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Could have been a case of designing a platform around the hardware in the early 90s, then being desperate for parts to keep the platform going while designing t

Could have been a case of designing a platform around the hardware in the early 90s, then being desperate for parts to keep the platform going while designing the upgrade.

vidarh 5y ago
Maybe, in which case it'd likely still be something video-oriented. The Amiga was never particularly fast in terms of raw number-crunching. As a desktop computer it felt fast because of the pre-emptive multitasking and the custom chips and the use of SCSI instead of IDE. Even the keyboard had it's own CPU (a 6502-compatible SOC) on some of the models - "everything" was offloaded from the main CPU, and so until PCs started getting GPUs etc. it didn't matter that much that Motorola from pretty early on was struggling to keep up with the x86 advances. But for video it had two major things going for it: Genlock, allowing cheap passthrough of a video signal and overlaying Amiga graphics on top of the video, and products like the Video Toaster that was initially built around the Amiga. So you could see Amiga's pop up in video context may years after they were otherwise becoming obsolete because of that.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  Yeah, I had a friend in the late 90s that used an Amiga with Genlock to fansub anime. I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA had some generic media rack kit or whatever that did something similar. People also kept Amigas going past their prime for apps like Deluxe Paint.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  Hell even in the early aughts you would still see video toasters in use at small local television stations until they were finally killed by HD.
- zerohp 5y ago
  Amiga's were used for a lot of weird video things like touch-screen video kiosks. Genlock a serial controlled laser disc player to the Amiga and put it in a cabinet with a serial port touch screen. A PC could certainly replace it by 2000 but if you developed your content in the mid-1980's then Amiga was probably your solution and you needed to keep it going for a while.
- mst 5y ago
  It seems entirely plausible to me that three letter agencies could also have done render farm type things like this: http://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/ http://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-a... (I think this is a subset of your comment rather than an extension but Babylon 5 reference ;)
  - vidarh 5y ago
    That'd be Video Toasters. But Newtek ditched Amiga support in '95, and by late 90's PCs or DEC Alphas would cream the Amigas for the render farms. Even Babylon 5 switched the render farms for seasons 4 and 5. Not impossible someone would still want to replace individual systems in a render farm rather than upgrading, but given the potential speed gains it'd seem like a poor choice.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
More likely they needed to develop exploits for Amiga driven SCADA systems.

Could have been a case of designing a platform around the hardware in the early 90s, then being desperate for parts to keep the platform going while designing the upgrade.

vidarh 5y ago

Maybe, in which case it'd likely still be something video-oriented. The Amiga was never particularly fast in terms of raw number-crunching. As a desktop computer it felt fast because of the pre-emptive multitasking and the custom chips and the use of SCSI instead of IDE. Even the keyboard had it's own CPU (a 6502-compatible SOC) on some of the models - "everything" was offloaded from the main CPU, and so until PCs started getting GPUs etc. it didn't matter that much that Motorola from pretty early on was struggling to keep up with the x86 advances. But for video it had two major things going for it: Genlock, allowing cheap passthrough of a video signal and overlaying Amiga graphics on top of the video, and products like the Video Toaster that was initially built around the Amiga. So you could see Amiga's pop up in video context may years after they were otherwise becoming obsolete because of that.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
Yeah, I had a friend in the late 90s that used an Amiga with Genlock to fansub anime. I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA had some generic media rack kit or whatever that did something similar. People also kept Amigas going past their prime for apps like Deluxe Paint.
sleepybrett 5y ago
Hell even in the early aughts you would still see video toasters in use at small local television stations until they were finally killed by HD.
zerohp 5y ago
Amiga's were used for a lot of weird video things like touch-screen video kiosks. Genlock a serial controlled laser disc player to the Amiga and put it in a cabinet with a serial port touch screen. A PC could certainly replace it by 2000 but if you developed your content in the mid-1980's then Amiga was probably your solution and you needed to keep it going for a while.
mst 5y ago
It seems entirely plausible to me that three letter agencies could also have done render farm type things like this: http://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/ http://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-a... (I think this is a subset of your comment rather than an extension but Babylon 5 reference ;)
- vidarh 5y ago
  That'd be Video Toasters. But Newtek ditched Amiga support in '95, and by late 90's PCs or DEC Alphas would cream the Amigas for the render farms. Even Babylon 5 switched the render farms for seasons 4 and 5. Not impossible someone would still want to replace individual systems in a render farm rather than upgrading, but given the potential speed gains it'd seem like a poor choice.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

More likely they needed to develop exploits for Amiga driven SCADA systems.