6 ms·

Picture gallery: Amiga prototype "Lorraine" at the Amiga 40 event

175 points by doener 1y ago

LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago
Please tell me that thing boots to Workbench
verytrivial 1y ago
Wire wrap is/was an underrated prototyping technique prior to PCB automation. Nasa flew missions with wire wrap boards.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  I had an old Kenwood amplifier for years that had wire wrap board to board connectors; it worked great.
Schlagbohrer 1y ago
What a godawful mess that must have been to debug. I've never used wirewrap, it looks awful to me. I am trying to imagine what it would have been like to design such a system using only pencil and paper. Going from block diagram to the lowest level, just on big sheets of paper... the pencil sharpeners must have been emptied twice a day.
- Gibbon1 1y ago
  The existence of wire wrap tells you a lot how painfully tedious it was to layout PCB's at the time. I did a couple of wire wrap boards. But eventually just started soldering wire wrap wire to the sockets. By the early 90's it was faster to layout a PCB and have it fabbed. Bonus you could outsource that and use the 3-4 weeks to do less tedious things. This is just around the time that programmable logic became readily available. It'd be much easier to iterate with that than wiring up logic gates. Last 30 years you can do all this debugging with simulations and then test using FPGA's.
  - FarmerPotato 1y ago
    I'm old-young enough to be aware of the evolution of minicomputers implemented in MSI TTL with wire-wrap (1970) to VLSI integration (1975). Examples are the LSI-11 and TMS9900. My first home-brew micro was done in 1987 using the Radio Shack hand-tool and an OK Industries' motorized wrap gun. Now, I add CPLD to my wire-wrap designs! Just like on an iterated PCB, you must lock the physical pins to functions.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Some DEC CPUs were wire-wrapped until VLSI became a thing. The KL-10 was notoriously an ECL wire-wrap design. But they had a semi-automated machine to handle it. I don't think anyone mass-produced non-trivial numbers of wire-wrap boards by hand. It's fine for prototypes, but it's a very error-prone process and makes it difficult to handle noise, especially at fast clock speeds.
  - FarmerPotato 1y ago
    Present day: I can fabricate a wire-wrap version from my PCB footprints, much faster than I can route the PCB! With wire-wrap, you can route multiple traces between the same pins, or I like to neatly bundle a whole bus' worth. I'm far more pleased with the results of my wire-wrap, than the quality of my SMT soldering once I get a PCB made. I had a tutor for wire-wrap in the 1980s. But I'm self-taught in PCB routing, and I start it over at least 3 times.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    When I was a kid helping my father with in-house electronics, early 1980's, this meant using specific pens and paper to layout them into boards, and then do chemical baths, drying the boards, and then hope for the best when starting to solder components on top. Usually a mistake in any step would mean throw away the whole board and start from scratch.
- rwmj 1y ago
  I made wirewrap boards back in the early 90s and it was extremely tedious, both following the netlist instructions to do the initial work, and then the inevitable debugging when it didn't work. Of course you can have two kinds of bugs - either you made a mistake doing the wirewrap, or your design has a problem! For the complexity of the boards I did, I think it took 2-3 days to do the initial wirewrap, and then days or weeks to debug and get it working. It was, however, both cheaper and easier than doing a prototype PCB. For that, I'd have to use the institution's darkroom with their flatbed photoplotter connected to a PDP-something that you had to boot from reel-to-reel tape. The plot happened overnight, and then had to be developed next day in the darkroom, and then if you were lucky you'd have transparencies of each layer of the PCB that you could send off to a local company who would etch you a single PCB for a lot of money in a few weeks. Even that wasn't trouble-free, since PCBs can have manufacturing faults, or you could screw up when soldering the components to the board, or your design could be wrong. It was very rare that I as the most junior person was allowed to go the PCB route. I think for my boards it happened only once on an ECL design that simply wouldn't have been possible with wirewrap. Although I was tasked with doing the transparencies for other team members. Since I was being paid only £40/week through a government benefits scheme, it was much cheaper to pay for my time than to pay an external company. Also as the other reply says, I used CPLDs a lot which were much faster to iterate. With practice you could pull out the QFP package, put it in the programmer, recompile and upload the new logic, and put it back into the board in an hour. Luxury! We never used pencil and paper (except for notes). The software for drawing schematics, laying out PCBs, making netlists, and compiling CPLDs was pretty advanced even then. Although all of it was horribly proprietary. No KiCAD for you. Taught you to check everything in your design early and often.
christkv 1y ago
Does it still boot?
- FarmerPotato 1y ago
  At VCFMW it was not powered on.
  - christkv 1y ago
    Still incredibly cool. My Amiga 500 was the computer I have the most fond memories from. I even had a 1200 for 4 years before I reluctantly transitioned to PC.
yzydserd 1y ago
The display was in a booth replicating the 1984 Winter CES booth. Here is a Creative Computing article from the 1984 event. https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorraine_finally_.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorr... Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."
- krige 1y ago
  Well, lucky Amiga, it was wasted by executive muck-ups rather than mere marketing foibles.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    The marketing managed to miss most of the time, too. (Mostly because of exec-level misguidance, though.)
Jolter 1y ago
I’m amazed someone preserved that! In whose ownership is it currently?
- hmstx 1y ago
  Dale Luck (from the original team) is preserving it, apparently.
- gpderetta 1y ago
  I remember seeing old photos of the prototype. I assumed it was lost decades ago.
FarmerPotato 1y ago
At VCFMW last month, my table was adjacent to Lorraine and her friends. Ben Heck walked by during setup, and asked me what it was. I was clueless, so we started making educated guesses. The Amiga poster was a start. I do wire-wrap. This thing is a marvel to behold. It is quite orderly, but could have used colors more effectively. The three units implement the VLSI chips and the main board of the Amiga that was first shown at CES (I believe.) Each VLSI is a stack of PCB such as you might get from Vector, with columns of pads for ICs in wire-wrap sockets, buss bars, and edge areas having mounting holes for connectors. The layers are connected by ribbon cables. (they are not called breadboard!) Wire wrap is a superior technology. There are no cold solder joints. They are gas-tight. It is not hard to debug. If you follow some rules, and don't make a spaghetti bird's nest. Such workmanship can be seen on minicomputers of the early 1970s. Whole computers were made by wire-wrap around MSI chips. My wire-wrapped PDP-11/10 functioned perfectly thru the 1990s. Recently, I implemented a microcomputer design in wire-wrap. That was enjoyable! My design was captured in KiCad, laid out as a PCB, which I translated to perf-board and wire-wrap sockets This approach is perfect for prototyping, as you can simply add new blocks.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  I probably still have my wire-wrap gun in storage somewhere but I would much rather use an FPGA. If you don't mind, answering, why do you still use this tech instead of FPGAs? As for cold solder joints: no, they don't do that. But when you start making modifications you have to be extremely careful not to cause any damage because tracing a loose joint on a wire wrap board is the stuff of nightmares.
  - FarmerPotato 1y ago
    Because I want to play with original chips. Many of them are in DIP sockets and are 5V. Not to mention linear and analog functions! No matter what, there's always wires or traces between packages. When I want to do FPGA, I start with an IceStick or BlackIce board (Lattice ICE40 FPGA). But then it comes down to interfacing it to some other chip. So if I make a little PCB that needs more than 16 I/O pins at the edge, I've got myself into extra ribbon cable to jumper to more I/Os.. I even made one wire-wrap board with 4 socketed 74LVC245 level shifters that the BlackIce board would plug into. From there, I could do what I wanted. I agree that damaging your wires is a serious risk. I guess I'm lucky that this never derailed me. I follow the color rule: blue on the bottom layer, yellow on the second. No daisy chains! Rather than unwrapping to get to a hidden blue wire, I can just cut it. Also I should mention that I'm not doing anything above 25 MHz.
Lio 1y ago
I love this, it’s like a holy relic. :D
tonijn 1y ago
Looks like a beehive. Very cool
- Razengan 1y ago
  a C-hive
ivolimmen 1y ago
I was there and it was glorious to watch. Beautiful to see an interesting part of history up close.
hmstx 1y ago
Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE
- 8bitsrule 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing that! Never got to see any pro wrapping. By the time this stuff started, I'd started forgetting all the hobbyist hardware electronics I'd learned (thinking it would last) and had moved to software ... at right about the time that manu's stopped documenting their internals ... but while disassemblers still existed.
  - hmstx 1y ago
    In retrospect, it seems almost nuts that appliances from the past came with not only a block diagram, but a schematic. Especially now that everything is not only too complex to be documented "for your own good", and even potential repair techs, and now with DMCA protected software locks. I still sometimes use the old Scott amplifier my parents got 50 years ago, with manual - and it has everything you need for a repair (besides a list of modern day replacement for some of these, of course). Same with the ol' Amiga 500 in a box over at their house. A lot of tinkering you could scheme on your own without going online (my quartz oscillator overclocking replacement never materialized, but hey).
panick21 1y ago
If you really take seriously what you could have done for a home computer if you had started with fully integrated chips, its actually insane. Imagine if you had an Amiga Chipset and you had combined it with a RISC like chip. If you did that in late 70s with 3.5μm HMOS (like 68k). The resulting system would be insane, in terms of performance to cost. You could outperform minicomputers that cost 10-100x more. The ARM2 like chip and the complete Amiga chipset seem to have less transistors then a single 68k, so the price off such a system would be very low. And we can see that with the Amiga, what really blows my mind is how cheap Amiga ended up being, an unbelievable achievment. Its seem the issue really was the the companies that had the resources to do that amount of chip design knowlage and finances were not interest in making a home computers/workstation. Workstation ended up being made by startups who didn't have the resources to do so much costume work. Appollo was a split-off group DEC because DEC was not interested in workstations. IBM was just to slow and couldn't really do prodcut design, and we all know how the eventually got around that problem with the PC. Apple for the Mac did try to do one ambitious chip with VSLI but didn't end up using it. The split between computer companies and chip design company was just to big to get the needed amount of integration, and there was clearly a lacking vision for what home computer could be. Jobs vision for the Macintosh went in the right direction, but really Jay Mine had the right vision, and he had it because he build a computer for himself. He wanted a home comptuer that was fast, had a proper operating system and enough media capability to run a flight simulator software. Sadly manamgent most of the time wanted him to develop a console and later when they allowed a home computer they didn't share his full vision. But then also actually plulling this vision off, multi-chip costume design with very few resources is just an amazing achievment. And many of the people didn't even have that much knowlage in chip design, there was a lot of competition for chip design people. Getting into Commmodore where they had the actual semiconductor teams to get these designs over the line was lucky, many other companies who could have bought them might have messed this up. In a perfect world you add ARM2-like RISC chip, a Sun-like costume MMU to something like Amiga Chipset and you move computing forward by 10+ years. In reality the exact opposite won, a 16-bit PC that had basically no costume design in it what so ever.
- anentropic 1y ago
  "custom" not "costume" (...I'm only adding this note to help, not criticise)
guerrilla 1y ago
If they could build that then, imagine what Ben Eater could build today. ;)
ra 1y ago
When I was a kid I had a Dragon32 and my little brother had an Amiga 500. I thought it was so cool with the demos and the sound but he was always getting worms that spread via floppy disc.
- b112 1y ago
  Yup, heh. And you'd infect all your floppies if you just warm booted, and put in the next game. Flipping the read only tab on every floppy was the first thing I did, after my first infection.
- attila-lendvai 1y ago
  there was a distinct floppy sound when the filesystem was updated after a write. i noticed my first virus pretty quickly, and even though i couldn't remove it, i could disable it in some files that i couldn't reproduce (no internet back then, and i was on the wrong side of the iron curtain as a child)
- squarefoot 1y ago
  Yes, that was a real problem. The Amiga would access disks every time they were inserted to id them, but viruses too would use that feature to spread themselves; they would remain resident in memory (also after warm resets) then write themselves on the bootblock of every inserted floppy. Seeing the computer access every inserted disk was then normal, no way to know if it was for reading or writing, so back then I built a small device that would take the writing pulse on the floppy port, make it a bit longer and drive a beeper. If I then inserted a floppy and it started beeping that meant that floppy and the one I read before it were infected so that I could restrict the suspects list and clean them. It was very effective, built some for friends and also sold some of them on local listings.
  - ra 1y ago
    Ha! that was genius of your younger self.
waltbosz 1y ago
Reminds me of that LLM computer built in Minecraft that was discussed here a few weeks back.
Razengan 1y ago
The failure of the Amiga and the near-failure and resurrection of Apple is what makes me believe in parallel universes/alternate timelines more than anything :)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mrandish 1y ago
  > makes me believe in parallel universes And we're obviously in the less cool branch. :-)
reaperducer 1y ago
You're not hardcore until you're wire-wrapped your own Amiga: https://www.amiga-news.de/pics/L/lorraine/FB_IMG_1761020398586.jpg https://www.amiga-news.de/pics/L/lorraine/FB_IMG_17610203985...
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  I never owned an Amiga, but it was clear at the time it was a masterpiece, and this just confirms it. Designing the chips in MSI, wire wrapping a prototype, and getting it all to work to the point where you get a functional chip run is the stuff of legends.
richrichardsson 1y ago
Always blows my mind that the prototype was made with discrete components.

175 points by doener 1y ago

LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago

Please tell me that thing boots to Workbench

verytrivial 1y ago

Wire wrap is/was an underrated prototyping technique prior to PCB automation. Nasa flew missions with wire wrap boards.

mikepurvis 1y ago
I had an old Kenwood amplifier for years that had wire wrap board to board connectors; it worked great.

Schlagbohrer 1y ago

What a godawful mess that must have been to debug. I've never used wirewrap, it looks awful to me. I am trying to imagine what it would have been like to design such a system using only pencil and paper. Going from block diagram to the lowest level, just on big sheets of paper... the pencil sharpeners must have been emptied twice a day.

Gibbon1 1y ago
The existence of wire wrap tells you a lot how painfully tedious it was to layout PCB's at the time. I did a couple of wire wrap boards. But eventually just started soldering wire wrap wire to the sockets. By the early 90's it was faster to layout a PCB and have it fabbed. Bonus you could outsource that and use the 3-4 weeks to do less tedious things. This is just around the time that programmable logic became readily available. It'd be much easier to iterate with that than wiring up logic gates. Last 30 years you can do all this debugging with simulations and then test using FPGA's.
- FarmerPotato 1y ago
  I'm old-young enough to be aware of the evolution of minicomputers implemented in MSI TTL with wire-wrap (1970) to VLSI integration (1975). Examples are the LSI-11 and TMS9900. My first home-brew micro was done in 1987 using the Radio Shack hand-tool and an OK Industries' motorized wrap gun. Now, I add CPLD to my wire-wrap designs! Just like on an iterated PCB, you must lock the physical pins to functions.
  - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
    Some DEC CPUs were wire-wrapped until VLSI became a thing. The KL-10 was notoriously an ECL wire-wrap design. But they had a semi-automated machine to handle it. I don't think anyone mass-produced non-trivial numbers of wire-wrap boards by hand. It's fine for prototypes, but it's a very error-prone process and makes it difficult to handle noise, especially at fast clock speeds.
- FarmerPotato 1y ago
  Present day: I can fabricate a wire-wrap version from my PCB footprints, much faster than I can route the PCB! With wire-wrap, you can route multiple traces between the same pins, or I like to neatly bundle a whole bus' worth. I'm far more pleased with the results of my wire-wrap, than the quality of my SMT soldering once I get a PCB made. I had a tutor for wire-wrap in the 1980s. But I'm self-taught in PCB routing, and I start it over at least 3 times.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  When I was a kid helping my father with in-house electronics, early 1980's, this meant using specific pens and paper to layout them into boards, and then do chemical baths, drying the boards, and then hope for the best when starting to solder components on top. Usually a mistake in any step would mean throw away the whole board and start from scratch.
rwmj 1y ago
I made wirewrap boards back in the early 90s and it was extremely tedious, both following the netlist instructions to do the initial work, and then the inevitable debugging when it didn't work. Of course you can have two kinds of bugs - either you made a mistake doing the wirewrap, or your design has a problem! For the complexity of the boards I did, I think it took 2-3 days to do the initial wirewrap, and then days or weeks to debug and get it working. It was, however, both cheaper and easier than doing a prototype PCB. For that, I'd have to use the institution's darkroom with their flatbed photoplotter connected to a PDP-something that you had to boot from reel-to-reel tape. The plot happened overnight, and then had to be developed next day in the darkroom, and then if you were lucky you'd have transparencies of each layer of the PCB that you could send off to a local company who would etch you a single PCB for a lot of money in a few weeks. Even that wasn't trouble-free, since PCBs can have manufacturing faults, or you could screw up when soldering the components to the board, or your design could be wrong. It was very rare that I as the most junior person was allowed to go the PCB route. I think for my boards it happened only once on an ECL design that simply wouldn't have been possible with wirewrap. Although I was tasked with doing the transparencies for other team members. Since I was being paid only £40/week through a government benefits scheme, it was much cheaper to pay for my time than to pay an external company. Also as the other reply says, I used CPLDs a lot which were much faster to iterate. With practice you could pull out the QFP package, put it in the programmer, recompile and upload the new logic, and put it back into the board in an hour. Luxury! We never used pencil and paper (except for notes). The software for drawing schematics, laying out PCBs, making netlists, and compiling CPLDs was pretty advanced even then. Although all of it was horribly proprietary. No KiCAD for you. Taught you to check everything in your design early and often.

christkv 1y ago

Does it still boot?

FarmerPotato 1y ago
At VCFMW it was not powered on.
- christkv 1y ago
  Still incredibly cool. My Amiga 500 was the computer I have the most fond memories from. I even had a 1200 for 4 years before I reluctantly transitioned to PC.

yzydserd 1y ago

The display was in a booth replicating the 1984 Winter CES booth. Here is a Creative Computing article from the 1984 event. https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorraine_finally_.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorr... Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."

krige 1y ago
Well, lucky Amiga, it was wasted by executive muck-ups rather than mere marketing foibles.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  The marketing managed to miss most of the time, too. (Mostly because of exec-level misguidance, though.)

Jolter 1y ago

I’m amazed someone preserved that! In whose ownership is it currently?

hmstx 1y ago
Dale Luck (from the original team) is preserving it, apparently.
gpderetta 1y ago
I remember seeing old photos of the prototype. I assumed it was lost decades ago.

FarmerPotato 1y ago

At VCFMW last month, my table was adjacent to Lorraine and her friends. Ben Heck walked by during setup, and asked me what it was. I was clueless, so we started making educated guesses. The Amiga poster was a start. I do wire-wrap. This thing is a marvel to behold. It is quite orderly, but could have used colors more effectively. The three units implement the VLSI chips and the main board of the Amiga that was first shown at CES (I believe.) Each VLSI is a stack of PCB such as you might get from Vector, with columns of pads for ICs in wire-wrap sockets, buss bars, and edge areas having mounting holes for connectors. The layers are connected by ribbon cables. (they are not called breadboard!) Wire wrap is a superior technology. There are no cold solder joints. They are gas-tight. It is not hard to debug. If you follow some rules, and don't make a spaghetti bird's nest. Such workmanship can be seen on minicomputers of the early 1970s. Whole computers were made by wire-wrap around MSI chips. My wire-wrapped PDP-11/10 functioned perfectly thru the 1990s. Recently, I implemented a microcomputer design in wire-wrap. That was enjoyable! My design was captured in KiCad, laid out as a PCB, which I translated to perf-board and wire-wrap sockets This approach is perfect for prototyping, as you can simply add new blocks.

jacquesm 1y ago
I probably still have my wire-wrap gun in storage somewhere but I would much rather use an FPGA. If you don't mind, answering, why do you still use this tech instead of FPGAs? As for cold solder joints: no, they don't do that. But when you start making modifications you have to be extremely careful not to cause any damage because tracing a loose joint on a wire wrap board is the stuff of nightmares.
- FarmerPotato 1y ago
  Because I want to play with original chips. Many of them are in DIP sockets and are 5V. Not to mention linear and analog functions! No matter what, there's always wires or traces between packages. When I want to do FPGA, I start with an IceStick or BlackIce board (Lattice ICE40 FPGA). But then it comes down to interfacing it to some other chip. So if I make a little PCB that needs more than 16 I/O pins at the edge, I've got myself into extra ribbon cable to jumper to more I/Os.. I even made one wire-wrap board with 4 socketed 74LVC245 level shifters that the BlackIce board would plug into. From there, I could do what I wanted. I agree that damaging your wires is a serious risk. I guess I'm lucky that this never derailed me. I follow the color rule: blue on the bottom layer, yellow on the second. No daisy chains! Rather than unwrapping to get to a hidden blue wire, I can just cut it. Also I should mention that I'm not doing anything above 25 MHz.

Lio 1y ago

I love this, it’s like a holy relic. :D

tonijn 1y ago

Looks like a beehive. Very cool

Razengan 1y ago
a C-hive

ivolimmen 1y ago

I was there and it was glorious to watch. Beautiful to see an interesting part of history up close.

hmstx 1y ago

Never seen wire wrapped boards besides photos of this and maybe some other early micro. So of course I had to do a little search and one of the first results has Bil Herd from Commodore (Plus/4, C128...) explaining it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvEDM-m9CE

8bitsrule 1y ago
Thanks for sharing that! Never got to see any pro wrapping. By the time this stuff started, I'd started forgetting all the hobbyist hardware electronics I'd learned (thinking it would last) and had moved to software ... at right about the time that manu's stopped documenting their internals ... but while disassemblers still existed.
- hmstx 1y ago
  In retrospect, it seems almost nuts that appliances from the past came with not only a block diagram, but a schematic. Especially now that everything is not only too complex to be documented "for your own good", and even potential repair techs, and now with DMCA protected software locks. I still sometimes use the old Scott amplifier my parents got 50 years ago, with manual - and it has everything you need for a repair (besides a list of modern day replacement for some of these, of course). Same with the ol' Amiga 500 in a box over at their house. A lot of tinkering you could scheme on your own without going online (my quartz oscillator overclocking replacement never materialized, but hey).

panick21 1y ago

If you really take seriously what you could have done for a home computer if you had started with fully integrated chips, its actually insane. Imagine if you had an Amiga Chipset and you had combined it with a RISC like chip. If you did that in late 70s with 3.5μm HMOS (like 68k). The resulting system would be insane, in terms of performance to cost. You could outperform minicomputers that cost 10-100x more. The ARM2 like chip and the complete Amiga chipset seem to have less transistors then a single 68k, so the price off such a system would be very low. And we can see that with the Amiga, what really blows my mind is how cheap Amiga ended up being, an unbelievable achievment. Its seem the issue really was the the companies that had the resources to do that amount of chip design knowlage and finances were not interest in making a home computers/workstation. Workstation ended up being made by startups who didn't have the resources to do so much costume work. Appollo was a split-off group DEC because DEC was not interested in workstations. IBM was just to slow and couldn't really do prodcut design, and we all know how the eventually got around that problem with the PC. Apple for the Mac did try to do one ambitious chip with VSLI but didn't end up using it. The split between computer companies and chip design company was just to big to get the needed amount of integration, and there was clearly a lacking vision for what home computer could be. Jobs vision for the Macintosh went in the right direction, but really Jay Mine had the right vision, and he had it because he build a computer for himself. He wanted a home comptuer that was fast, had a proper operating system and enough media capability to run a flight simulator software. Sadly manamgent most of the time wanted him to develop a console and later when they allowed a home computer they didn't share his full vision. But then also actually plulling this vision off, multi-chip costume design with very few resources is just an amazing achievment. And many of the people didn't even have that much knowlage in chip design, there was a lot of competition for chip design people. Getting into Commmodore where they had the actual semiconductor teams to get these designs over the line was lucky, many other companies who could have bought them might have messed this up. In a perfect world you add ARM2-like RISC chip, a Sun-like costume MMU to something like Amiga Chipset and you move computing forward by 10+ years. In reality the exact opposite won, a 16-bit PC that had basically no costume design in it what so ever.

anentropic 1y ago
"custom" not "costume" (...I'm only adding this note to help, not criticise)

guerrilla 1y ago

If they could build that then, imagine what Ben Eater could build today. ;)

ra 1y ago

When I was a kid I had a Dragon32 and my little brother had an Amiga 500. I thought it was so cool with the demos and the sound but he was always getting worms that spread via floppy disc.

b112 1y ago
Yup, heh. And you'd infect all your floppies if you just warm booted, and put in the next game. Flipping the read only tab on every floppy was the first thing I did, after my first infection.
attila-lendvai 1y ago
there was a distinct floppy sound when the filesystem was updated after a write. i noticed my first virus pretty quickly, and even though i couldn't remove it, i could disable it in some files that i couldn't reproduce (no internet back then, and i was on the wrong side of the iron curtain as a child)
squarefoot 1y ago
Yes, that was a real problem. The Amiga would access disks every time they were inserted to id them, but viruses too would use that feature to spread themselves; they would remain resident in memory (also after warm resets) then write themselves on the bootblock of every inserted floppy. Seeing the computer access every inserted disk was then normal, no way to know if it was for reading or writing, so back then I built a small device that would take the writing pulse on the floppy port, make it a bit longer and drive a beeper. If I then inserted a floppy and it started beeping that meant that floppy and the one I read before it were infected so that I could restrict the suspects list and clean them. It was very effective, built some for friends and also sold some of them on local listings.
- ra 1y ago
  Ha! that was genius of your younger self.

waltbosz 1y ago

Reminds me of that LLM computer built in Minecraft that was discussed here a few weeks back.

Razengan 1y ago

The failure of the Amiga and the near-failure and resurrection of Apple is what makes me believe in parallel universes/alternate timelines more than anything :)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mrandish 1y ago
> makes me believe in parallel universes And we're obviously in the less cool branch. :-)

reaperducer 1y ago

You're not hardcore until you're wire-wrapped your own Amiga: https://www.amiga-news.de/pics/L/lorraine/FB_IMG_1761020398586.jpg https://www.amiga-news.de/pics/L/lorraine/FB_IMG_17610203985...

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
I never owned an Amiga, but it was clear at the time it was a masterpiece, and this just confirms it. Designing the chips in MSI, wire wrapping a prototype, and getting it all to work to the point where you get a functional chip run is the stuff of legends.

richrichardsson 1y ago

Always blows my mind that the prototype was made with discrete components.