7 ms·

The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. One company cannot

The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. One company cannot out-innovate thousands for long-- so everything the Amiga could do in 1985, the PC could do better by 1987 with ISA cards from thousands of different manufacturers. HAM in 1985 was great. VGA in 1987 was better. 2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great. SoundBlaster CMS in 1987 wasn't better, but it didn't take long before 16-bit audio hit the PC. Video overlay with the A2000 was great, and carved out a niche in AV production for decades. But again, VGA was better, ubiquitous GUI accelerators like the Mach32 made windows fly so fast the Amiga could only dream, and frankensteining accelerators into a closed "complete" system was not the answer people were looking for. Hell I had, and still have, my A2000 and remember the torturous pain of upgrading the video in it, with some apps that would only display on the built-in video because the add-in cards couldn't support the native graphics some apps that would work on both until you dropped in the accelerator file thingy and then they would only work on the add-in card, motherboard ram/chip ram/fast ram/expansion card ram/CPU accelerator RAM all of which could lead to incompatibilities or performance gotchas. Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. I installed a Picasso video card and performance worsened because I had paid for the then-astronomical 8MB "fast" RAM upgrade and whoops! video cards only worked with up to 6MB of fast ram and any configurations with more had to use segmented RAM which tanked performance. Some programs would only work with the Picasso drivers, some with the cybergraphics drivers, and others still with only EGS drivers. At almost the exact time this article came out I moved to PC, got to play Doom, and the rest was history.

actionfromafar 3y ago
Yet, Apple.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Apple appeals to a totally different customer. They want something that they’d needn’t fuss with. The other Apple customer is the developer who’s forced into ownership so that he/she can sell to that first Apple customer. Edit: until this became the Apple way, Apple was on life support and headed for hospice. The market chose the appliance like computer and explicitly rejected tinkering.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  Apple had System 7. AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7. Besides, in the early 90s when Amiga was dying Apple was also dying. They only survived because of extremely high-end desktop publishing and educational users buying IIfx's, Quadra 950s, and PowerMac 8100s, the fact that Apple moved to PowerPC (two months before this article was published) while Amiga was releasing the 4000T with a 68040, and their extremely desirable laptops. People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price. And then they became UNIX workstations.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy Arguably true of PowerPC Macintoshes, but for quite some time the fastest m68k Macintosh you could buy was an Amiga running a Macintosh emulator.
    - snakeyjake 3y ago
      I too subscribed to Amiga World and remember that article. That was only true for a very brief period of time with Amigas using the 68060, which they never came from the factory with. I and, judging by their price on Amibay today, very few other people ever owned or used or even saw a 68060 accelerator card. At the time I could barely afford the 030 accelerator for my A2000 and could sell it today for the price of a 4090. Hmm......
      - erickhill 3y ago
        I have an Amiga 1000 with an expansion package called A-Max. This allows my Amiga to use a real external Macintosh floppy drive. But it also allows me to use a separate partition on the A1K's internal hard drive where I've installed System 6. A-Max allows me to have what would essentially be a Macintosh Plus with crazy stats for the times, including a mild accelerator. The little thing flies. Two computers in one! Since most software except certain Mac games (cough!) ever hit the Mac custom chips, virtually everything I throw at it works flawlessly. MS Word, Mac Draw, Hypercard, Quarterstaff... It's pretty cool.
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  “the Macintosh-Microsoft monopoly” very funny statement circa 1994… just three years before the infamous “Pray” issue of Wired. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ I've always been kind of amazed by nostalgia for the Amiga. I was a young computer user in this era, and — despite having heard of the apparent media superiority of the Amiga — had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. I felt like more people claimed to have portals to Narnia in their closets than had Amigas.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    > had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. Are you in the US maybe? Most of the Amiga market was in Europe (though here too it varied greatly by country). In my school classes alone there were several Amiga owners. In the US Tramiel managed to burn Commodore's computer shop dealer network to the ground with his pricing shenanigans and deal with Kmart to bypass computer stores for the Commodore 64. As a result, when the Amiga was too expensive to sell well in budget outlets, Commodore US basically had to rebuild their dealer network from the ashes that Tramiel left on the way to buy Atari. Meanwhile, in Europe, most Commodore subsidiaries grasped the opportunity to push the Amiga as a games machine starting with the Amiga 500, while Commodore US kept pushing it as a professional machine. You see this difference very clearly in the computer press - where the US Amiga magazines are all serious, while e.g. in the UK the most famous Amiga tie-in was a package with game for the 1989 Batman movie[1]. While many of us also used it for non-gaming stuff, it was games that sustained the bulk of Amiga sales, to the point of e.g. putting Commodore UK in a position where they considered a management buyout of Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt... [1] https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commodore/recreated/packaging/2022/09/03/amiga-500-batman-pack.html https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commod...
- vidarh 3y ago
  Apple was the antithesis of Commodore in those days: Aiming for the high-end market (post-Tramiel Commodore US tried that; the rest of Commodore focused on the low end, the Tramiel had from the start[1], with some exceptions - Commodore Germany did well in the business market - and the non-US subsidiaries sold far more Amigas that way), and focusing on far simpler hardware designs, and on selling into businesses and education. And they too just barely survived. To the point that there was widespread talk of bankruptcy for several years. And there was that infamous cash injection from Microsoft. There was also their brief flirtation with allowing clones. At the same time Commodore was management-dysfunction central in a way that Apple, even with the Jobs ouster and return, never was (Commodore did oust its founder too - the aforementioned Tramiel -, but he bought their arch-rival - Atari - and went into head-to-head competition in their most lucrative markets instead of eventually returning). [1] Tramiel's slogan in the early days of Commodore's entry into the home-computer market was "computers for the masses, not the classes".
unwind 3y ago
Nit: it was 4x 8-bit audio channels, of course.
zozbot234 3y ago
The Amiga was built to be a gaming console. How many gaming consoles take custom video cards?
- tom_ 3y ago
  How many gaming consoles have a keyboard and a mouse and (as was much commented upon at the time) a multitasking GUI OS?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The original Amiga design had none of those. All of those were added at a point where the game machine market had collapsed and Amiga was running out of money and/or the final pieces after Commodore had snatched them up. AmigaOS "famously" (to Amiga users) has weird inconsistencies because Commodore last minute had to license a BCPL based system to add the AmigaDOS subsystem which is inconsistent with every other part of the OS, for example, because the original system didn't have filesystems and the like in a working order and the company meant to provide it failed to do so. And so we were grumbling about having to deal with BCPL style "BPTR" pointers (had to be shifted to be dereferenced) for no good reason for years afterward.
- Lerc 3y ago
  Yet the Zorro II and III busses were quite advanced for their time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
- empressplay 3y ago
  The 500 was developed to compete in the 'desktop gaming' market but the original 1000 was designed as a productivity machine to compete with the Macintosh. Later 'expandable' Amigas were similarly targeted towards graphics professionals. The Amiga models targeted toward consumer gaming did not AFAIK have the ability to add a video card, being in the more classic integrated keyboard form factor.
  - vidarh 3y ago
wslh 3y ago
My memory is very different about the timing. Not saying that your claim of sustaining innovation is not very complex. I remember that Microsoft continued with DOS for long and Windows <= 3.x (and a bit later too) was [quasi] just an UI on top of DOS. My main explanation in 2024 is that Microsoft is Microsoft, no matter what they sell. Microsoft is a business machine like nobody have seen before, they fail at zillions of projects and acquisitions but they continue to exist and growth! Think that Apple found their way very late on so business wise Commodore was doomed, it is not about the hardware. I remember in the late 80s joking to my friends spending money on a Sound Blaster and a CGA... VGA.... SuperVGA. I developed in assembler for the 68x line and just after I learnt some x86 I couldn't believe you need to know about offsets for pointers. But Microsoft is Microsoft and Intel was Intel. The 386 line changed everything. It is documented in the Andy Groove book. This is not personal with your comment but I think several times in HN the community doesn't understand the complexity about going to market and touching the really complex business reality. This goes far from using fancy programming languages, frameworks, etc. Even receiving huge investments.
- tom_ 3y ago
  In my view it is entirely about the hardware. By the time the Amiga 1200 came out, PC makers could sell you a 33 MHz 486 with <10 cycle multiply, and VESA graphics card with convenient 1 byte/pixel graphics memory arrangement. Against this, muh blitter and HAM and dual playfield mode means nothing. Your dad's bitplane games might be smoother on the Amiga, meanwhile Wing Commander looks like nothing you have ever seen before and let's not even get on to Wolfenstein 3D. (As a kindness to Amiga fans, I am not even going to mention Doom or Syndicate.) The PC games ended up better, and RIP Amiga.
  - wslh 3y ago
    I am not saying that there was not a breaking point but I say that Amiga had enough time and its demise was not inevitable. This was much before Doom. As it is say in the thread they could see themselves as a game console and market that. Nintendo Switch is worse than PS5 but they remain in the market and they started selling game cards. May be Commodore needed a Mario and a Donkey Kong. I think the three coprocessors in the Amiga were a breakthrough before intel included the FPU. This is why I return to the business execution part. And also Commodore was confronting Microsoft and Intel directly. I also felt that Commodore was a good replacement for the Mac, it has WYSIWYG word processor, 3D software, etc.
vidarh 3y ago
> The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. Amiga wouldn't have existed, or mattered, in the first place without all of those whiz-bang chips in them, and wouldn't have survived the years it did without them even if some irrelevant version had happened without them. But that never would have happened to start with - Amiga, the company, was formed around the ideas of building a gaming system. Looking at the history of Commodore, it's also not at all clear that this was the issue - Commodore was a deeply dysfunctional company, and had been for many years before they even bought Amiga, with extensive problems around underfunding R&D, but then randomly yanking projects and lacking product direction. It became an issue certainly, because it meant that the dysfunction of Commodore was sufficient to kill the whole platform - a risk the PC hardware avoided thanks to clones, and the OS/hardware split of the PC platform avoided because even MS stumbling would've "just" have led to another OS winning out. But without the features of the chipset, nobody would have cared. It was almost only in the US the Amiga was seen predominantly as a "professional" machine that sold as a competitor to PCs in the early years, and it wasn't in the US Amiga sold. The bulk of the Amiga market was in Europe, especially the UK and Germany. Germany also did have a more professional market for the Amiga as well - with e.g. the A2000 being driven by demand from Commodore's Germany subsidiary, but not as the only thing. To such an extent that after Commodore International failed, the Commodore UK management tried to finance a buyout of its own parent company, and kept operating for as long as they could still scrounge up stock. [This US situation was created in large part because Tramiel, before he was fired and bought Atari, had seriously destroyed Commodore's US more 'serious' dealer market with price cuts without preparing the dealers followed by putting Commodore 64's in Kmart, and so when the Amiga was launched Commodore struggled to get sufficient distribution in outlets that could handle a much more expensive machine] > Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. This is very different from how I remember things. People were mocking the PC well after Commodore went bankrupt for how PC users had to muck around with drivers and weird command line settings while on the Amiga you just dropped driver in, and had cards that supported AutoConfig [1], which meant we would laugh at PC users whenever they mentioned IRQ's because all of that nonsense was automatic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
leptons 3y ago
>2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great Amiga had 14 bit audio. No matter the audio, or the graphics capabilities, the Amiga still had a vastly superior operating system. AREXX was far, far ahead of its time. The multitasking was ahead of its time. Those are the things that kept me on Amiga for so long. No other computing platform really compared in the ways that Amiga really shined.
pjmlp 3y ago
And yet not only are modern computers special snowflakes, with exception of the desktop market only alive due to custom hardware used for AAA games on esports, we get whiz-bang chips on all of them. The only difference is that instead of Assembly and DMA configurations, we now use whiz-bang chips vendor specific APIs. Commodore and Amiga went down due to bad management. PC weren't much better unless people were willing to buy whiz-bang sounds cards from Creative Labs or AdLib, while coding for VESA cards wasn't much better without a wrapper library, as contrary to the previous BIOS standards, using Super VGA required drivers from the card vendor. Naturally not a problem for Windows 3.x games, but not everyone was that keen in adopting WinG from Microsoft.

actionfromafar 3y ago

Yet, Apple.

BirAdam 3y ago
Apple appeals to a totally different customer. They want something that they’d needn’t fuss with. The other Apple customer is the developer who’s forced into ownership so that he/she can sell to that first Apple customer. Edit: until this became the Apple way, Apple was on life support and headed for hospice. The market chose the appliance like computer and explicitly rejected tinkering.
snakeyjake 3y ago
Apple had System 7. AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7. Besides, in the early 90s when Amiga was dying Apple was also dying. They only survived because of extremely high-end desktop publishing and educational users buying IIfx's, Quadra 950s, and PowerMac 8100s, the fact that Apple moved to PowerPC (two months before this article was published) while Amiga was releasing the 4000T with a 68040, and their extremely desirable laptops. People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price. And then they became UNIX workstations.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy Arguably true of PowerPC Macintoshes, but for quite some time the fastest m68k Macintosh you could buy was an Amiga running a Macintosh emulator.
  - snakeyjake 3y ago
    I too subscribed to Amiga World and remember that article. That was only true for a very brief period of time with Amigas using the 68060, which they never came from the factory with. I and, judging by their price on Amibay today, very few other people ever owned or used or even saw a 68060 accelerator card. At the time I could barely afford the 030 accelerator for my A2000 and could sell it today for the price of a 4090. Hmm......
    - erickhill 3y ago
      I have an Amiga 1000 with an expansion package called A-Max. This allows my Amiga to use a real external Macintosh floppy drive. But it also allows me to use a separate partition on the A1K's internal hard drive where I've installed System 6. A-Max allows me to have what would essentially be a Macintosh Plus with crazy stats for the times, including a mild accelerator. The little thing flies. Two computers in one! Since most software except certain Mac games (cough!) ever hit the Mac custom chips, virtually everything I throw at it works flawlessly. MS Word, Mac Draw, Hypercard, Quarterstaff... It's pretty cool.
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
“the Macintosh-Microsoft monopoly” very funny statement circa 1994… just three years before the infamous “Pray” issue of Wired. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ I've always been kind of amazed by nostalgia for the Amiga. I was a young computer user in this era, and — despite having heard of the apparent media superiority of the Amiga — had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. I felt like more people claimed to have portals to Narnia in their closets than had Amigas.
- vidarh 3y ago
  > had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. Are you in the US maybe? Most of the Amiga market was in Europe (though here too it varied greatly by country). In my school classes alone there were several Amiga owners. In the US Tramiel managed to burn Commodore's computer shop dealer network to the ground with his pricing shenanigans and deal with Kmart to bypass computer stores for the Commodore 64. As a result, when the Amiga was too expensive to sell well in budget outlets, Commodore US basically had to rebuild their dealer network from the ashes that Tramiel left on the way to buy Atari. Meanwhile, in Europe, most Commodore subsidiaries grasped the opportunity to push the Amiga as a games machine starting with the Amiga 500, while Commodore US kept pushing it as a professional machine. You see this difference very clearly in the computer press - where the US Amiga magazines are all serious, while e.g. in the UK the most famous Amiga tie-in was a package with game for the 1989 Batman movie[1]. While many of us also used it for non-gaming stuff, it was games that sustained the bulk of Amiga sales, to the point of e.g. putting Commodore UK in a position where they considered a management buyout of Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt... [1] https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commodore/recreated/packaging/2022/09/03/amiga-500-batman-pack.html https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commod...
vidarh 3y ago
Apple was the antithesis of Commodore in those days: Aiming for the high-end market (post-Tramiel Commodore US tried that; the rest of Commodore focused on the low end, the Tramiel had from the start[1], with some exceptions - Commodore Germany did well in the business market - and the non-US subsidiaries sold far more Amigas that way), and focusing on far simpler hardware designs, and on selling into businesses and education. And they too just barely survived. To the point that there was widespread talk of bankruptcy for several years. And there was that infamous cash injection from Microsoft. There was also their brief flirtation with allowing clones. At the same time Commodore was management-dysfunction central in a way that Apple, even with the Jobs ouster and return, never was (Commodore did oust its founder too - the aforementioned Tramiel -, but he bought their arch-rival - Atari - and went into head-to-head competition in their most lucrative markets instead of eventually returning). [1] Tramiel's slogan in the early days of Commodore's entry into the home-computer market was "computers for the masses, not the classes".

unwind 3y ago

Nit: it was 4x 8-bit audio channels, of course.

zozbot234 3y ago

The Amiga was built to be a gaming console. How many gaming consoles take custom video cards?

tom_ 3y ago
How many gaming consoles have a keyboard and a mouse and (as was much commented upon at the time) a multitasking GUI OS?
- vidarh 3y ago
  The original Amiga design had none of those. All of those were added at a point where the game machine market had collapsed and Amiga was running out of money and/or the final pieces after Commodore had snatched them up. AmigaOS "famously" (to Amiga users) has weird inconsistencies because Commodore last minute had to license a BCPL based system to add the AmigaDOS subsystem which is inconsistent with every other part of the OS, for example, because the original system didn't have filesystems and the like in a working order and the company meant to provide it failed to do so. And so we were grumbling about having to deal with BCPL style "BPTR" pointers (had to be shifted to be dereferenced) for no good reason for years afterward.
Lerc 3y ago
Yet the Zorro II and III busses were quite advanced for their time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
empressplay 3y ago
The 500 was developed to compete in the 'desktop gaming' market but the original 1000 was designed as a productivity machine to compete with the Macintosh. Later 'expandable' Amigas were similarly targeted towards graphics professionals. The Amiga models targeted toward consumer gaming did not AFAIK have the ability to add a video card, being in the more classic integrated keyboard form factor.
- vidarh 3y ago

wslh 3y ago

My memory is very different about the timing. Not saying that your claim of sustaining innovation is not very complex. I remember that Microsoft continued with DOS for long and Windows <= 3.x (and a bit later too) was [quasi] just an UI on top of DOS. My main explanation in 2024 is that Microsoft is Microsoft, no matter what they sell. Microsoft is a business machine like nobody have seen before, they fail at zillions of projects and acquisitions but they continue to exist and growth! Think that Apple found their way very late on so business wise Commodore was doomed, it is not about the hardware. I remember in the late 80s joking to my friends spending money on a Sound Blaster and a CGA... VGA.... SuperVGA. I developed in assembler for the 68x line and just after I learnt some x86 I couldn't believe you need to know about offsets for pointers. But Microsoft is Microsoft and Intel was Intel. The 386 line changed everything. It is documented in the Andy Groove book. This is not personal with your comment but I think several times in HN the community doesn't understand the complexity about going to market and touching the really complex business reality. This goes far from using fancy programming languages, frameworks, etc. Even receiving huge investments.

tom_ 3y ago
In my view it is entirely about the hardware. By the time the Amiga 1200 came out, PC makers could sell you a 33 MHz 486 with <10 cycle multiply, and VESA graphics card with convenient 1 byte/pixel graphics memory arrangement. Against this, muh blitter and HAM and dual playfield mode means nothing. Your dad's bitplane games might be smoother on the Amiga, meanwhile Wing Commander looks like nothing you have ever seen before and let's not even get on to Wolfenstein 3D. (As a kindness to Amiga fans, I am not even going to mention Doom or Syndicate.) The PC games ended up better, and RIP Amiga.
- wslh 3y ago
  I am not saying that there was not a breaking point but I say that Amiga had enough time and its demise was not inevitable. This was much before Doom. As it is say in the thread they could see themselves as a game console and market that. Nintendo Switch is worse than PS5 but they remain in the market and they started selling game cards. May be Commodore needed a Mario and a Donkey Kong. I think the three coprocessors in the Amiga were a breakthrough before intel included the FPU. This is why I return to the business execution part. And also Commodore was confronting Microsoft and Intel directly. I also felt that Commodore was a good replacement for the Mac, it has WYSIWYG word processor, 3D software, etc.

vidarh 3y ago

> The Amiga was dead the second they put all of those whiz-bang chips in them that allowed them to do things that the PC and Mac couldn't do. Amiga wouldn't have existed, or mattered, in the first place without all of those whiz-bang chips in them, and wouldn't have survived the years it did without them even if some irrelevant version had happened without them. But that never would have happened to start with - Amiga, the company, was formed around the ideas of building a gaming system. Looking at the history of Commodore, it's also not at all clear that this was the issue - Commodore was a deeply dysfunctional company, and had been for many years before they even bought Amiga, with extensive problems around underfunding R&D, but then randomly yanking projects and lacking product direction. It became an issue certainly, because it meant that the dysfunction of Commodore was sufficient to kill the whole platform - a risk the PC hardware avoided thanks to clones, and the OS/hardware split of the PC platform avoided because even MS stumbling would've "just" have led to another OS winning out. But without the features of the chipset, nobody would have cared. It was almost only in the US the Amiga was seen predominantly as a "professional" machine that sold as a competitor to PCs in the early years, and it wasn't in the US Amiga sold. The bulk of the Amiga market was in Europe, especially the UK and Germany. Germany also did have a more professional market for the Amiga as well - with e.g. the A2000 being driven by demand from Commodore's Germany subsidiary, but not as the only thing. To such an extent that after Commodore International failed, the Commodore UK management tried to finance a buyout of its own parent company, and kept operating for as long as they could still scrounge up stock. [This US situation was created in large part because Tramiel, before he was fired and bought Atari, had seriously destroyed Commodore's US more 'serious' dealer market with price cuts without preparing the dealers followed by putting Commodore 64's in Kmart, and so when the Amiga was launched Commodore struggled to get sufficient distribution in outlets that could handle a much more expensive machine] > Generally speaking, you stuck in a VGA card and CGA and EGA worked. When a faster card came out you stuck it in and loaded a TSR or drivers and things worked faster. Installed Windows? Get a card with Windows acceleration. 1280x1024@24-bits in 1992 while the Amiga was outputting TV resolutions. This is very different from how I remember things. People were mocking the PC well after Commodore went bankrupt for how PC users had to muck around with drivers and weird command line settings while on the Amiga you just dropped driver in, and had cards that supported AutoConfig [1], which meant we would laugh at PC users whenever they mentioned IRQ's because all of that nonsense was automatic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig

leptons 3y ago

>2x 8-bit stereo channels in 1985 was great Amiga had 14 bit audio. No matter the audio, or the graphics capabilities, the Amiga still had a vastly superior operating system. AREXX was far, far ahead of its time. The multitasking was ahead of its time. Those are the things that kept me on Amiga for so long. No other computing platform really compared in the ways that Amiga really shined.

pjmlp 3y ago

And yet not only are modern computers special snowflakes, with exception of the desktop market only alive due to custom hardware used for AAA games on esports, we get whiz-bang chips on all of them. The only difference is that instead of Assembly and DMA configurations, we now use whiz-bang chips vendor specific APIs. Commodore and Amiga went down due to bad management. PC weren't much better unless people were willing to buy whiz-bang sounds cards from Creative Labs or AdLib, while coding for VESA cards wasn't much better without a wrapper library, as contrary to the previous BIOS standards, using Super VGA required drivers from the card vendor. Naturally not a problem for Windows 3.x games, but not everyone was that keen in adopting WinG from Microsoft.