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Amiga

What the Amiga Pioneers Are Doing Now 131

Posted by Hemos from the moving-along-foot-loose-and-fancy-free dept.
The_Borg writes "Nice little piece in the OttawaCitizen about the pioneers of Amiga and what they are doing now, as well as a few details of how Microsoft tried to sink them. "
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What the Amiga Pioneers Are Doing Now More

What the Amiga Pioneers Are Doing Now

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  • the pioneers of amiga are alive and well, check out rebol.com
  • I remember playing old classics like Lazer Chess and the like on my friend's old Amiga.. now they're incredibly powerful.. the fact that MS tried to shaft them just makes it worse.
    ,-----.----...---..--..-....-
    ' CitizenC
    ' "Bug? That's Not A Bug, That's A Feature!"
    `-----.----...---..--..-....-
  • Nice to see that he's gone on to bigger and better things, and learned his lesson. Marketing is more than half of a successful product. We have Microsoft (and Intel, to a lesser extent) to thank for that.

    The Blurb at the end about "the amiga will rise again" or something like that, is, like has been discussed here before, unlikely.

    Everyone knows why.

  • ... (Score:1)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 )
    The only thing of interest in this whole article was that girl in the third picture down on the right. =)

    More seriously, was this really slashdot material? If we wanted to talk about every sunken company that didn't make the cut, we'd be posting 50x stories a day for the next 2 years about the "coulda been" companies. For whatever reason, marketing, bad product, microsoft, will of god, however it happened - their product didn't make it.

  • As much as I hate to say it, the Amiga is well and truly dead. All we have had for the last few years is bickering and incompetence, and the world has just moved on. I don't honestly expect to see a new Amiga machine, and if I do I feel it will be under specified, new 2 years ago stuff that only the die hards will even look at and few of them will part with cash for it. Graphic design work is done with Mac or PC, and pretty much anything else is done with a PC. Sure you could have some kind of open standards machine that can live with whatever it's put with but I can't see it happening. the community and it's network have all but gone. There will be no-one to spread the word, and the machine will be poor. But then, I was an Atari ST user :)
  • Alas... i wish i hadn't sold my Amiga. Those are nifty little things. You'll have to excuse me. Maybe i should've went to bed about 14 hours ago.

    "And these Web appliances could yet break Microsoft and Intel's domination of the desktop computer market."

    What a strong revelation. AOL _is_ a major company, but isn't that stretching it a bit? Sure, I could see a resurgance(is that a word?) with Amiga.. especially with AOL involved.. maybe Gateway will make up for where Mr. Chowaniec lacked in marketing ability. But breaking through the strong 20 foot high diamond shard encrusted walls of the bigwigs like M$ and Intel would require a lot of firepower. I'm no business whiz, but it would probably take years to get to that point. If they're lucky enough to get that far. Maybe if they pick up a giant stuffed loveable aardvark name Freddie as their mascot they can win over the kiddies!
  • I don't know how many /.ers are from the GTO (Greater Ottawa Area!) but nobody I know holds the Citizen in very high regard. It's an OK paper but it's run by a fascist. And indeed there is a nickname for it. hint: what rhymes with the first syllable of citizen??

    anyhow, has anyone else noticed how many slashdot stories actually come from the citizen? it's pretty suprising. perhaps it's because more people from ottawa read slashdot than one would think...

  • What details? (Score:4)

    by dieman ( 4814 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @12:44PM (#1499469) Homepage
    I do not see "details" in this article of Microsoft practices.

    Slashdot people *need* to start reading your links. It's only fair that we see the real information

    And I know your gonna moderate this down because why is that k1dd13 d1ss1ng the slashdot poeple theyresoooo cool.

  • Re:... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The thing is, the Amiga design, software and hardware, was revolutionary at the time. Even people in the PC world acknowledge it took 10 years for the PC to overtake the Amiga on the hardware front, and on the software front, there's still things the AmigaOS does more efficiently than anything else. It's not just any failed company, its the fact that if the Amiga had won out, the AAA chipset had been released, and not been mismanaged, we'd have had a system equivalent in power to a Sega Saturn _five years_ before the Sega Saturn was released. The loss of the amiga set general computing back 5-10 years. People who do not understand the Amiga are doomed to reinvent it...(See BeOS...)
    The other important thing is that all the Amiga codebase and talent is transferable to linux - the Amiga was much more unix-like than windows is.
  • Bleh -- At least once a day we get a "Is this really news for nerds" post. It's a matter of opinion of course, but let's think about it.

    /. has been covering Amiga news quite a bit since the recent flurry of news surrounding them and Transmeta. Doesn't it make sense that they'd post an article about the people who made the Amiga what it was? I'll agree that there are more appropriate topics for Slashdot, but I think that Amiga-news has its place here. After all, there are certainly some Amiga-fans among our ranks.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Marketing? Okay, so marketing is important, to be sure. But how important? The Amiga, while one would debate wether or not it was 'better' than the competition at hand, certainly was powerful enough. It was a wonder to use, and (although it's more of a collector's item nowadays) I still play with my old one every now and again. It's truly fun. Hard to get over the fact that when I turn it on, 9 seconds later I'm able to work.

    Back to marketing... Did Microsoft kill Amiga? I think possibly. At that time in history, not (really) so way back when, the market, above all else, was crying for standardization. I don't think marketing killed Amiga, I think it was that.

    Microsoft, hate them as you may, was able to deliver one thing to a lot of people. Compatability. Yes, marketing had a LOT to do with that, but not solely.

    There was a clear demand for the ability to be able to share files with others. Sometimes, you wanted to share files with someone who didn't have the same hardware you did.

    By making software that filled THAT void, I think Microsoft was able to conquor. The Amiga was a fascinating product, and still is, to a certain extent, but I don't believe that Marketing (at least not solely) was its death...

  • Third Picture down:

    http://www.ottawa citizen.com/hightech/991126/3206262-3206309.jpeg [ottawacitizen.com]

    She looks like Alicia Bridges, from the song "I Love the Nightlife." Personally, I thought the article was much more interesting than this woman's photo. (Although the girl in the SECOND picture down on the right side is quite......interesting. She caught my attention quickly. :)

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:. (Score:1)

    by kazith ( 119085 )
    I can smell that from here!! anyways, sure the Amiga is dead, it coul dmake a come back, if does does, that'ld rock! all theyld need to do it have all of the latest hardware, and tweak it into one nice system, and who knows, it could very well be the same a when I used and Amiga 500, it was alot more powerfull then the crappy 386's at that time, damn cloneing, grrr!
  • This is a side effect of the sheer volume of submissions that slashdot gets. Shouldn't they hire more people to wade through this crap, so we don't have to suffer?

    Probably to be moderated down,
    i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
  • This is really a puff piece, nothing to get excited over. The stuff that was exciting for me was tracking down the people who worked at Mark Williams on Coherent... anyone remember Coherent? It was a Unix for 286 clone, done in assembler. Woof, it was fast!

    Another thing: What is this online service I keep reading about, American Online? Geez Louise man, that's twice in a week that error has made it to my notice.

    And one more thing: How about a registry of stuff like this? You know, like Ex-MSFT [exmsft.com] for other projects.
    --

  • I used to be a large Amiga fan, starting out with my 500 and then getting a 3000. I loved DPaint VI and my various ray tracing programs.

    But then Doom came out. And it didn't come out on the Amiga. Plus the built in graphics chip on my 3000 was pretty lame compared to the SVGA cards on the market. That pretty much did it for me. Faster core processor was nicer for ray tracing (although I don't do as much anymore), the higher resolutions are a necessity for me, and the lack of Doom was a real problem. The technology was great in the past but a PC with a 3D card has a lot more tricks under the hood.

    I am curious about the internet devices the article talks about. After playing around with some Sunrays, I can see these taking off big time (although not the Sunray incarnation of it. Sun servers and switched networks are too expensive). Since the Amiga had linux ported to it, these IDs might be able to run linux. A $200 linux machine would be a big consumer draw.

  • What people fail to realize is that Amiga folks are *the most obsessive* group in the world. It's as simple as that. If amiga's aren't owned by nerds, I don't know who does.

    Besides, why by new systems at high prices when they'll be obsolete in a few months when you can buy obsolete systems at high prices and still feel you've made a good purchase ( I know I do ;)
  • The Amiga 1000 was at least 5 years ahead of it's time. It ran a 68000 CPU at about 7.16 Mhz, and had a whopping 256 kbytes of RAM. (Remember, this is 1984 we're talking about.) It could handle 640x400 graphics at 16 colors. (320x200 and 320x400 could do a maximum of 64 colors.) The 1000 also had seperate graphics processors.

    This machine was pushed as a Gaming machine, a Graphics machine, Video Production (Ah, the days of the Video Toaster) Programming, and desktop. Unfortunately, as the article states, Commodore was not exactly a Marketing Wizard. Sure, they put out a hell of a good product (almost everything from Commodore rocked), but when it came to actually pushing the product, they failed.

    It's unfortunate that companies which make viable products get stomped out like this, but it's a hard lesson. It's also pretty sad that making a good product just isn't good enough to survive in business anymore.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Amiga is not dead quite yet. Sure, we may never see another computer with the "Amiga" name stamped on it, but Amiga lives on in a lot of other ways.
    Take my experience with the Amiga as an example. I used to have one of the old 512k Amiga 500s. When I got my first Wintel box in 1994, I knew there had to be something better then the monstrosity that was MS Windows. The Amiga directly led to my discovery of Linux. I'm not the only one either, there a lot of Linux users and developers out there who have migrated to Linux.
    The Amiga was one of the greatest products in the history of personal computers. Considering that there are people out there who still get real work done on their Commodore 64's I think that it is going to be a LONG time before the die hard Amiga fans give up the ghost on their wonder boxes.
  • and what they are doing now, as well as a few details of how Microsoft tried to sink them. Can anyone show me where these details in the article are? I read the article several times, but could not find them. Looking at the pictures carefully did not help much either. I don't want to join the discussion of whether Amiga is dead or not. But now that people started attaching anti-Microsoft remarks to completely irrelevant articles , I wonder what will come next.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
  • I dont like to see Boing balls bounced around for attention; Amiga wont disappear, and does not need any fluffers to stay firmly rooted.
    Its bizarre that a non-technical would dare mention a past stint at Commodore...With its greedy, horrible, money management, let alone the profoundly slim marketing push.
    I dont recall seeing his signature on the inside of the A1000, or any of the Patents either.
    Perhaps the name was in an easter-egg I missed. ;^)

    Some errors in the article:
    Gateway bought Amiga well over 2 years ago.
    The AOL prediction is pure conjecture.

    Calmos made some neat DES and key management processor hardware, along with the gambit of
    intel 82Cxx peripherial chips.

    I was strongly advised not to use Tundras 1st
    gen PCI bridge chips by someone who did. Regretfully he had.
    His saving these two IS something to tout, but
    with the limited "bean-flow" into all things Amiga
    (Like the CBM-PC compatibles) while at Commodore
    puts one in the bad company of Gould, Haige, and the LBM. Whos next to join THEM?

    Onward!
  • If you have a title about "Amiga Pioneers", I expect to find something about Jay Miner there, not some Commodore vice-prez. It's not like Commodore did the pioneering with Amiga, they just bought Jay's company when it would have died otherwise.

  • Commodore did not invent the Amiga (Score:3)

    by Sneakums ( 2534 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @01:26PM (#1499490)
    It's worth pointing out that Commodore did not invent that Amiga; they bought the Amiga company, which almost completely developed the Amiga 1000. Lorraine (the prototype) was done by the time C= got on the scene.

    It was at Amiga, and not at Commodore, that the phrase "Guru Meditation" was born. Commodore later elided the phrase from KickStart (version 2.00, I believe).

  • Bah. Management weenies. (Score:3)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @01:34PM (#1499493)
    The true father of the Amiga was Jay Miner, who architected the system. Other names from the inner circle include Dale Luck, RJ Mical, and Dave Needle, but Mr. Miner (RIP) was the soul of the machine.
  • hint: what rhymes with the first syllable of citizen??

    OK, English is not my first language, but I don't get it. What is the nickname anyway? Ottawa Citosine? Am I missing something?
  • Today the trademark "Amiga" is owned by PC manufacturer Gateway.

  • learn your history first (Score:5)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @01:41PM (#1499496) Journal
    Amiga was developed by a company that thought they were making the next great console. Their engineers, probably the finest design team that had ever been assembled to that point, had other ideas: they were going to make it the ultimate personal computer. Most of their development was done semi-secretly -- the people bankrolling the initial project didn't realize the feature set had expanded so enormously.

    Obviously, I'm not up on all the details here, but that original seed company ran into financial trouble. Atari lent them money, knowing that they probably wouldn't be able to pay it back and they would get this incredible technology very cheaply when the little company defaulted. (I don't know if the little company was called Amiga or not.)

    Well, sure enough, they hadn't quite completed their design and the loan was due -- Atari was about to move in and shut them down. Commodore rode in as a white knight and bought the company lock, stock, and barrel. They repaid Atari and took the technology for themselves. This infuriated Jack Tramiel of Atari.

    To get revenge, Atari slapped together what was essentially a cheap piece of shit that, on paper, appeared to have many of the same technical merits the Amiga did. In actual fact, it was a 68000 with some RAM, I/O ports, and very simple graphic and sound chips. TOS was their single-tasking operating system. The desktop was called GEM, and was ugly and sluggish. But it had a 68000, like the Amiga, and it actually clocked the CPU faster (8Mhz) instead of the Amiga's 7.14Mhz. It also included a built-in MIDI port, which is probably the only really cool thing about it.

    The Atari STs had three big advantages over the Amiga. They were cheaper, were easier to program, and were backed by a big, sleazy advertising campaign. They ran 'comparison' ads all the time which were horribly slanted. They actually did pretty well with it for quite some time. The infighting between the Amiga and ST weakened both computers, and eventually destroyed both: the PC juggernaut overwhelmed them, though the Amiga lasted a lot longer. The Amiga/Atari wars were worse than any of the distro wars you see now. But ultimately, while the Atari died a lot sooner, they both still died.

    It took ten years, however, for the PC to catch up to the Amiga completely. Out of the box, it could do 4,096 colors (32 at once in low res, 4096 at once in a special HAM mode that was really hard to program for). It had sprites, four-channel digital sound, and an array of (for the time) incredibly powerful custom chips that offloaded almost all of the graphic and sound work from the CPU.

    The operating system multitasked with an incredibly light overhead. You could seriously expect to run several smaller programs in 256K. 512K was quite usable, and when you expanded the machine to 2.5MB of RAM you had a really kick-butt machine.

    It didn't have the concept of memory-to-disk paging, but that's probably just as well. Disk I/O was always bad on the Amigas; their filesystem really wasn't very good, and their floppies weren't especially reliable. It wasn't until you added a hard drive that they really started to sing, and most consumers couldn't afford hard drives back then.

    It wasn't until 1994 that I could really multitask on my PC (with an early Linux, .8 or .9 or thereabouts) the same way that I had done on the Amiga. Linux was, in many respects, a bit like coming home again. Linux didn't really do graphics well (in a way it still doesn't: SVGALib just isn't that hot), and X was slower than dirt on the 386-16 I was running. It wasn't an Amiga replacement quite yet, but it was sure closer than Win 3.1.

    My personal PC didn't rival my original Amiga for actual useful power until about 1996: considering our family bought our Amiga 1000 in Christmas of 1985, I think that's just amazing legs. I have a friend who is still using an A2000 (1987 or so) and absolutely swears by it.

    At this point the original technology is hopelessly primitive and probably not worth saving, IMO. There are just too many features missing that we are all used to. The BeOS is, at present, the closest you can get to the Amiga. If you want to get back into that type of technology again, I'd suggest BeOS on a dual-CPU PC instead.

    They did finally emulate the Amiga in software. There is a commercial package with ready-to-run binaries that will allow you to do almost anything you could do with a real Amiga. Check Cloanto [cloanto.com] for details. You can also, if you wish, download and assemble the pieces separately without paying for them, a la Linux.

    It's worth a look. There were some cool ideas back then. The Amiga was the most technologically brilliant personal computer ever created. There are a lot of us older geeks out there who have very fond memories indeed. :-)

  • Re:Isn't Amiga == Commodore? (Score:3)

    by Zoltar ( 24850 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @01:47PM (#1499497)
    Duh... don't you keep up with the times... Elvis bought the rights to the Amiga a couple years ago. There have been tons of rumors about his plans. I'm betting that he's gonna release the new model in conjunction with a world tour. That will set the world on its tail, you can be sure.

    I've heard he's gonna tour with Jim Morrison sometime in Q1 of 2000, so look for the new Amiga around then. That is of course unless he gets abducted by aliens before he can finish putting the final touches on that bad boy computer that just friggin refuses to die :)

  • Does /. actually read these things? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "as well as a few details of how Microsoft tried to sink them." Where does it talk about this? Bert Hill talks about Microsoft all of twice, first saying that the Amiga was "a quaint early personal computer that fell under the juggernaut of Microsoft and Intel." The second is in reference to Amiga's "web appliances [which] could yet break Microsoft and Intel's domination of the desktop computer market." According to Mr. Chowaniec, "We had a brilliant piece of technology, but we did a lousy job of marketing and that proved to be the Achilles heel." Jeez. They also mention Philadelphia. Why don't you also mention that details of how Philadelphia was responsible for crushing Amiga are revealed.
  • Well, unlikely, maybe, but not prohibitively so. Systems other than MS-Windows, Linux included, are gaining ground. There's no reason Amiga can't be a player if their approach is good.

    ---GEC
  • Much as I enjoy Slashdot, that gratuitous reference to "how Microsoft tried to bring them down" was a joke.

    Bullshit. It's not there. Read the article. It just says that the Amiga fell by the wayside. Yet certain posters like everything to sound like a Microsoft conspiracy.

  • Yes, I agree that the biggest amiga-killer of them all was not marketing, not compability (at the time), it actually was DOOM...

    I remember that almost every game made predoom looked better on amiga, had better sound and better feel... Ppl was pretty happy with their amigas. Sure the PCs sometimes had better gfx-cards or bigger HD, but the final result (the game), was almost always better on the Amiga (Just compare Gods, Cannon fodder or Pirates, Amiga vs PC).

    Then one day we found a cool game at school, called "Wolfenstein 3D", we thought it cool, but not much a reason to sell our nice little miggys for. About a year later we laid our hands on The Game... DOOM... It was the coolest thing anybody had seen ever... It almost looked reel, it was probably the first time a game would make you jump in your chair when a monster appeared.

    Of course all the (very skilled) hackers in the amiga community decided that we needed a game like that for the amiga, but time passed, and nothing that could compare to the original ever showed up (I think it was because amiga had another way of handling graphics, 'bitplane graphics').

    And after the release of DOOM & the failure of the miggy hackers to achive something similar, at least I never heard of someone (not amigafanatic) seriously considering buying one...



    This might be a little bit over simplified, but what the ****... Marketing, price & compability probably played their role too, but the one thing you really could see/feel/fear was DOOM... ;o)


  • Not getting in to the Amiga is the best every debate, I reckon that it was/is the coolest machine ever.

    Things like the Guru Meditation. While other computers had ther lx234I chips, the Amiga had Paula and Denise chips. PC's had Very Large intergrated chips, Amiga had Fat chips (Fat Agnus for example).

    It was like they were computers built by real people for real people, not machines built by tech heads for accountants!.

    Still, Linux could take the coolest crown yet...

  • In their heyday, I don't question that they were good machines. But let's be realistic. I really don't think they'd be able to get back into the market this late in the game. Do you really think they'd be able to make a comeback, and somehow win out against Winblows, Linux, and even the entire x86 architecture? Truth is, x86 has been around so long that it can be very cheaply made, and if I'm gonna go through the trouble of switching architectures, it'd better be pretty damn cool. I wouldn't switch to anything under 64-bit.
  • ...they wrote 'American Online' in that article. It used to bug the hell out of me when, many moons ago, I worked in a computer retail store and had to put up with endless hordes of people inevitably putting that extra 'n' in 'America Online.' Eghads.
  • The Amiga brand and technology was (I seem to remember) bought by a British high street PC retailer who then went bust. After that I think the brand and tech hopped around a bit before being bought by Gateway.

    Commodore basically screwed what was a very good system for its day. The technology was well ahead of its time. Remember that the Video Toaster was the amongst the first "cheap" video editing systems, and that the original graphics for Babylon 5 were done on Amigas because they were so much cheaper than the competition.

    Aah, a bit of nostalgia. I may have to get the old A500 (upgraded to 2 Mb, and AmigaDos 1.2) out of the loft. Speedball 2 rocked, and AREXX was fantastic.

  • Who? (Score:3)

    by hanway ( 28844 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @02:58PM (#1499510) Homepage
    I had one of the original Amigas in 1985, and I've never heard of Adam Chowaniec, the guy profiled in this article. I'm sure that he was yet another manager in Commodore's byzantine corporate structure who, if he had anything at all to do with the Amiga, probably hurt it more than helped it.

    Just to double-check, and because it was lying around, I just checked the August, 1985 issue of Byte, which was the first in-depth look at the Amiga. Let's see who they mention: the late Jay Miner. (It's a shame they don't mention the guys behind the software, too. Although they describe the software components, no one else is mentioned by name. It's been so long now that the only names I can think of off-hand are Carl Sassenrath and RJ Mical.)

    The real definition of an Amiga "pioneer" would be someone with his signature on the inside top cover of an Amiga 1000. Is there a list of these somewhere?

  • how bout we let the average /. reader decide by opening the input queue and letting people moderate the hell out of stories ? that way only the moderating majority gets to choose which stories make it to the front.
  • I'm not sure whether Dave Morse or Jay Miner was employee #1 of HiToro (later Amiga, Inc.). Jay Miner, Joe Decuir and Ron Nicholson were the technical founders and ASIC architects; Luck, Mical and Needle came later, after Glen Keller, Dave Dean and Bob Pariseau joined the engineering team. Decuir is now at Microsoft. Nicholson is currently writing PalmPilot software.
  • I had the pleasure of using an Amiga once. It was in a public access TV studio where I used to work, and was an Amiga 2500. That thing was one of the most amazing machines I had ever seen for its time. While I wasn't extremely fond of the OS, this machine, with a minimum ammount of disk space and RAM, could produce broadcast quality animations and logo with a little expertise in DPaint. I haven't seen anything quite like DPaint since, though I haven't been in the broadcasting business for a while.

    Anyway, it seems to me that the two most revolutionary computers ever built were the Apple II and the Amiga (hell, throw the original Mac in there, too). Both died because of improper marketing and, if Microsoft had been eliminated early on, I think the war would be between Apple and Amiga. Both were amazing machines that nothing before (or after) can compare to--it's a shame the wintel market took so many years to come up with equivelent technology.

  • Jay Miner died back in 1994.

    go to www.jms.org to find out more
  • >It took ten years, however, for the PC to catch up to the Amiga completely.

    Hrmmmm, I had a 286 Xenix box that could multi-task and do graphics with its CGI (computer graphics interface)

    You could format a floppy AND type, just like an amiga.

    And it would work in 2 megs.

    QNX 2.1 would work in 1 meg, and had some kind of graphics mode. Never used the graphics mode. Oh, it would work on an 8088.

    So to say the PC took 10 years to 'catch up' is not correct. Intel boxes ran fine...when you dumped CP/M, err MS-DOS. Not great, but fine.


  • Ryhmes with "Cit". One word. Starts with "sh". Smells bad.
  • I remember when AmigaDOS v2.04 came out, and how it was trumpeted that the Guru Meditation error had finally been eliminated.

    Guru meditation errors were obnoxious because it locked up your whole machine with this pile of useless numbers staring you in the face. Much like the BSOD on NT machines, or kernel panics on Unix machines except Guru's happened much much more often.

    Anyway so it was funny when the marketing claimed that AmigaDOS v2.04 was much more reliable because they'd eliminated the Guru meditation problem.

    Well, they hadn't eliminated it, just renamed it. Not quite the same thing. :)

    Actually my Amiga 500 started guruing far more often with v2.04, it would even guru when I turned off my external 2400 baud modem. That's how unstable the platform was... :(
  • Wrong one - girl in the bottom pick. Had netscape scrolled down when I said that. =)
  • is refreshing compared to people like 'kitsune sushi', who puts such faith in moderation that his sig informs us all that 'If you have something intelligent to say, log in and get moderated up. Otherwise, you're wasting your time'.
    I told him the sig was lame and got 2 paragraphs of psychotic insults. Yours I find humorous becasue it is the exact opposite!
  • Who???

    It would have been for more useful to see what the various Big Name Amigoids are doing now. Far example, Carl Sassenrath who wrote chunks of the OS, Dave Haynie their senior engineer (and maker of the hilarious C= Deathbed Vigil video) Fred Fish even. On a tangent, I notice that Jeff Minter is working for/with 3DO.

    Ever noticed how Amiga desktop like GNOME can be? Suspiciously so IMHO. :o)

    X
  • I've never heard of this guy either.

    Dave Haynie was one of the main engineers with the Amiga.

    And some of the guys who supported the Amiga through freeware/shareware...

    Fred Fish... long before there was the internet, there was the Fred Fish collection of software.

    And Matt Dillon contributed a lot. Dmouse was one of my favorite tools, and he also had a C compiler, etc.

  • The only thing Microsoft ever did to damage the Amiga was writing the AmigaBASIC interpreter. It was essentially a very early version of what would later become QuickBASIC.

    That is, it no longer required line numbers, and supported functions and subroutines and such.

    However it was slow as hell.

    Actually one of the things which hurt the Amiga was the lack of good development tools and information.

    I think it's funny that slashdot always uses 'Microsoft' to get people interested in an article.
  • Sorry, but I don't have time to read Slashdot all day, and therefore, am not interested in reading through (or downloading) a whole bunch of silly, dumb, offtopic, insulting, bullheaded, or just plain uninformed posts. Until recently, I set my threshold at 2, only just now turned down to 1. I view the moderation system as very effective, and am quite pleased with the quality of the information I read. Incidentally, this thread was moderated up to 2, so...
  • No, I don't read the globe, and I _am_ being overly critical of the paper. Heck, I used to deliver it! But I suppose it's what I read most of the time IF I read the paper.

    Actually the Ottawa Sun is a much better paper.
  • Yiiii! That last comment about the sun was supposed to have [/joke] around it!!!
  • the /. moderation system is effective, and it is well conceived. I was only commenting on these two sigs, so feel free to use moderation for whatever you want... i'm not knocking that.
  • And back in 1979, SWTPC boxen (with a Motorola 6809) DID run UNIFLEX, a cheap, frugal Unix lookalike that not only multitasked, but was also multiuser.

    And the whole shebang could run on floppies, too.
    -- ----------------------------------------------
    Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!

  • As a former owner of an Amiga 500 (sniff), I couldn't agree more. However, in addition to their marketing not being the best, their customer service spawned more horror stories than I can remember. Of course, if they had shaped things up, people might have been eagerly awaiting an Amiga 5000 or 6000. Oh, well.

    Evil Overlord X
    Coming to a third world country near you!
  • The true father of the Amiga was Jay Miner, who architected the system. Other names from the inner circle include Dale Luck, RJ Mical, and Dave Needle

    Not to forget Dave Haynie.

  • What the lid says.. (Score:3)

    by Lerc ( 71477 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @06:31PM (#1499533)
    Hard to read some since the're signatures so many errors are possibe.

    Jo?? Ca?ill
    Dan Beitman
    Scribble
    Risle Geiger
    Robert J. Mical (very arty too)
    327002-01 REV A
    Ali??en E. Co?????
    Dave Moun
    Jay Miner
    Bel Pavireau
    Dave Dean
    Paw Print
    Darlaine Mc Donell
    E?levin Chu (Three non-acii chars follow)
    Carl Sassenrath
    Dave Nee?lle
    Ronald H. Nicholson j
    Se??n Dic?n
    Scribble
    Can't even tell which way is up.
    Mary McCoy
    Ste?? Shepard
    Neil Ma?in
    Bob "Kodiak" Burns
    Cheryl ?ill?ois
    Bill Kobb
    Mik? Di Fapp
    Mitchell ?ass
    Aki T_L
    Ca??? Neeues
    Bruce Thompson
    Don L??k
    ??ep M??t?
    Lau?i? jan Rusch
    Dale Due?
    Anne Mo?oles
    Jesn Belle?
    Joe Pillow
    Mike Slifeak
    Jeff L Tayler
    Lee Ho
    Dan R?i???qus
    Dave Doineman
    Something Lee
    Tall Scribble '85
    Scribble
    Cris R
    Martin P??y?ybl??i
    Three chars (Angly lookin face, T hugging a square, and A guy looking at space panic)
    Another Scribble.
  • Funny, I remember one of the Amigas doing 4096 colors. Which one? Or maybe you needed an add-on card?
  • Rumor has it that Amiga Inc. will be releasing a new machine, consisting solely of styrofoam and felt bunting with a grey plastic screen [amiga.org]. It will make a nice conversation piece: "Why does your computer not turn on? And why does it feel like velvet?"

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • I'm more interested in what RJ Mical, Carl Sassenrath, Dale Luck, Dave Haynie etc than any of these guys. Let's face it: Microsoft didn't kill the Amiga. Commodore did. Piracy did. Gateway did.

  • Re:wrong amiga guys (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Sunday November 28, 1999 @08:12PM (#1499538) Homepage Journal

    RJ Mical: Currently living with his wife and four lovely children on the San Francisco Peninsula. He's written a book (fiction), and is searching for a publisher.

    Carl Sassenrath: Created and currently distributing the REBOL [rebol.com] programming language.

    Dale Luck: When not restoring his massive menagerie of vintage coin-op video games, he works for a digital PBX/telephony company in the Bay Area.

    Dave Needle: Still inventing and building cool hardware hacks at his own pace, and installs $1500 bathroom faucets at the behest of his loving wife, Margo.

    Still some of the coolest people I have been privileged to know.

    Schwab

  • I wrote this essay [best.com] some years ago, mostly out of personal catharsis. Perhaps others will find it worth reading.

    I also have a set of pages containing some of the stuff I did for the Amiga [best.com].

    Schwab

  • The stats for the display are correct. 320X400 at 64 colors (32 colors + 32 "half-bright" colors) and
    640X400 with 16 colors. Half-bright mode was new in the ECS chipset, the first Amigas had only 32 colors
    in low res. The palette was 12bit allowing for 4096 "Possible" colors. There was a special mode called
    "Hold And Modify" (HAM) that worked under 320X400. I'm not sure of the math involved, but a pixel could
    be modified by an adjacent pixel, causing gradations or modifications of some sort. This mode could
    display all 4096 colors. This true hack done by Jay Miner almost didn't make it into the final production of
    the Agnes chip. It was left IN because it either would have left a hole of unused space on the chip die, or it
    would set back the production of the Amiga to redesign the chip. Jay Miner had said in retrospect that he
    was glad that he left it in. I'm glad he did as it allowed the Amiga to be the first personal computer to do
    photo realism in 3D programs. Anyone remember Sculpt 3D?

    BTW I have about $15K of Amiga equipment that I would like to find a home for. (Scary when you start
    adding up all the money you've spent!)
  • Microsoft, the company that abused the 8 MSB in pointers for type information. Worked fine with the plain 68000 (although strongly discouraged by the Motorola M68000 programmer's guide!), but broke horribly on the '020 and up.

    Of course M$ isn't the only one that made that mistake: ask Apple (early MacOS) and even RMS (Emacs 19).

  • Well, to say that Doom on the PC killed the Amiga is a bit of a stretch. Not that Doom wasn't an important game... No, the Amiga's biggest problem was a director of engineering (named Syndes I think) put in place by the LBM. Rather than finish and put into production, the Amiga 3500 with the AA or AGA chip set. He shelved it and had the designers work up new machines with older chipsets and features no better than the Amiga 500. This was 1990!!! From this was born the Amiga 600, a machine that nobody wanted. Later the A3500 got cost reduced and hacked up to make the A4000... Oh just a few years late. By then the VGA chipsets overtook the Amiga. If Amiga had kept on the time table they prescribed in 89-90, The A4000 probably would have had a chipset codenamed AAA that would have had 24bit color. 24bit standard on a personal computer in about 1992 would have been amazing.

    Whatever the name of the new Director of Engineering, he was responsible for the PCjr while at IBM. That should tell you something!!!
  • Sounds more like something got damaged when the ROM was installed. I never had any problems with 2.04 that weren't related to software incompatibility. You may have had a blown 8520 chip.

    >Actually my Amiga 500 started guruing far more
    >often with v2.04, it would even guru when I
    >turned off my external 2400 baud modem. That's
    >how unstable the platform was... :(
  • Carl Sassenrath has created a new programming or scripting language called Rebol. I'm not smart enough to know what it can do.
    http://www.rebol.com

    Dave Hayne has been working with what was called Pios, and was working for Scala. Pios has changed their name... ??? I still see his name from time to time.

    How about Leo Schwab. He was a rather famous Amiga software designer. I believe he's now working for Be inc.

    RJ Mical and Dale Luck were part of 3D0 (I think) I don't have any idea what the're doing now
  • Just to add a little to this.

    Aparently, Jay Miner and much of his team worked at Atari prior to starting work on the Amiga. I beleive that Jay Minor is credited with much of the work on the atari 800 series and VCS graphics engines..

    So, (pure conjecture), this seems to fit nicely. Miner and friends get unhappy at Atari, which at the time is falling from grace, sold by warner, and eventually lands in the hands of the tramiels. Miner leaves, starts work on Amiga, atari lends money expecting to get the technology back, cheap.

    The rest is history.

    Also of interest, though its been argued that the ST died before the amiga, the Atari name still lingers on.

    Atari Coin-OP is still alive and well, have a look in any arcade.

    Atari Computer, the brand now owned by Hasbro, is re-releasing old atari titles and building new ones under the Atari brand.

  • As far as I know, Microsoft didn't have anything to do with the killing off of the Amiga. Commodore did such a good job on their own, that any help from the competition was unnecessary. The problem was that they didn't seem to develop their product much after 1985. I think that was when the A500 came, and after that came nothing until the A1200 which came much too late (1991? 1992? Something like that).

    Commodore also tried to make products that we, the Amiga community, didn't want. They made a gaming console type of thing, that I forget the name of, that they thought the Amiga 500 owners would buy instead of their beloved computers. We didn't want that. What we wanted was computers that continued to be as far ahead as they were in 1985! Just think! How good would the Amiga be if there were one that were as far ahead as it used to be?

    The Amiga has been so badly handled in the past, that I have a very hard time believing in a second coming for it. There has been a lot of talk lately, but I have seen very little actual things happen. For now, Linux rules!
  • In my experience the slashdot moderation system is fairly effective if you're going with the general wisdom on this site and post fairly early in a thread. Post late or disagree that Linux and GPL/Open source will take over the world and you stand substantially less chance of being moderated up. The moderation system is fairly good, but often just serves to reinforce prejudices by only promoting stuff that people agree with.

    If we were all a little more open and would moderate posts based on the quality of their reasoning as well as the degree to which we agreed with their conclusions, I might change my preferences away from -1. Until then, it stays.

    Greg
  • The relevancy of putting a Microsoft bash in the article could be debated heavily, but the truth is that although the Amiga didn't fit in with Gates's plan for all home computers to resemble miniature mainframes (The Amiga was small, fast and comparitively reliable, anathema to DOS and Windoze-heads in the early '90s), I don't believe M$ considered them a real threat due to the fact that their main user base was based in Europe, which, he probably reasoned, could be swung by a heavy advertising campaign from a 'new' product. People from the UK will agree that we were hit by a MONSTROUS ad campaign for Win95 in an attempt to switch us. Adults bought PC's because of the heavy advertising and didn't know any better, and the kids bought them because of DOOM, which didn't have a serious contender on the Amiga for another year. (Although it said a lot for the machine that AB3D, Gloom, Fears and the like ran playably on a CPU less powerful than a 286!). Rumours abound in the Amiga community that Medhi Ali was paid by Gates to wind up CBM, however my BS detector quivers strongly on that one, as I believe that CBM, especially in the US, was a badly mismanaged company whose shareholders wanted to be in bed with Gates and 'the big boys' as they probably saw it. This shows in the fact that Commodore PC clones were, in the public eye at least, given marketing priority over Amigas in the US (source : Eric Schwartz). What the shareholders saw as a 'minority machine' due to the Amiga's notable foothold in Europe as opposed to the US, just simply wasn't generating enough capital for them. This is an aspect of the computer world that I really, really hate.
    I don't know if or how the Amiga can have a future, or at any rate didn't until I heard of the plan to Open-Source the Amiga OS. This can only be a good thing. Pushing up the spec of computers is also a Good Thing. Filling up these computers with BloatWare that takes up space that could be used better elsewhere is categorically NOT A GOOD THING. That is what keeps the Amiga alive in the minds and hearts of those who used one on a regular basis, because they remember a time when the OS was designed with efficiency and intuitiveness in mind, rather than these pretty, but slow and cumbersome monstrosities that M$ has been churning out for years.
    Perhaps my nostalgia is dissolving my thoughts into a rant, but the damage that Microsoft did, and continues to do with all it's competitors, simply by using marketing and advertising to convice a sometimes sheep-like public that THERE IS NO REAL ALTERNATIVE TO OUR PRODUCT is very palpable indeed to all who try to pick up the computer baton and run ahead of the game that M$ would like to think it controls.
    Yes, Commodore had wonderful ways of shooting itself in the foot, even when it had superior product, but the fact that a bunch of Californinan dentists with a couple of million dollars to burn, plus a team of dedicated engineers could steal a jump on Big Blue and M$ in the 80's when they hadn't got to thinking about the home market yet, at least should give us hope.
    What made the Amiga for me was the fact that it was a computer that a simpleton could at first use, and then grow to understand how it worked at their own pace (Thanks to an inspired OS), and then play arcade quality games on when they got bored. This was the route that really got me into computer-related things, and I have been slightly disillusioned with them ever since the M$/corporate mentality took over circa 1994.
    Only the Linux way of thinking gives me hope that computers could be more than just another way of getting revenue these days, and the open-sourcing of Amiga OS can only teach the lesson of a well-written OS to a new generation.

    +++ RANT MODE OFF +++

    Anyway those that really want to know about Amiga, what it did and who was involved, there is a list of them here [freeserve.co.uk] There are more lists which mention more people, for those who wish to look. The most widely known of former CBM-Amiga engineers, Dave Haynie, occasionally posts here, and can be seen occasionally throughout the 'Net. A list of amiga specs that Haynie rescued from the CBM vaults is here. [thule.no]
    As for the other engineers, I just hope that they're still being nuts somewhere, and haven't been sucked into the corporate tangle that is the dark side of computing today. Jay Miner, as most Amigans know, tragically died in 1994, after many years of illness, but his mark on the technological world is indelible, and the love he and the other engineers had for their little lump of silicon and PCB is echoed in the fact that the Amiga will never be forgotten by those who used them, and some who still use them today.

    Well, please forgive the incoherence, and I hope that I talk a bit of sense to some of you here and there.

    Don't let the b*stards get you down,

    Tc.

  • <WARNING TYPE=OFFTOPIC>
    Really? Like what?

    I collect used Amiga stuff like a refrigerator collects dust bunnies. Much to the chagrin of my wife. :)
    </WARNING>


    Later...
  • The Tramiel family owned Atari from 1985 onwards, IIRC. Jack Tramiel ran CBM in the days of the C64, but was forced out for various reasons around 1984/5 He set things up so that by the time he quit CBM, he owned and ran Atari, who actually tried to buy the Amiga. However Tramiel refused to play fair, and CBM steamed in at the 11th hour and bailed Amiga out.

    The Amiga still lives mainly because of the attachment of those who use them, not because of Gateway IMHO.

    Anyway, I've posted a rant below summing up my feelings on this.
    Have fun,
    Tc.
  • The Atari of the late '70s and early '80s was cool.

    The monstrosity of Atari under the Tramiels was certainly not

    I have a feeling that the Hasbro Atari is trading on it's association with pioneering video games, as opposed to the cut-throat money grabbing behemoth of the 80's who held back games development for 6 years with the ST.

    Besides, only Tramiel's Atari could make an OS and call it TOS! (A very appropriate name, I feel.)
  • Agreed. The only comment was that the Amiga fell to the onslaught of MS and Intel. It also said that Commodore didn't properly market the machine.

    Bad marketing in the face of a fierce competitor
    != underhanded practices by that competitor.

    Overall, this article shouldn't have been posted. 3-4 scant paragraphs about how this guy learned "other than technical things" at Amiga in the 80s doesn't really qualify as a story about the "Amiga Pioneers".

  • Any of you guys remember GFA Basic? :-)
  • *Sigh*

    Once again, the term fascist is being used to describe someone who is right-wing (Conrad Black).

    Take a history lesson boyo, and you will learn what a real fascist is.

    (Betcha a looney that this guy thinks Chretien's Liberals are doing a *super* job).

    The Baron
  • As much as I dislike Microsoft, I hate to see them blamed for everything bad that has happened in the software industry. At this point, it really is fashionable to bash Microsoft.

    As for the Amiga, it wasn't because of Microsoft that it died (yes, I'm considering it dead - see below) - and neither was it because the platform wasn't good enough. No, it was Commodore's horrible management that killed it.

    Now, let's return to the issue of death. What does it mean when you say that a computer platform is dead ? As it has been pointed, Amigas do exist in some form and software for it is being actively developed. Yes, this is true. But still, for most people, it's only a reason for nostalgy.

    Amiga, as a phenomenon, is gone. It was a great computer, years ahead of its time - and in the mainstream computing world, with millions of users and lots of software. The days of glory are gone, and no matter how much the Amiga enthusiasts would want it, those days will not return. Amiga is, and will remain, a niche computer, with no significance to the majority of the user base.

    So - as a former Amiga user - for me, as I used to know it, Amiga is dead. Period.

  • > Paw Print

    That would be Jay Miner's dog Michy. Michy, legend says, was the codesigner of the original Amiga chipset: when Jay added something to a chip layout, if Michy didn't nod in approval Jay would take the feature back out.

    > Dave Nee?lle

    Needle

    > Ronald H. Nicholson j

    Also to be found inside the case of the 128K Mac. Lucky bastard: he switched jobs just in time to be part of history not once, but twice.

    > Joe Pillow

    This is not a real person. Legend says this fictitious name was used to buy an airline seat, one version says the seat was used to carry an early Amiga breadboard prototype to a trade show, another version says it was just for an extra seat in which to store a whole bunch of spare pillows for the team.

  • It is piratism! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > You can also, if you wish, download and assemble the pieces separately without paying for them, a la Linux. Every person who uses Amiga ROM images and OS without buying them should be hanged! If the SW is not bought, then Amiga could die. And in the other hand, emulated Amiga is a far cry from the real one. Buy the HW also and get the feel of the real thing. -bbuilder (Amiga user since 1985, also PC user from 3/96 till 19/96, now 100% (or 99%, maybe) pure Amigan)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Yeah, why don't you guys pull up a copy of amiga basic.

    Guess who wrote it?

    Pan
  • Once again, the term fascist is being used to describe someone who is right-wing (Conrad Black). Take a history lesson boyo, and you will learn what a real fascist is.

    well, maybe fascist is a strong word, but black is not very far from it. Hey, ever read what he say against people from québec, especially the bad and evil separatists like me?

    chretien is a fucking moron too. so i think it's quite funny to see these two morons fighting for that stupid british lord title.


  • Amigas can play any game, if you have source (Score:3)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @07:03AM (#1499571) Homepage Journal

    Actually, though, the reason the Amiga didn't have Doom was due to marketing. Commodore killed the Amiga market enough that Id had no reason to release an Amiga port. Apparently there just wasn't high enough expected sales. Can't say I blame them.

    After Doom got ported to the Mac, though, Amiga users were able to run Doom using Mac emulators, and it wasn't bad. And of course, within a day or two of Id releasing the Doom source, native Amiga ports started showing up as well, and these are actually quite good -- better than the original in some ways. (But so is the DosDoom port.)

    We didn't get Quake either, until the Linux source got leaked and some pirate ported it. Once there were a few thousand people playing Quake on their Amigas, someone (Clickboom) took advantage of this .. ahem .. marketing reasearch .. and got a license from Id for a legitimate port.

    Similar thing happened with Myst also. Some pirate had to do the marketing research before we could get a legit port. With a situation like that, it's no wonder that game developers have stayed away from the Amiga in the 90s, but it's not the machine's fault -- it is quite capable of playing the games. You can play any game you want on an Amiga if you can just get source code. I sure wish Bungee would accidently leak some of their stuff some time... ;-)


    ---
  • If I'm not mistaken, Fred Fish is working for Be, Inc.

  • At the time of the Amiga's heyday, Microsoft wasn't really a juggernaut, and neither they nor the PC world in general took the Amiga seriously.

    The company that did take them seriously was Apple.

    The Amiga wasn't as friendly as the Macintosh--in terms of usability, Intuition never caught up to Finder--but in most other respects, it kicked the Macintosh's butt. Remember, this was 1985: Macs didn't even do color at that point, and there was nothing on the Apple drawing board that could come close to the Amiga's capabilities.

    This is the real reason the Apple IIgs came into being--Apple needed something right then that could compete with the Amiga, and the in-development Macintosh II wasn't going to do it: its price was just far too prohibitive for home use.

    Apple insiders said that while Apple dismissed Commodore in public, that wasn't the case inside--they were seen as the real threat. I still remember persistent rumors that Commodore's one "big money" TV campaign for the Amiga (high special-effects budget and the Pointer Sisters) failed to get much, if any, network time because Apple threatened to pull their advertising if Commodore was given time--although as far as I know those rumors have never been substantiated.

  • If we were all a little more open and would moderate posts based on the quality of their reasoning as well as the degree to which we
    agreed with their conclusions, I might change my preferences away from -1. Until then, it stays.

    For the most part I dont see too many posts that are well reasoned and dont get moderated to about 2. If you set your threshold to 5 you'll never see people hwo disagree with the norm, but there's enough moderators out there that are fair to put a disagreeable post up to at least 2.

    Of course your idea of what is disagreeable might be different :-)

    I always browwse at -1, because there's alot of funny stuff going on in -1 and 0 land, and I love to read it when I have the time.

    -Rich
  • Aaaaaaaaaaah. Now I see.

    (And boy, do I feel stupid.)
  • IIRC, in 1994, a "good" machine would have been something along the lines of a 486-66; I don't think the Pentium shipped until 1995. At the time, it would have cost around $3,000, fully loaded.

    I think you're right that the comparison is a bit specious. A 1985 A1000 cost about what a 486-66 would have cost in 1994. However, I didn't buy the A1000, my parents did. My first machine was an A500, and I eventually scraped up the $1200 or so to get into an A2000. Even by 1994, my income hadn't gone up that much (was still young), and there's no way I could have saved $3K for a 486-66. Realistically, a span of about 7 years is fairer: 1987 to 1994, comparing a cost range of $500 or so.

    Even if I had had $3k in 1994, a 486-66 still wouldn't be as fast as an Amiga for multimedia apps, at least under Windows 3.1. I suspect that a custom program written in DOS on one of those machines could have come pretty close. It wouldn't have had four-channel sound, but you can fake that with 16-bit sound. (Amiga has 4 8-bit digital channels.) And the 256-color modes really did look a *lot* nicer than the standard 16-color Amiga hi-res palette. For still pictures and strategy games, the PC was much better than the Amiga in 1994 -- but it still wasn't as fast at animation.

    Another way to look at it: In 1985, a PC that cost around the same amount as an Amiga would have been an 8Mhz 286 (2nd generation AT), with 16-color CGA graphics, and usually 128K of RAM. That may give you a better idea of how far ahead the Amiga really was.

    And you are right that there was no MMU protection in Amiga's multitasking. This made the machine very unstable indeed for the first year or so. By the time the A500 shipped, people were getting pretty good with the very new concepts in the OS, like message-passing, memory pointers, and semaphores. A single bad program could take down the whole machine, but that's also true of every consumer OS until NT. (and Linux, of course.) Because of this, the overall programming quality was very high. Everyone knew their program could crash your computer easily, so everyone was really careful not to do that.

    Overall system stability with the Amiga was at least as good as with Win98, even without hardware MMU support. And it was blazing fast; it could task switch in something like 50 clock cycles. Motorola actually used the core of the Amiga OS, Exec, as an example of how to do fast task switching on the 68000 chip.

    A hardware MMU would probably have been 'better', but in actual practice it didn't seem to matter too much once the programmers got up to speed.
  • Agreed wholeheartedly. I actually met Carl Sassenrath, the guy who wrote Exec, at a party once. Really nice guy. As I mentioned sideways to another Amiga person there, "Wow. What do you say to a demigod?" :-)

    >
  • Oops! Yes, you are right, I forgot about the ROM issue. I have both an A500 and an A2000 sitting in my closet (broken), so ROMs weren't an issue for me.

    If you are going to emulate the Amiga, you should probably purchase the ROMS, at least if you want to be legal. I also encourage you to register WinUAE(I did!).

    However, the people in the Amiga community moaning and griping about sites like Lazarus are just dumb. The Amiga is *dead*. It won't come back. It is just too outmoded to be worth salvaging anymore. Might as well put up those old programs so that everyone can see them -- if some of those useful old ideas are re-introduced into computing, we will all benefit.

    Obviously that doesn't include the (12?) or so programs that people are still trying to make money from... but fer chrissake, who cares if someone copies Lemmings 1 anymore? *sigh*
  • Hell yeah! I remember that mag. As a kid I used to spend hours pounding the programs into a Laser 128. Those listings probably did more to help me learn how to type than any other single experience. Well, maybe not ;)
  • Dale Due? or Don L??k could be Dale Luck (co-author of Boing!)
  • The Amiga brand and technology was (I seem to remember) bought by a British high street PC retailer

    ESCOM were German, not British, AFAIK.

  • The monstrosity of Atari under the Tramiels was certainly not

    Both Commodore (CD-32? A500+? A600? A3000?) and Atari (Lynx? Jaguar?) made large product and marketing blunders. If they had done anything like IBM's Chaplin ads, things might have looked very different now.

  • The monstrosity of Atari under the Tramiels was certainly not

    Both Commodore (CD-32? A500+? A600? A3000? C64C?) and Atari (Lynx? Jaguar? ST 1040?) made large product and marketing blunders. If they had done anything like IBM's Chaplin ads, things might have looked very different now.

  • Interesting tidbit about the AtariTramielC= games: people claimed that effectively the Amiga is a descendant of the Atari 400/800 series, while the ST is a descendent of the C64.


    --
  • Maybe I should have been more specific...

    You couldn't run Doom on the amigas that were available at the time Doom was released. Yes, they ported both doom & quake & even descent I think, but to run these games you'd have to have at least a motorola 060 for decent (well...) fps.

    And the best amiga processor you could get in 1993 was a motorla 040. If my memory isn't totally s****d up...

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