13 ms·

The Amiga Consciousness

169 points by erickhill 9y ago

subatomic 9y ago
I highly recommend the documentary "From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years" http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga The significance of the architecture and Jay Miners brilliance in system design cannot be underestimated.
- ianai 9y ago
  Can you outline the draw for people?
  - danielbarla 9y ago
    The draw, as in the attraction to Amiga? TL;DR: it was a technologically superior product for a while, but never became mainstream. This allowed it to garner a decent, very faithful following. Kind of like if the iPhone had failed, but you still had people swearing it's greatest thing since sliced bread. I can't comment too much regarding the development side of things, as I was quite young at the time. While I dabbled in coding and have heard many comments about various ahead of its time ideas even on the dev side of things, I suspect what set it aside was in large part the hardware. For its price, it came surprisingly well equipped. For context, we're talking 1985, so most PCs you ran into would have had CGA (EGA only having come out in '84). On the Amiga, the lower / standard resolutions you could have 32 or 64 colours at a time, picked from a 12-bit (4096) palette. For static images, there was a special hack which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at the same time, which made for breathtaking visuals. There were a set of co-processors (Copper and Blitter), which allowed for specialised, primarily graphical programming. Kind of alike a 2D GPU, but in 1985. The OS itself had a fairly well implemented true pre-emptive multitasking, which allowed for a number of apps to be run simultaneously. Again, this is 2 years before Windows 2.0, and probably 10 years before Windows had anything better than switch-tasking. Apps could run as a window, or get their own fullscreen mode, but surprisingly the fullscreen mode was stable (sometimes games still crash on Windows when you drop do desktop), and you could even drag the full screen window down, and see half the desktop, half the game, etc. Along with the various co-processors offloading work from the CPU, this meant that the entire experience was very fluid. I still remember playing various simple games by setting them to high priority on the CPU, while a 3D render was merrily taking 100% of the CPU in the background. There was literally no noticeable lag in the game. For various architectural reasons, this just doesn't seem to work on modern machines. Couple that with very decent audio (again, I suspect it would be many years before PCs routinely outperformed the Amiga), and you have a very decent product. It's very difficult to explain the degree to which this technical lead existed, the market is much more competitive now, and everything is much closer together. But, as an example, it's as if someone came out with a console with full VR capabilities at a 500$ price point. It simply shouldn't be feasible. Since it was quite different, a lot of in-house technologies sprung up. An example is the AmigaGuide format, which was a kind of hyperlinked text document (kind of like man pages?). I suspect a bunch of these esoteric and quirky aspects gave the Amiga a lot of its flavour and soul. For various reasons, possible mismanagement by Commodore, possibly the PC's open platform simply being economically superior, the Amiga never became mainstream. But therein lies it's draw - the people who knew it and loved it simply couldn't believe this, and became rather fanatical followers.
    - ianai 9y ago
      That’s what I was not grasping. We were too poor to have a computer until I was 16 (in the 90s) so I missed that era. Thank you!
      - danielbarla 9y ago
        You're welcome! One of the appeals of Amiga was that it offered all this at a very competitive price (when compared to IBM compatible PCs). Still, I recall a Commodore 64 costing my parents about 4 months of salary, and that was without even a tape drive. This was Eastern Europe, so perhaps we were poorer than most on HN. Commodores, Ataris and other alt machines were pretty popular around those parts, due to their price point.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    Imagine Alexa/Siri 20 years from now, running on VR glasses that actually work and look cool. Available today. That’s what the Amiga felt like in 1985.
vardump 9y ago
After all these years I still remember Amiga original chipset register 0xdff180 is the first palette entry. Or that exec library pointer is at 0x4. And hundreds of other details. It was amazing to set a copper list that completely defines the display, microsecond by microsecond, scanline by scanline. To setup blitter to decode a raw disk sector on the background. To learn blitter 4-channel minterm [0] logic combinators. Having fun with Deluxe Paint color cycling. Trying to make some kind of music in Protracker and Octamed and listening all those amazing music modules made by other people. Writing text documents CygnusEd. Having fun with AsmOne assembler IDE. Playing Shadow of the Beast, Marble Madness, Xenon 2 Megablast, Turrican 2, Civilization, Settlers, Lemmings, Another World, Stunt Car Racer, North and South and all those other amazing games. That inspired to imitate and to learn more. Watching amazing demos like Phenomena Enigma, Kefrens Desert Dream, Sanity Arte, Spaceballs 9 fingers. Wondering how seemingly impossible effects were achieved. It was a great machine and taught me a lot. I'd be a different person without Amiga. [0]: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  Ahh, Protracker. But let us not forget Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_2:_Brutal_Deluxe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_2:_Brutal_Deluxe) And forget the Blue Screen of Death... Amiga gave you Guru Meditation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
- hota_mazi 9y ago
  The Amiga's way of getting relative pointers to libraries was amazing (and quite ahead of its time). Like you said, the only absolute address that always worked was 4, exec.library, and after that, you used that pointer to open other libraries, guaranteeing that they could be relocated any time.
- indigodaddy 9y ago
  Nice comment. Those Amiga 500 days were indeed magical times. Marble Madness was particularly memorable.
ggm 9y ago
I had to do (crude) forensics on an Amiga belonging to a suicide victim at university (I was in the computer center, the uni and police asked us to look for a suicide note) The mod/demo programs were amazing. I was totally outside the mod scene, but I could see why people were attracted to it.
- Something1234 9y ago
  That is such a sad event for you to have to perform forensics on. Did you find anything of note about the demo programs? I really want to ask for more details about the suicide but I feel that would be crude.
  - ggm 9y ago
    I don't think the owner had written any/many. They seemed to be shared amongst the digerati for c00lz. Mostly very trippy colormap warping, some of them had sprites doing things over the underlying image, a lot of XOR constructive/destructive interference fringe ideas. They had two dimensions: 1) be as trippy-cool as possible 2) be written as tersely as humanly possible The suicide: I can't say. He left no note. I was led to believe he'd found a way to consume a huge amount of time-charged online credit, realized he had accrued a multi-thousand dollar debt, was failing university and was severely depressed. This was back in the 1990s. Computer Crime was new, and the consequences for him was probably jail time. A lot of other stuff on the amiga was about conspiracy theory, hacking, the usual ascii copy of 'the anarchists cookbook' which almost anyone can stumble upon and hoarde. For somebody in formative years, maybe this was more exciting than in hindsight it reads. (I mean both for me, finding it, and for him, finding/owning it in the raw. I wouldn't have been significantly older than him really, perhaps 10 years at most) I don't think I helped the family come to any sense of closure, or informed things to help the police or coroner. I did learn that this is a very emotionally stressful job to perform and I am not well suited to either the detail side of logging "what was found" or delivery of the right kind of empathetic response to people in emotional stress. The uni was pretty good about this. They gave me counselling afterward as I recall. I wouldn't be surprised to be told anyone doing this kind of digital forensics nowadays has a pretty solid support structure. Between this, and kiddyporn I think you'd need it. I think you can learn both skills, but it takes time
jflatow 9y ago
I used an Amiga as a kid, and loved it. I am sure it had a profound impact on me. I never identified with a broader Amiga using community, until now. This is so cool, I'm excited to realize that the spirit lives on.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  My parents got me one, hoping I could use it for school or something. I guess I was too young to really appreciate it beyond the fancy games I could play. Still have it tucked away in the basement though, but the floppies are likely dead by now.
  - wowtip 9y ago
    Those 3,5" floppies seems to be almost immortal. Packed up my Amiga 500+ after 20 years in different cellars and attics, most disks seems fine, and my kids are fascinated by the late 80s / early 90s games :)
    - Moru 9y ago
      Some 3.5" floppies didn't even survive the walk between the computer and the library for printout. It all depends on what quality discs you could afford. The expensive ones was a lot better than the cheaper ones.
Keyframe 9y ago
Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near multimedia capabilities Amiga had. Not for the price a kid could afford or bought for (such as an SGI machine). Vivid colors, fast graphics, great sound, all in a small box. Whereas PCs and Macs seemed like several generations behind it. What made it special was that every kid (and an older person) that used it dabbled with games, programming, music, everything it had to offer. You can still see that core foundation Amiga enabled those users in their everyday work they do today. It's not something that has happened before or since. I wish kids today have something like it. On paper they do. Computers today are beyond imagination a few decades ago, but something is lacking. Maybe the abundance of power? Back then, graphics, sound, interactive storytelling and interactivity were just coming at full force to home users and they were exploring. Today it's taken for granted, so maybe not many care (everything looks the same feeling).
- flukus 9y ago
  I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.
  - Keyframe 9y ago
    Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example). Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).
hoodoof 9y ago
One day in maybe 1987 I was working at a computer company that had a mainframe and was full of greenscreen microcomputers like the Apricot and Sirius 1. One day, I walked into my work area and this new machine was set up and on the screen was this: http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png I was a pivotal moment. My mind was blown and although I could not afford it I immediately ordered one. In hindsight a more successful strategy for Amiga might have been to build it as a games console as its primary market position.
- basementcat 9y ago
  The Amiga was originally designed to be a game console but the company was forced to pivot after the video game crash of 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_develo...
  - flukus 9y ago
    Uncoincidentally, it's most successful market (or one of at least) was the UK where the video game crash never happened.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32
tadruj 9y ago
I miss `filenote <filename> <note>` on the filesystem level - AFFS :) I'm all emotional now
zmix 9y ago
AmigaOS was, overall, the best OS I have ever used. As little technical as possible, but as much as needed. It was an OS, that would gently make you a power-user. I am not going to rant, but my God, was that a good OS! 10 years ahead of its time!
- orionblastar 9y ago
  Google search for AROS it is an open source free alternative to AmigaOS and it runs on PCs and can run old Amiga software on emulators.
- kiksy 9y ago
  It felt like it was so "feature complete" even around 1990. Add a web browser (and networking )and run it on a modern spec machine and I'm sure it would be perfectly usable.
  - harel 9y ago
    People actually do that. You even have multiple browsers to choose from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_AmigaOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_Amig...
jshaqaw 9y ago
If you weren’t around at the time it’s hard to understand just how much beyond every other home computer platform the Amiga was. Yet another data point that “best” doesn’t always win.
- Moru 9y ago
  It's never the best thing that wins. It's whoever has the best marketing budget that wins :-)
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  In Europe in the late 80s to early 90s, the Amiga was the computer everyone wanted, both for graphics, music and especially games. It was a natural successor to the C64, which obviously also had a gigantic following. We never really got into the Apple II and its successors like the US did.
- AndrewStephens 9y ago
  The Amiga was "winning" for a few years but, in hindsight, it is easy to see why it was eventually eclipsed. PCs in the mid-80s were slow, boring, and expensive but the ruthless PC-clone market had lowered costs and increased specifications so quickly that around the early 90s games actually started looking better on PCs. Although the base Amiga500s were cheap, adding things like hard drives and more memory were always expensive. The bigger and more capable models were just as expensive as their PC counterparts and Commodore were slow to react to competition. In the end it was one struggling company against many PC Clone makers and they just couldn't compete on price or features. The final nail in the coffin was when Windows95 came out and Microsoft started focusing on the home/school market.
stevoski 9y ago
A story: I completed a PDP11 assembly coding assignment in university, on an Amiga. Actually it was an Amiga running a Mac emulator, which in turn was running a PDP11 emulator. Macs at that time used a variable speed floppy drive, while the Amiga floppy drive was fixed speed. So I was also using a Mac-compatible external floppy disk drive. The point of the story is that you could use an Amiga as a Mac if you really wanted to.
- fractallyte 9y ago
  Fusion - a commercial Mac emulator for the Amiga - actually ran faster than a real Mac at the time (mid- to late-nineties). I sneaked out a couple of ROM images from the Macs at work, set up Fusion, and had CompuServe running on my Amiga back in 1997. Nothing else though - System 7 and 8 were complex, lackluster, slow, and crash-prone; AmigaOS really blew away the Mac, right up until OSX.
  - einr 9y ago
    RetroManCave on YouTube had an interesting video recently that investigated the performance and capabilities of running a Mac emulator on an Amiga vs. a real 68k Mac, and which actually was faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI Very impressive stuff. Being able to run Mac software would mean access to Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Framemaker, Microsoft Word and Excel and other business/DTP software that unfortunately wasn't really available natively on Amiga. I suspect lots of people used Mac emulators to make their Amiga a viable school/work machine, in addition to all the creative fun and games the native platform afforded.
egypturnash 9y ago
The Amiga, Born a Champion. We made Amiga, Commodore fucked it up. - hidden message in version 1.2 of the OS Computers nowadays feel so boring compared to the raw, crackling future contained in the early Amigas. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking. I'm not entirely sure the boringness is a bad thing; my Mac is a tool for getting work done, rather than a cool thing that nobody really knows how to use right yet.
Nr7 9y ago
Here is an excellent video about the history of Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o There are several other related videos on the channel that are very much worth to watch.
EB-Barrington 9y ago
Reading text, scrolling by using the down-arrow on the Amiga in 1988, was smoother than than the Windows 10 laptop I'm using to view this page, here in 2018. I can't imagine what personal computing would be like in 2018 if the Amiga system had gained market dominance.
EB-Barrington 9y ago
My first full time job was at a store that sold Amiga's (and PC's). We had a very large range of software - including every game, constantly getting new stock. Once we convinced the boss to purchase a shrink-wrap machine to keep everything looking neat, we started taking games home, copying them, and sharing them with the local community. The next morning, we'd shrink-wrap the games back to their original state, and put them back on the shelf for sale.
- Moru 9y ago
  I'm not sure you realise this but that might have been the main reason Amiga got successful in the first place. When my friends bought computers they selected the one where they had easy access to free games. I bought an Atari while they still bought c-64 because copying tapes and discs from other users was easy. I learned programming since there was nothing else to do :-)
  - EB-Barrington 9y ago
    Oh yeah, I realise! (I bought an Amiga when I was studying Comp Sci at University, rather than the recommended PC - as the games were much better on the Amiga. Fortunately there was one unit with 68k assembly programming, ideally suited to having an Amiga (and I got really good at Speedball II).
harel 9y ago
Everything about the Amiga was Magic. Even a system crash was a spiritual experience, with a meditating Guru.
kiksy 9y ago
Just incase anyone hasn't seen it, Ars Technica have been running an excellent series on the history of the Amiga. https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/
mmjaa 9y ago
Old computers never die - their users do! We should definitely not be throwing away old computers. They're just as useful as they were when they were assembled, and can be tasked to do all sorts of things we haven't even thought about yet. I'm a huge fan of retro computing (Oric-1 Atmos, FTW!) and there is nothing more satisfying than to sit down and download a fresh new app, built this year, to run on a system built 30 years ago. I think this is a feeling that must persist, somehow, so I encourage everyone and anyone who has an old computer in their attic to dig it out, boot it up, and keep it running. Even if you can't find a use for it, there are a million other people out there who could. Give it to the kids and let them learn computing in the most distraction-free environment you can give them... my kids learned computing at the 8-bit level and its already put them way ahead of the iPhone-addicted peers. Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters, an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal ..
- noxToken 9y ago
  > Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters, an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal Some kids don't want nor will ever care to put their time to use by programming on an 8-bit architecture. Some won't even care to do it on current gen architecture, and that should be alright. I could be misreading your tone (hope I am), but some people value experience rather than creation. Creators are not superior to consumers. Putting down others, especially children, because they'd rather play some shovelware mobile release than create something is distasteful. We may be technically inclined, but we aren't gods.
  - 9889095r3jh 9y ago
    Na, creators are superior. There's nothing wrong with kids playing dumb mobile games. But they gotta spend some time making something. I don't care if it's a video game, a short film, or a bird house. When you're making things, you're learning. And when you're passively consuming, you may not be. With games like Minecraft, kids today have no excuse. They can be making things and playing a game at the same time.
_mrmnmly 9y ago
so I've got a (maybe silly, but still) question: why Amiga wasn't successful to this day as a solid competitor to PCs and Macs?
- ubermonkey 9y ago
  Bad marketing is a big part of it. Amiga fans will also cite poor management choices in general, though I don't know anything about that. By the time they were introduced, though, the PC and Mac were already in the market. The PC was being adopted into offices by then, so it's also possible that the ironclad rep (at the time!) of IBM meant that the PC was already locked into a path to dominance, but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    >but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education. Compatibility mainly, being able to take your work home and continue doing it. There were a few software 8086 emulators for the Amiga that could run DOS and a few productivity applications, and there was a sidecar for the A1000 which had a full blown PC & 5.25" floppy drive in it for compatibility.
    - _mrmnmly 9y ago
      thank You all for Your responses - it turned out an interesting question for me which I plan to dive deeper into during following weekend :)
- bobochan 9y ago
  This is my memory of it, albeit from a long time ago. The retail market for personal computers was very different in the mid to late 80s. I remember going to Ferranti-Dege, a camera store in Harvard Square, to buy an Apple ][+ when they first came out, and then upgraded to an Apple //e a few years later at the Harvard Coop. Buying computers and accessories like floppy disks meant going to specialized, usually small retailers. Commodore saw an opportunity to market their very inexpensive VIC-20, and then Commodore 64, through a much broader range of stores. You started seeing VIC-20s at Toys R Us and other big chain stores. The mom & pop computer stores could not compete on price with the bigger stores, so they stopped selling Commodore machines. The Amiga was a serious computer when it came out, and it was too high end for toy stores, etc. to carry. With the bridges burned to the other distribution channels (at least in the US) the average shopper never saw an Amiga on the shelf. Mind you, this was still in an era when Texas Instruments was selling the TI-99/4A and Atari was selling the 400 and 800, so there were other options on the shelves.
ekianjo 9y ago
To fully understand why the Amiga was great for his time, a good introduction is the book "the future was here".
AndrewStephens 9y ago
The Amiga hit the home computer market like a bomb. For a few years there was nothing quite like it on the market at a price that people could actually afford. It was never that big in the USA but overseas it had a huge impact, bridging the gap between games machines and real computers. I saved up several years of teenage-dollars to buy one when I was 15 and never looked back. Of particular interest to me was the excellent-for-the-time audio chip. I spent many hours making MODs and games for my friends to play. Later, I taught myself C and never looked back. A sample of the sorts of things a teenager could do in 1991 : https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.html https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.htm...
IronWolve 9y ago
AmiTCP is what got me into being a sysadmin. I was a teenager using slurp and amitcp to get my amiga online the Internet. Learning about TCP and configuration files got me into setting up servers. I started working at an ISP setting up BSD servers for web/ftp/mail/ppp/radius. I've been online on my c64/128D with 300/1200 then finally a 2400 baud modem, then went Amiga 500 and got that Amiga on my local ISP. But after I started working at an ISP, it was AMD 486/DX100 and was PC since then . with tons of Amiga Emulators and linux boxes I still sit in an Amiga IRC channel till this day, and still idle on efnet. Amusing story, an old buddy and co-worker I met on IRC, I got him a job at my work, known him for years, he moved to Finland years ago so he could go to all the demo scenes, and now he is a judge on many of them. Shout out to Sir Garbage Truck and Accession!

169 points by erickhill 9y ago

I highly recommend the documentary "From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years" http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga The significance of the architecture and Jay Miners brilliance in system design cannot be underestimated.

ianai 9y ago
Can you outline the draw for people?
- danielbarla 9y ago
  The draw, as in the attraction to Amiga? TL;DR: it was a technologically superior product for a while, but never became mainstream. This allowed it to garner a decent, very faithful following. Kind of like if the iPhone had failed, but you still had people swearing it's greatest thing since sliced bread. I can't comment too much regarding the development side of things, as I was quite young at the time. While I dabbled in coding and have heard many comments about various ahead of its time ideas even on the dev side of things, I suspect what set it aside was in large part the hardware. For its price, it came surprisingly well equipped. For context, we're talking 1985, so most PCs you ran into would have had CGA (EGA only having come out in '84). On the Amiga, the lower / standard resolutions you could have 32 or 64 colours at a time, picked from a 12-bit (4096) palette. For static images, there was a special hack which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at the same time, which made for breathtaking visuals. There were a set of co-processors (Copper and Blitter), which allowed for specialised, primarily graphical programming. Kind of alike a 2D GPU, but in 1985. The OS itself had a fairly well implemented true pre-emptive multitasking, which allowed for a number of apps to be run simultaneously. Again, this is 2 years before Windows 2.0, and probably 10 years before Windows had anything better than switch-tasking. Apps could run as a window, or get their own fullscreen mode, but surprisingly the fullscreen mode was stable (sometimes games still crash on Windows when you drop do desktop), and you could even drag the full screen window down, and see half the desktop, half the game, etc. Along with the various co-processors offloading work from the CPU, this meant that the entire experience was very fluid. I still remember playing various simple games by setting them to high priority on the CPU, while a 3D render was merrily taking 100% of the CPU in the background. There was literally no noticeable lag in the game. For various architectural reasons, this just doesn't seem to work on modern machines. Couple that with very decent audio (again, I suspect it would be many years before PCs routinely outperformed the Amiga), and you have a very decent product. It's very difficult to explain the degree to which this technical lead existed, the market is much more competitive now, and everything is much closer together. But, as an example, it's as if someone came out with a console with full VR capabilities at a 500$ price point. It simply shouldn't be feasible. Since it was quite different, a lot of in-house technologies sprung up. An example is the AmigaGuide format, which was a kind of hyperlinked text document (kind of like man pages?). I suspect a bunch of these esoteric and quirky aspects gave the Amiga a lot of its flavour and soul. For various reasons, possible mismanagement by Commodore, possibly the PC's open platform simply being economically superior, the Amiga never became mainstream. But therein lies it's draw - the people who knew it and loved it simply couldn't believe this, and became rather fanatical followers.
  - ianai 9y ago
    That’s what I was not grasping. We were too poor to have a computer until I was 16 (in the 90s) so I missed that era. Thank you!
    - danielbarla 9y ago
      You're welcome! One of the appeals of Amiga was that it offered all this at a very competitive price (when compared to IBM compatible PCs). Still, I recall a Commodore 64 costing my parents about 4 months of salary, and that was without even a tape drive. This was Eastern Europe, so perhaps we were poorer than most on HN. Commodores, Ataris and other alt machines were pretty popular around those parts, due to their price point.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Imagine Alexa/Siri 20 years from now, running on VR glasses that actually work and look cool. Available today. That’s what the Amiga felt like in 1985.

vardump 9y ago

After all these years I still remember Amiga original chipset register 0xdff180 is the first palette entry. Or that exec library pointer is at 0x4. And hundreds of other details. It was amazing to set a copper list that completely defines the display, microsecond by microsecond, scanline by scanline. To setup blitter to decode a raw disk sector on the background. To learn blitter 4-channel minterm [0] logic combinators. Having fun with Deluxe Paint color cycling. Trying to make some kind of music in Protracker and Octamed and listening all those amazing music modules made by other people. Writing text documents CygnusEd. Having fun with AsmOne assembler IDE. Playing Shadow of the Beast, Marble Madness, Xenon 2 Megablast, Turrican 2, Civilization, Settlers, Lemmings, Another World, Stunt Car Racer, North and South and all those other amazing games. That inspired to imitate and to learn more. Watching amazing demos like Phenomena Enigma, Kefrens Desert Dream, Sanity Arte, Spaceballs 9 fingers. Wondering how seemingly impossible effects were achieved. It was a great machine and taught me a lot. I'd be a different person without Amiga. [0]: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms

FireBeyond 9y ago
Ahh, Protracker. But let us not forget Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_2:_Brutal_Deluxe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_2:_Brutal_Deluxe) And forget the Blue Screen of Death... Amiga gave you Guru Meditation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
hota_mazi 9y ago
The Amiga's way of getting relative pointers to libraries was amazing (and quite ahead of its time). Like you said, the only absolute address that always worked was 4, exec.library, and after that, you used that pointer to open other libraries, guaranteeing that they could be relocated any time.
indigodaddy 9y ago
Nice comment. Those Amiga 500 days were indeed magical times. Marble Madness was particularly memorable.

ggm 9y ago

I had to do (crude) forensics on an Amiga belonging to a suicide victim at university (I was in the computer center, the uni and police asked us to look for a suicide note) The mod/demo programs were amazing. I was totally outside the mod scene, but I could see why people were attracted to it.

Something1234 9y ago
That is such a sad event for you to have to perform forensics on. Did you find anything of note about the demo programs? I really want to ask for more details about the suicide but I feel that would be crude.
- ggm 9y ago
  I don't think the owner had written any/many. They seemed to be shared amongst the digerati for c00lz. Mostly very trippy colormap warping, some of them had sprites doing things over the underlying image, a lot of XOR constructive/destructive interference fringe ideas. They had two dimensions: 1) be as trippy-cool as possible 2) be written as tersely as humanly possible The suicide: I can't say. He left no note. I was led to believe he'd found a way to consume a huge amount of time-charged online credit, realized he had accrued a multi-thousand dollar debt, was failing university and was severely depressed. This was back in the 1990s. Computer Crime was new, and the consequences for him was probably jail time. A lot of other stuff on the amiga was about conspiracy theory, hacking, the usual ascii copy of 'the anarchists cookbook' which almost anyone can stumble upon and hoarde. For somebody in formative years, maybe this was more exciting than in hindsight it reads. (I mean both for me, finding it, and for him, finding/owning it in the raw. I wouldn't have been significantly older than him really, perhaps 10 years at most) I don't think I helped the family come to any sense of closure, or informed things to help the police or coroner. I did learn that this is a very emotionally stressful job to perform and I am not well suited to either the detail side of logging "what was found" or delivery of the right kind of empathetic response to people in emotional stress. The uni was pretty good about this. They gave me counselling afterward as I recall. I wouldn't be surprised to be told anyone doing this kind of digital forensics nowadays has a pretty solid support structure. Between this, and kiddyporn I think you'd need it. I think you can learn both skills, but it takes time

jflatow 9y ago

I used an Amiga as a kid, and loved it. I am sure it had a profound impact on me. I never identified with a broader Amiga using community, until now. This is so cool, I'm excited to realize that the spirit lives on.

digi_owl 9y ago
My parents got me one, hoping I could use it for school or something. I guess I was too young to really appreciate it beyond the fancy games I could play. Still have it tucked away in the basement though, but the floppies are likely dead by now.
- wowtip 9y ago
  Those 3,5" floppies seems to be almost immortal. Packed up my Amiga 500+ after 20 years in different cellars and attics, most disks seems fine, and my kids are fascinated by the late 80s / early 90s games :)
  - Moru 9y ago
    Some 3.5" floppies didn't even survive the walk between the computer and the library for printout. It all depends on what quality discs you could afford. The expensive ones was a lot better than the cheaper ones.

Keyframe 9y ago

Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near multimedia capabilities Amiga had. Not for the price a kid could afford or bought for (such as an SGI machine). Vivid colors, fast graphics, great sound, all in a small box. Whereas PCs and Macs seemed like several generations behind it. What made it special was that every kid (and an older person) that used it dabbled with games, programming, music, everything it had to offer. You can still see that core foundation Amiga enabled those users in their everyday work they do today. It's not something that has happened before or since. I wish kids today have something like it. On paper they do. Computers today are beyond imagination a few decades ago, but something is lacking. Maybe the abundance of power? Back then, graphics, sound, interactive storytelling and interactivity were just coming at full force to home users and they were exploring. Today it's taken for granted, so maybe not many care (everything looks the same feeling).

flukus 9y ago
I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.
- Keyframe 9y ago
  Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example). Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).

hoodoof 9y ago

One day in maybe 1987 I was working at a computer company that had a mainframe and was full of greenscreen microcomputers like the Apricot and Sirius 1. One day, I walked into my work area and this new machine was set up and on the screen was this: http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png I was a pivotal moment. My mind was blown and although I could not afford it I immediately ordered one. In hindsight a more successful strategy for Amiga might have been to build it as a games console as its primary market position.

basementcat 9y ago
The Amiga was originally designed to be a game console but the company was forced to pivot after the video game crash of 1983. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_develo...
- flukus 9y ago
  Uncoincidentally, it's most successful market (or one of at least) was the UK where the video game crash never happened.
digi_owl 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32

tadruj 9y ago

I miss `filenote <filename> <note>` on the filesystem level - AFFS :) I'm all emotional now

zmix 9y ago

AmigaOS was, overall, the best OS I have ever used. As little technical as possible, but as much as needed. It was an OS, that would gently make you a power-user. I am not going to rant, but my God, was that a good OS! 10 years ahead of its time!

orionblastar 9y ago
Google search for AROS it is an open source free alternative to AmigaOS and it runs on PCs and can run old Amiga software on emulators.
kiksy 9y ago
It felt like it was so "feature complete" even around 1990. Add a web browser (and networking )and run it on a modern spec machine and I'm sure it would be perfectly usable.
- harel 9y ago
  People actually do that. You even have multiple browsers to choose from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_AmigaOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_Amig...

jshaqaw 9y ago

If you weren’t around at the time it’s hard to understand just how much beyond every other home computer platform the Amiga was. Yet another data point that “best” doesn’t always win.

Moru 9y ago
It's never the best thing that wins. It's whoever has the best marketing budget that wins :-)
KozmoNau7 9y ago
In Europe in the late 80s to early 90s, the Amiga was the computer everyone wanted, both for graphics, music and especially games. It was a natural successor to the C64, which obviously also had a gigantic following. We never really got into the Apple II and its successors like the US did.
AndrewStephens 9y ago
The Amiga was "winning" for a few years but, in hindsight, it is easy to see why it was eventually eclipsed. PCs in the mid-80s were slow, boring, and expensive but the ruthless PC-clone market had lowered costs and increased specifications so quickly that around the early 90s games actually started looking better on PCs. Although the base Amiga500s were cheap, adding things like hard drives and more memory were always expensive. The bigger and more capable models were just as expensive as their PC counterparts and Commodore were slow to react to competition. In the end it was one struggling company against many PC Clone makers and they just couldn't compete on price or features. The final nail in the coffin was when Windows95 came out and Microsoft started focusing on the home/school market.

stevoski 9y ago

A story: I completed a PDP11 assembly coding assignment in university, on an Amiga. Actually it was an Amiga running a Mac emulator, which in turn was running a PDP11 emulator. Macs at that time used a variable speed floppy drive, while the Amiga floppy drive was fixed speed. So I was also using a Mac-compatible external floppy disk drive. The point of the story is that you could use an Amiga as a Mac if you really wanted to.

fractallyte 9y ago
Fusion - a commercial Mac emulator for the Amiga - actually ran faster than a real Mac at the time (mid- to late-nineties). I sneaked out a couple of ROM images from the Macs at work, set up Fusion, and had CompuServe running on my Amiga back in 1997. Nothing else though - System 7 and 8 were complex, lackluster, slow, and crash-prone; AmigaOS really blew away the Mac, right up until OSX.
- einr 9y ago
  RetroManCave on YouTube had an interesting video recently that investigated the performance and capabilities of running a Mac emulator on an Amiga vs. a real 68k Mac, and which actually was faster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI Very impressive stuff. Being able to run Mac software would mean access to Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Framemaker, Microsoft Word and Excel and other business/DTP software that unfortunately wasn't really available natively on Amiga. I suspect lots of people used Mac emulators to make their Amiga a viable school/work machine, in addition to all the creative fun and games the native platform afforded.

egypturnash 9y ago

The Amiga, Born a Champion. We made Amiga, Commodore fucked it up. - hidden message in version 1.2 of the OS Computers nowadays feel so boring compared to the raw, crackling future contained in the early Amigas. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking. I'm not entirely sure the boringness is a bad thing; my Mac is a tool for getting work done, rather than a cool thing that nobody really knows how to use right yet.

Nr7 9y ago

Here is an excellent video about the history of Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o There are several other related videos on the channel that are very much worth to watch.

EB-Barrington 9y ago

Reading text, scrolling by using the down-arrow on the Amiga in 1988, was smoother than than the Windows 10 laptop I'm using to view this page, here in 2018. I can't imagine what personal computing would be like in 2018 if the Amiga system had gained market dominance.

EB-Barrington 9y ago

My first full time job was at a store that sold Amiga's (and PC's). We had a very large range of software - including every game, constantly getting new stock. Once we convinced the boss to purchase a shrink-wrap machine to keep everything looking neat, we started taking games home, copying them, and sharing them with the local community. The next morning, we'd shrink-wrap the games back to their original state, and put them back on the shelf for sale.

Moru 9y ago
I'm not sure you realise this but that might have been the main reason Amiga got successful in the first place. When my friends bought computers they selected the one where they had easy access to free games. I bought an Atari while they still bought c-64 because copying tapes and discs from other users was easy. I learned programming since there was nothing else to do :-)
- EB-Barrington 9y ago
  Oh yeah, I realise! (I bought an Amiga when I was studying Comp Sci at University, rather than the recommended PC - as the games were much better on the Amiga. Fortunately there was one unit with 68k assembly programming, ideally suited to having an Amiga (and I got really good at Speedball II).

harel 9y ago

Everything about the Amiga was Magic. Even a system crash was a spiritual experience, with a meditating Guru.

kiksy 9y ago

Just incase anyone hasn't seen it, Ars Technica have been running an excellent series on the history of the Amiga. https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

mmjaa 9y ago

Old computers never die - their users do! We should definitely not be throwing away old computers. They're just as useful as they were when they were assembled, and can be tasked to do all sorts of things we haven't even thought about yet. I'm a huge fan of retro computing (Oric-1 Atmos, FTW!) and there is nothing more satisfying than to sit down and download a fresh new app, built this year, to run on a system built 30 years ago. I think this is a feeling that must persist, somehow, so I encourage everyone and anyone who has an old computer in their attic to dig it out, boot it up, and keep it running. Even if you can't find a use for it, there are a million other people out there who could. Give it to the kids and let them learn computing in the most distraction-free environment you can give them... my kids learned computing at the 8-bit level and its already put them way ahead of the iPhone-addicted peers. Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters, an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal ..

noxToken 9y ago
> Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters, an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal Some kids don't want nor will ever care to put their time to use by programming on an 8-bit architecture. Some won't even care to do it on current gen architecture, and that should be alright. I could be misreading your tone (hope I am), but some people value experience rather than creation. Creators are not superior to consumers. Putting down others, especially children, because they'd rather play some shovelware mobile release than create something is distasteful. We may be technically inclined, but we aren't gods.
- 9889095r3jh 9y ago
  Na, creators are superior. There's nothing wrong with kids playing dumb mobile games. But they gotta spend some time making something. I don't care if it's a video game, a short film, or a bird house. When you're making things, you're learning. And when you're passively consuming, you may not be. With games like Minecraft, kids today have no excuse. They can be making things and playing a game at the same time.

_mrmnmly 9y ago

so I've got a (maybe silly, but still) question: why Amiga wasn't successful to this day as a solid competitor to PCs and Macs?

ubermonkey 9y ago
Bad marketing is a big part of it. Amiga fans will also cite poor management choices in general, though I don't know anything about that. By the time they were introduced, though, the PC and Mac were already in the market. The PC was being adopted into offices by then, so it's also possible that the ironclad rep (at the time!) of IBM meant that the PC was already locked into a path to dominance, but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  >but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive in homes or education. Compatibility mainly, being able to take your work home and continue doing it. There were a few software 8086 emulators for the Amiga that could run DOS and a few productivity applications, and there was a sidecar for the A1000 which had a full blown PC & 5.25" floppy drive in it for compatibility.
  - _mrmnmly 9y ago
    thank You all for Your responses - it turned out an interesting question for me which I plan to dive deeper into during following weekend :)
bobochan 9y ago
This is my memory of it, albeit from a long time ago. The retail market for personal computers was very different in the mid to late 80s. I remember going to Ferranti-Dege, a camera store in Harvard Square, to buy an Apple ][+ when they first came out, and then upgraded to an Apple //e a few years later at the Harvard Coop. Buying computers and accessories like floppy disks meant going to specialized, usually small retailers. Commodore saw an opportunity to market their very inexpensive VIC-20, and then Commodore 64, through a much broader range of stores. You started seeing VIC-20s at Toys R Us and other big chain stores. The mom & pop computer stores could not compete on price with the bigger stores, so they stopped selling Commodore machines. The Amiga was a serious computer when it came out, and it was too high end for toy stores, etc. to carry. With the bridges burned to the other distribution channels (at least in the US) the average shopper never saw an Amiga on the shelf. Mind you, this was still in an era when Texas Instruments was selling the TI-99/4A and Atari was selling the 400 and 800, so there were other options on the shelves.

ekianjo 9y ago

To fully understand why the Amiga was great for his time, a good introduction is the book "the future was here".

AndrewStephens 9y ago

The Amiga hit the home computer market like a bomb. For a few years there was nothing quite like it on the market at a price that people could actually afford. It was never that big in the USA but overseas it had a huge impact, bridging the gap between games machines and real computers. I saved up several years of teenage-dollars to buy one when I was 15 and never looked back. Of particular interest to me was the excellent-for-the-time audio chip. I spent many hours making MODs and games for my friends to play. Later, I taught myself C and never looked back. A sample of the sorts of things a teenager could do in 1991 : https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.html https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.htm...

IronWolve 9y ago

AmiTCP is what got me into being a sysadmin. I was a teenager using slurp and amitcp to get my amiga online the Internet. Learning about TCP and configuration files got me into setting up servers. I started working at an ISP setting up BSD servers for web/ftp/mail/ppp/radius. I've been online on my c64/128D with 300/1200 then finally a 2400 baud modem, then went Amiga 500 and got that Amiga on my local ISP. But after I started working at an ISP, it was AMD 486/DX100 and was PC since then . with tons of Amiga Emulators and linux boxes I still sit in an Amiga IRC channel till this day, and still idle on efnet. Amusing story, an old buddy and co-worker I met on IRC, I got him a job at my work, known him for years, he moved to Finland years ago so he could go to all the demo scenes, and now he is a judge on many of them. Shout out to Sir Garbage Truck and Accession!