4 ms·

Wow, I'll have to add this to my set of "how can I show people, especially my Apple zealot friends who obsess about the original Mac 128k, just how advanced the

Wow, I'll have to add this to my set of "how can I show people, especially my Apple zealot friends who obsess about the original Mac 128k, just how advanced the Amiga was" videos. This video, is one of my favorites (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs), it shows just how advanced the Amiga was in 1985, let alone after 1987 when the 2000 was introduced. I learned to code on a Vic-20 and C64 (basic and assembly), but the Amiga was my first exposure to C, and LaTeX, and 3D modeling / video editing. I grew up relatively poor in Baltimore City, and this was an astonishing amount of capability for something so affordable. (I also learned soldering because I only had 512k of chip ram on my A500, and Commodore's official RAM upgrade was too expensive, so I bought my own RAM chips and soldered them directly to the mainboard) I have an unlimited amount of nostalgia for this machine (and Babylon-5!)

jacobush 8y ago
You are my soulmate.
spullara 8y ago
Literally the same progression as me.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  If you're interested in C64 stuff, here's a video I made of some old C64 intros I wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aViXXbUg_yU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aViXXbUg_yU
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Nice nostalgia trip you linked, only missing Super Hang On really - so close to the arcade, awful on every other platform. XCopy. whistles innocently
- cromwellian 8y ago
  I was addicted to Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe for awhile. But truly, one of the greatest early games was Fairy Tale Adventure which came out in 1987. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_4DhXWdwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_4DhXWdwo
  - sys_64738 8y ago
    Ice cream! Ice cream!
    - cromwellian 8y ago
      I love your handle, I immediately recognized it, 30 years later, C64 kernel and i/o addresses still burnt into my memory.
cromwellian 8y ago
This is another one of my favorites, the JobsNote-like launch of the Amiga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8 Compare this to the 1984 launch of the Mac which cost $2485 MSRP, all of these capabilities came for only $1285 ($1595 with monitor), or the A500 ($699 MSRP) As you can tell, I'm still bitter and annoyed at how Commodore mismanaged and squandered the marketing and sales of this machine. The Amiga was so advanced, it wasn't until PCs arrived with SuperVGA cards and SoundBlaster audio that I was enticed to leave the Amiga platform. The Mac128k at school seemed like a toy in comparison to my Amiga and what it could do, but somehow all of the media attention was on it. It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  > It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared Commodore had no clue what to do with it. It's like Apple launched iPhone, then Jobs spent the rest of the marketing budget on a yacht then told engineering to make everything cheaper. Eventually Gould and Ali were on 3x what the CEO of IBM got in the same years. Tucked away somewhere, I still have the 1985 issue of UK's PCW (the serious magazine, comparable to Byte) when the A1000 was first reviewed. Something like 15 pages of glowing praise and how nothing else is in the same universe, it'll change the world, etc. They barely touched an Amiga ever again.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    I remember an interview with Jean-Louis Gassée that mentioned after he'd been fired from Apple but before he'd gone on to start Be Inc., Gould actually approached him to lead Commodore before he hired Ali. Gassée said he'd only do it if he got a guarantee of non-interference for a specific amount of time (three years, maybe), and Gould wouldn't go for it. I don't know how that would have changed things -- Be came to a sad end itself, after all. But it's hard not to wonder.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  I used AMAX II with my Amiga 500 to run Mac programs while at College. That was an example of how brilliant it was given the native speed of the Mac under emulation. The Amiga platform is an era which I wouldn't trade for anything. I feel sad for people who didn't have the opportunity to experience and live it first hand.
tambourine_man 8y ago
The Amiga was years ahead. When I saw the Debbie Harry portrait by Andy Warhol I was mesmerized. But the thing about the original Mac, to me at least, was the finesse, good taste, personality and coherence of the whole thing. I didn’t have that feeling again until I saw BeOS and later the original iPhone.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  True to some extent, but it also was crippled by low RAM, a tiny screen, bad performance. The Amiga lacked coherence, but Amiga applications and games could do so much more with the exception of perhaps DTP (but a LaserWriter was out of the price range of most people) Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) I did DTP on the Amiga, for example, by using LaTeX to do all of my work in college, produce postscript files with dvi2ps and then taking the files to my college lab and printing them on expensive printers. A $500 Amiga was producing reports with AMSTeX or LaTeX that looked like they were professionally typeset by a $5000 Mac setup (in 2018 dollars)
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    >Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) Sure they did. The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. It wasn’t supposed to be hackable, like the Apple II, which was a hackers dream machine. I only take issue with the “creative” part of your comment.
    - cromwellian 8y ago
      The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". In terms of 2018 dollars, it cost about $6000 without a LaserWriter. Very few people could afford one, no matter how easy it was to use, which is why the Commodore 64 and Apple 2 far outsold it. 17 million Commodore 64's were sold. About 5 million Amigas. These were mostly sold to consumers, not schools. Sales for the original Mac128/Plus/SE/512 are hard to come buy, but looking at yearly estimates (about 70k Mac128k sold in 1984, and about 3x that every year after), the Mac never had any significant installed base of ordinary home users compared to the 8-bit or 16-bit competitors.
Torwald 8y ago
Don't forget to talk about preemptive multitasking.
icelancer 8y ago
FLATLINE by Ahoy is a must-watch about the Amiga's start and how it languished due to poor business decisions and bad luck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ

jacobush 8y ago

You are my soulmate.

spullara 8y ago

Literally the same progression as me.

cromwellian 8y ago
If you're interested in C64 stuff, here's a video I made of some old C64 intros I wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aViXXbUg_yU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aViXXbUg_yU

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Nice nostalgia trip you linked, only missing Super Hang On really - so close to the arcade, awful on every other platform. XCopy. whistles innocently

cromwellian 8y ago
I was addicted to Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe for awhile. But truly, one of the greatest early games was Fairy Tale Adventure which came out in 1987. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_4DhXWdwo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_4DhXWdwo
- sys_64738 8y ago
  Ice cream! Ice cream!
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    I love your handle, I immediately recognized it, 30 years later, C64 kernel and i/o addresses still burnt into my memory.

cromwellian 8y ago

This is another one of my favorites, the JobsNote-like launch of the Amiga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8 Compare this to the 1984 launch of the Mac which cost $2485 MSRP, all of these capabilities came for only $1285 ($1595 with monitor), or the A500 ($699 MSRP) As you can tell, I'm still bitter and annoyed at how Commodore mismanaged and squandered the marketing and sales of this machine. The Amiga was so advanced, it wasn't until PCs arrived with SuperVGA cards and SoundBlaster audio that I was enticed to leave the Amiga platform. The Mac128k at school seemed like a toy in comparison to my Amiga and what it could do, but somehow all of the media attention was on it. It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared Commodore had no clue what to do with it. It's like Apple launched iPhone, then Jobs spent the rest of the marketing budget on a yacht then told engineering to make everything cheaper. Eventually Gould and Ali were on 3x what the CEO of IBM got in the same years. Tucked away somewhere, I still have the 1985 issue of UK's PCW (the serious magazine, comparable to Byte) when the A1000 was first reviewed. Something like 15 pages of glowing praise and how nothing else is in the same universe, it'll change the world, etc. They barely touched an Amiga ever again.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  I remember an interview with Jean-Louis Gassée that mentioned after he'd been fired from Apple but before he'd gone on to start Be Inc., Gould actually approached him to lead Commodore before he hired Ali. Gassée said he'd only do it if he got a guarantee of non-interference for a specific amount of time (three years, maybe), and Gould wouldn't go for it. I don't know how that would have changed things -- Be came to a sad end itself, after all. But it's hard not to wonder.
sys_64738 8y ago
I used AMAX II with my Amiga 500 to run Mac programs while at College. That was an example of how brilliant it was given the native speed of the Mac under emulation. The Amiga platform is an era which I wouldn't trade for anything. I feel sad for people who didn't have the opportunity to experience and live it first hand.

tambourine_man 8y ago

The Amiga was years ahead. When I saw the Debbie Harry portrait by Andy Warhol I was mesmerized. But the thing about the original Mac, to me at least, was the finesse, good taste, personality and coherence of the whole thing. I didn’t have that feeling again until I saw BeOS and later the original iPhone.

cromwellian 8y ago
True to some extent, but it also was crippled by low RAM, a tiny screen, bad performance. The Amiga lacked coherence, but Amiga applications and games could do so much more with the exception of perhaps DTP (but a LaserWriter was out of the price range of most people) Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) I did DTP on the Amiga, for example, by using LaTeX to do all of my work in college, produce postscript files with dvi2ps and then taking the files to my college lab and printing them on expensive printers. A $500 Amiga was producing reports with AMSTeX or LaTeX that looked like they were professionally typeset by a $5000 Mac setup (in 2018 dollars)
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  >Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!) Sure they did. The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. It wasn’t supposed to be hackable, like the Apple II, which was a hackers dream machine. I only take issue with the “creative” part of your comment.
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". In terms of 2018 dollars, it cost about $6000 without a LaserWriter. Very few people could afford one, no matter how easy it was to use, which is why the Commodore 64 and Apple 2 far outsold it. 17 million Commodore 64's were sold. About 5 million Amigas. These were mostly sold to consumers, not schools. Sales for the original Mac128/Plus/SE/512 are hard to come buy, but looking at yearly estimates (about 70k Mac128k sold in 1984, and about 3x that every year after), the Mac never had any significant installed base of ordinary home users compared to the 8-bit or 16-bit competitors.

Torwald 8y ago

Don't forget to talk about preemptive multitasking.

icelancer 8y ago

FLATLINE by Ahoy is a must-watch about the Amiga's start and how it languished due to poor business decisions and bad luck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ