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The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came out and pretty much crushed everything else. That year is when I realized it was

The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came out and pretty much crushed everything else. That year is when I realized it was time to sell my Amiga and buy a PC because the future had just jumped to a different hardware architecture. To me, booting Windows 95 was as jaw dropping as seeing the ray traced juggler demo and Marble Madness on an Amiga 1000 Kickstart 1.0 in 1986.

gaius 11y ago
Ultimately the Amiga painted itself into a corner; so finely tuned for 2D that it couldn't easily just slot in a 3D card like a PC could. I still have mine, suped up with a 68010, that'll get you 5% in a tight loop.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I wonder where the Amiga would have been today if those chips had been sitting on one or more easily swappable boards like what most of the PC did. What seemed to sink the Amiga in the long run was that to go from OCS to ECS or AGA you basically had to buy a new computer. But a PC could go from EGA to VGA by swapping out a card. Never mind that the first 3D accelerators were pass through concoctions, where the VGA card had a short cable run over to the 3D card that in turn was connected to the screen.
  - david-given 11y ago
    I still have an original 3DFX Voodoo Graphics somewhere that worked like that. Alas, it didn't do any sane from of OpenGL, so eventually I just used it to show X on a second monitor, via a full-screen texture. It worked astonishingly badly. Now completely unusable, of course, like its Hercules cousin, because it was an ISA bus device.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    The big box Amiga's did get graphics cards with decent specs. The problem wasn't so much that, but that the vast majority of the Amiga volume was the low end machines. You'd never get an Amiga500 or A1200 style machine with card slots usable like that at the time. The big box Amigas sold too little, and the accelerator cards were equivalently high priced niche products. That, and of course that Commodore management consistently messed up and delayed the better options. What is a real shame is that Hombre didn't get finished before he bankruptcy [1]: A 64 bit 3D graphics chipset with an integrated PA-RISC and DSP, coupled with an AGA-Amiga-on-a-chip for backwards compatibility, and with Windows NT compatibility (back in the days when NT ran on multiple hardware architectures; though at that time I probably would have thought Commodore had sold it's soul to the devil if I'd seen the Win NT compatibility). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
  - bsdetector 11y ago
    It wasn't the lack of slots and cards, it was the hardware was too magical and hacky. Basically it was over-engineered so much it couldn't evolve. People made code that depended on those hacks and magic. If the coprocessor doesn't work the exact same way in the future then everything breaks. That's fine if it's doing something simple like displaying a big array where each byte was a pixel or RGB value because you can easily make that backward compatible. Instead it was doing things like running code between scan-lines and using 5 bits per pixel. A new display chip would basically have to include the old chip in its entirety just to be backward compatible. All the Amiga hardware worked like this.
zurn 11y ago
And if you weren't impressed by Windows, by that time Linux was quite good on the PC if you built it with Linux in mind. And you could still dual boot to DOS games.
- whaaaaaaaat 11y ago
  Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice wavetable synthesis. Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything else about it is totally broken." Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in 1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the time included all the media software. Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running Windows or a Mac. Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3 video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.
  - zurn 11y ago
    If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone, it wasn't polished but I thought it was awesome to have your own graphical Unix box and be connected to the community building Linux. I had a lot of fun. You could browse the web, listen to mp3s (if you had a 100 MHz 486), learn Emacs and Perl and Python and C, get to know how everything on the Internet worked including security aspects by playing with all the server software. All this for free and on cheap hardware. The old 1995 Linux box is less interesting to play with than the stuff in your list because all the stuff in your list became extinct and aren't just retarded versions of their modern incarnations.
vidarh 11y ago
Windows 95 was pretty uninteresting to me. The only thing it had over the Amiga was memory isolation, which wasn't seen as a big deal by most Amiga users at the time. In most other respects AmigaOS still beat the pants of Windows95, with things like Datatypes, deep Arexx integration in most applications etc. There are parts of AmigaOS I still miss. What killed the Amiga apart from the Commodore bankruptcy was hardware costs and lack of viable 3D support on the low end far more than Windows 95.
- yuhong 11y ago
  Yea, the Commodore bankruptcy predates Win95 I think.

gaius 11y ago

Ultimately the Amiga painted itself into a corner; so finely tuned for 2D that it couldn't easily just slot in a 3D card like a PC could. I still have mine, suped up with a 68010, that'll get you 5% in a tight loop.

digi_owl 11y ago
I wonder where the Amiga would have been today if those chips had been sitting on one or more easily swappable boards like what most of the PC did. What seemed to sink the Amiga in the long run was that to go from OCS to ECS or AGA you basically had to buy a new computer. But a PC could go from EGA to VGA by swapping out a card. Never mind that the first 3D accelerators were pass through concoctions, where the VGA card had a short cable run over to the 3D card that in turn was connected to the screen.
- david-given 11y ago
  I still have an original 3DFX Voodoo Graphics somewhere that worked like that. Alas, it didn't do any sane from of OpenGL, so eventually I just used it to show X on a second monitor, via a full-screen texture. It worked astonishingly badly. Now completely unusable, of course, like its Hercules cousin, because it was an ISA bus device.
- vidarh 11y ago
  The big box Amiga's did get graphics cards with decent specs. The problem wasn't so much that, but that the vast majority of the Amiga volume was the low end machines. You'd never get an Amiga500 or A1200 style machine with card slots usable like that at the time. The big box Amigas sold too little, and the accelerator cards were equivalently high priced niche products. That, and of course that Commodore management consistently messed up and delayed the better options. What is a real shame is that Hombre didn't get finished before he bankruptcy [1]: A 64 bit 3D graphics chipset with an integrated PA-RISC and DSP, coupled with an AGA-Amiga-on-a-chip for backwards compatibility, and with Windows NT compatibility (back in the days when NT ran on multiple hardware architectures; though at that time I probably would have thought Commodore had sold it's soul to the devil if I'd seen the Win NT compatibility). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
- bsdetector 11y ago
  It wasn't the lack of slots and cards, it was the hardware was too magical and hacky. Basically it was over-engineered so much it couldn't evolve. People made code that depended on those hacks and magic. If the coprocessor doesn't work the exact same way in the future then everything breaks. That's fine if it's doing something simple like displaying a big array where each byte was a pixel or RGB value because you can easily make that backward compatible. Instead it was doing things like running code between scan-lines and using 5 bits per pixel. A new display chip would basically have to include the old chip in its entirety just to be backward compatible. All the Amiga hardware worked like this.

zurn 11y ago

And if you weren't impressed by Windows, by that time Linux was quite good on the PC if you built it with Linux in mind. And you could still dual boot to DOS games.

whaaaaaaaat 11y ago
Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice wavetable synthesis. Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything else about it is totally broken." Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in 1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the time included all the media software. Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running Windows or a Mac. Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3 video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.
- zurn 11y ago
  If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone, it wasn't polished but I thought it was awesome to have your own graphical Unix box and be connected to the community building Linux. I had a lot of fun. You could browse the web, listen to mp3s (if you had a 100 MHz 486), learn Emacs and Perl and Python and C, get to know how everything on the Internet worked including security aspects by playing with all the server software. All this for free and on cheap hardware. The old 1995 Linux box is less interesting to play with than the stuff in your list because all the stuff in your list became extinct and aren't just retarded versions of their modern incarnations.

vidarh 11y ago

Windows 95 was pretty uninteresting to me. The only thing it had over the Amiga was memory isolation, which wasn't seen as a big deal by most Amiga users at the time. In most other respects AmigaOS still beat the pants of Windows95, with things like Datatypes, deep Arexx integration in most applications etc. There are parts of AmigaOS I still miss. What killed the Amiga apart from the Commodore bankruptcy was hardware costs and lack of viable 3D support on the low end far more than Windows 95.

yuhong 11y ago
Yea, the Commodore bankruptcy predates Win95 I think.