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The Amiga was definitely a big factor. For one it was a “cathedral”, not a “bazaar” in the sense that it had more or less the same hardware on all models. The
by mjul 6y ago
The Amiga was definitely a big factor.
For one it was a “cathedral”, not a “bazaar” in the sense that it had more or less the same hardware on all models.
The hardware was nicely balanced: small enough that you could learn it all, yet complex enough to keep tweaking and pushing its limits for a long time.
It also had a long life, so you could get really good at it. People were using their 500s from the 80s well into the 90es.
Contrast with his to PCs where there was a plethora of different hardware components for CPU models, graphics and sound - a “bazaar”.
At the early stages the standardised Amiga was just much easier for the devs.
Later the PCs became so powerful that the energy moved there anyway - but I still remember the shock of the terribly messy instruction set on the PCs after switching from the nice and clean 68k.
For me personally that was when I stopped. It was simply not joyful to work with.
- chihuahua 6y agoThat's funny, I had the same reaction to the difference between the 68k and 80286 instruction sets. I enjoyed writing 68k assembly on an Amiga 1000. Then (around 1990) I got a 286 PC and looked at an assembly language book in a bookstore. I put the book back on the shelf and thought "this is horrible, I don't want to deal with this mess". I thought it was just me.
- vidarh 6y agoSimilar story here. I actively opted for M68k assembly over higher level languages on more than one occasion. Then I switched to Linux on a PC, took one look at x86 assembly and didn't touch assembly again for many years.
- vidarh 6y agoThe demo scene was big on 8-bit machines "long" (by 1980's home-computing time scales) before the Amiga became a big factor.
- anthk 6y agoI remember people still running Amigas and software for it (MPEG1 video players, Winamp clones, NES emulators...) in 1999.