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What makes Amiga more nostalgic than other systems? An Amiga 500 was my first computer, I learned Turbo Pascal and played Defenders of the Crown To me, it was

What makes Amiga more nostalgic than other systems? An Amiga 500 was my first computer, I learned Turbo Pascal and played Defenders of the Crown To me, it was the only computer I've owned that had personality, which I can't completely describe what that means, but no other computer has felt like my Amiga.

cryptonector 8y ago
It was flat out superior to everything else that was on the market at that time, and in many ways. And it failed. Bad leadership, bad brand / lack of rebranding ("Amiga??" "Commodore is for gaming, not for business!"). It made for justified fanboys who got disappointed and had to settle for the garbage that all other PCs were relative to Amiga. It had superior: - graphics hardware, including the copper and the blitter - OS - HW extensibility - performance Commodore even did the first SVR4 port to a production system outside AT&T, and had brilliant people. The Amiga outpaced all other PCs (x86 DOS/OS/2/Windows and Mac) for half a decade, and was a fantastic gaming platform for its time.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  > the first SVR4 port to a production system outside AT&T That was so complete that Sun tried quite hard to licence the 3000UX as an entry level Sun workstation. Commodore couldn't/wouldn't agree licencing. Which rather sums things up.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    I didn't know this. Fascinating!
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
To add to what cryptonector says, it was unimaginable and leagues ahead of everything else that wasn't £5k+ or a Unix workstation. What were the choices? C64 and Spectrum were yesterday's news. PC's were 4 colour CGA or EGA if spending a fortune, could go "beep", and ran DOS or Windows 3 that supposedly multi tasked but in reality could background print or crash, yet cost loads. Mac's were single colour and oh so expensive. The ST was a quick cheap hack solely to ruin the Amiga's day after Atari failed to buy (rip-off) the Amiga. It had midi which meant it found a significant niche. Amiga had prioritisable pre-emptive multi tasking that actually worked, and multi colours. It compared with workstations Even AmigaDOS that took a lot of flak was better than the others as it felt rather like Unix lite to use. Porting most unix command line and terminal apps was pretty trivial. Most of the ideas were innovative; dozens of DMA channels, copper and blitter as co-processors with their own memory access, autoconfig that worked. Ten years later Windows 95 came out with plug and pray to finally end the pissing about with jumpers, shared interrupts and bios config. Wasn't as good as Autoconfig, nor anything like as reliable. Workbench and Intuition were easily the best designed API of any of the OS's. Code sizes were tiny thanks to shared libraries. I remember when I had to switch to PC - one package I ran came on something like 15 or more Windows floppies. The Amiga version had come on 2, yet did more. The second disk was example files. It was the same when I tried my first GUI hello world under windows - why is this 50k when the amiga version, that had the same resizeable window, icons and such, was something under 1k? Why do I have to write all this glue code to do things the OS should be doing? There was a Unix-like inclination to open standards and data sharing - IFF (jointly with EA of all people!), datatypes, Arexx. There was a Mac-like inclination to better hardware - HDDs and CDs were SCSI, avoid impacting the processor etc. Commodore didn't know what to do with it and ended up marketing as a second rate console/games machine, cost cutting and delaying the next machines, and they had an asshole for CEO who was bleeding the company dry. The demo scene probably made more sales than C=. It should have obliterated Microsoft and PCs as on every significant point it was comparing a Mercedes with a Trabant. The Byte and PCW reviews on its 85 release felt similarly. I imagine early Mac owners feel similar, for different but equally justified reasons. It's hard not to be nostalgic or feel there was a huge missed opportunity to build the future on a better foundation.

cryptonector 8y ago

It was flat out superior to everything else that was on the market at that time, and in many ways. And it failed. Bad leadership, bad brand / lack of rebranding ("Amiga??" "Commodore is for gaming, not for business!"). It made for justified fanboys who got disappointed and had to settle for the garbage that all other PCs were relative to Amiga. It had superior: - graphics hardware, including the copper and the blitter - OS - HW extensibility - performance Commodore even did the first SVR4 port to a production system outside AT&T, and had brilliant people. The Amiga outpaced all other PCs (x86 DOS/OS/2/Windows and Mac) for half a decade, and was a fantastic gaming platform for its time.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> the first SVR4 port to a production system outside AT&T That was so complete that Sun tried quite hard to licence the 3000UX as an entry level Sun workstation. Commodore couldn't/wouldn't agree licencing. Which rather sums things up.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  I didn't know this. Fascinating!

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

To add to what cryptonector says, it was unimaginable and leagues ahead of everything else that wasn't £5k+ or a Unix workstation. What were the choices? C64 and Spectrum were yesterday's news. PC's were 4 colour CGA or EGA if spending a fortune, could go "beep", and ran DOS or Windows 3 that supposedly multi tasked but in reality could background print or crash, yet cost loads. Mac's were single colour and oh so expensive. The ST was a quick cheap hack solely to ruin the Amiga's day after Atari failed to buy (rip-off) the Amiga. It had midi which meant it found a significant niche. Amiga had prioritisable pre-emptive multi tasking that actually worked, and multi colours. It compared with workstations Even AmigaDOS that took a lot of flak was better than the others as it felt rather like Unix lite to use. Porting most unix command line and terminal apps was pretty trivial. Most of the ideas were innovative; dozens of DMA channels, copper and blitter as co-processors with their own memory access, autoconfig that worked. Ten years later Windows 95 came out with plug and pray to finally end the pissing about with jumpers, shared interrupts and bios config. Wasn't as good as Autoconfig, nor anything like as reliable. Workbench and Intuition were easily the best designed API of any of the OS's. Code sizes were tiny thanks to shared libraries. I remember when I had to switch to PC - one package I ran came on something like 15 or more Windows floppies. The Amiga version had come on 2, yet did more. The second disk was example files. It was the same when I tried my first GUI hello world under windows - why is this 50k when the amiga version, that had the same resizeable window, icons and such, was something under 1k? Why do I have to write all this glue code to do things the OS should be doing? There was a Unix-like inclination to open standards and data sharing - IFF (jointly with EA of all people!), datatypes, Arexx. There was a Mac-like inclination to better hardware - HDDs and CDs were SCSI, avoid impacting the processor etc. Commodore didn't know what to do with it and ended up marketing as a second rate console/games machine, cost cutting and delaying the next machines, and they had an asshole for CEO who was bleeding the company dry. The demo scene probably made more sales than C=. It should have obliterated Microsoft and PCs as on every significant point it was comparing a Mercedes with a Trabant. The Byte and PCW reviews on its 85 release felt similarly. I imagine early Mac owners feel similar, for different but equally justified reasons. It's hard not to be nostalgic or feel there was a huge missed opportunity to build the future on a better foundation.