4 ms·

It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple acceler

It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple accelerated 2D graphics. It feels like a wasted opportunity.

1oooqooq 2y ago
this article actually explain it. they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.
sixothree 2y ago
It was literally a matter of expansion and upgradability. People saw it as a “micro” with vendor lock in.
ChainOfFools 2y ago
And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.
- beagle3 2y ago
  It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking. The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    "Enforcer" did not provide full memory protection. It only protected the lower page of memory (which were used as lookup tables by the OS, example: address 4 which was the Amiga "Exec" base address), in addition to some unmapped areas of memory. It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  It had preemptive multitasking when consumer windows was still stuck on cooperative technologies. Where one misbehaving application could crash the whole system.
- the_af 2y ago
  There is an interesting "History of the Amiga" article in Ars Technica [1], and the sense I got is that the Amiga didn't win out for non-technical reasons. It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc. [1] https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

1oooqooq 2y ago

this article actually explain it. they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.

sixothree 2y ago

It was literally a matter of expansion and upgradability. People saw it as a “micro” with vendor lock in.

ChainOfFools 2y ago

And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.

beagle3 2y ago
It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking. The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.
- icedchai 2y ago
  "Enforcer" did not provide full memory protection. It only protected the lower page of memory (which were used as lookup tables by the OS, example: address 4 which was the Amiga "Exec" base address), in addition to some unmapped areas of memory. It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.
wkat4242 2y ago
It had preemptive multitasking when consumer windows was still stuck on cooperative technologies. Where one misbehaving application could crash the whole system.
the_af 2y ago
There is an interesting "History of the Amiga" article in Ars Technica [1], and the sense I got is that the Amiga didn't win out for non-technical reasons. It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc. [1] https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/