13 ms·

The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine

85 points by mgunes 12y ago

bane 12y ago
I think this bit was really interesting analysis: "Amiga’s financial difficulties provided the opportunity of a lifetime to a bunch of folks that may have struggled to get in the door in even the most junior of positions at someplace like Apple, IBM, or Microsoft." It reminds me a bit of the recent realization Google has had (after trolling through vast amount of employment data) they see virtually no difference in performance from people with high pedigrees that people without. http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-not-impressed-by-your-fancy-ivy-league-credentials/ http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-no... It's a lesson that seems to keep getting relearned over and over again. Hire the individual, not the GPA, not the degree, not the school. These guys produced an amazing machine virtually on a shoe-string. It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. A podcast I've been listening to recently has some wonderful interviews with some of the industry people from that time period and there's some great insight into this transition. http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/
- cmrdporcupine 12y ago
  Yeah it's funny, the Amiga is kind of a spiritual successor to the the A8, and the ST is kind of a spiritual successor to the Commodore 64 (lead designer on the ST, Shiraz Shivji, was a designer on the C64).
  - protomyth 12y ago
    Given the shift in ownership of Atari, it does make sense. Atari was basically the old Commodore owners.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The ST was a way to get access to a 32 bit address space without spending a very large amount of money. The Amiga was the fore-runner of the multi-media PC.
  - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
    32-bit address space, GUI, hi-rez screen, and good-enough games. In 1987 my choice was a Commodore 128 or an Atari ST -- I wanted 80 columns, modern graphics, and more memory and couldn't afford a PC or Mac (nor did I like the PC anyways). I was coming from a VIC-20. The ST fit the niche and lasted me until I went Linux on a 486 in 1992. The Amiga was another step up in the price tier, and less geared around productivity and more around entertainment.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      If you were into video at the time, the Amiga was most definitely the more productive machine.
      - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
        Oh for sure. But if you were into MIDI, the ST was by far the better choice. The Amiga sold more the ST in the end. But neither really made a dent in the market % wise. Both had a lot of potential and were let down by bad management. Commodore I think did a marginally better job than Atari did in growing their platform. Atari had a last gasp of inspiration with the TT and Falcon and MultiTOS that seemed like they were making up for 5 years of neglect. But then they packed it in. I still turn my Falcon on occasionally. It is a really nice machine.
        protomyth 12y ago
        Neither understood the fundamental truth that they had to be priced in the C64 range to stay alive. The C64 was replaced market share-wise by the IBM PC and neither company repeated the success of their earlier, cheaper machines. They needed games and price to keep winning.
        cmrdporcupine 12y ago
        PCs didn't become affordable for non-business uses until the early 90s. By then you could get a 486 or 386 for about $2000. When you think about inflation, that's a heck of a lot in today's money, but if you take into account that the original IBM PC was $1500 in 1981 dollars when it was introduced, that's a heck of a lot more cash. ($3,873.30 according to http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) That was really out of the reach of middle/working class people.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Indeed. When I did interviews (and I didn't do a ton, but I did enough) I noticed zero correlation between having a CS degree and being able to code worth a damn. I noticed only a moderate correlation between having a degree from a "good" school and coding ability, but nowhere near enough to warrant the overwhelming degree of credentialism that exists in the industry today. On a similar note, a lot of the best coders I've known have had degrees in non-CS fields (such as physics) or no degree at all.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  > It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. The Amiga offloads a lot of functionality to the custom chips, much like Atari 8-bit machines (ANTIC is an incredible piece of hardware design). I liked to compare the ST to the minimalism of the Apple II, but I agree, it's more like the C64.
  - to3m 12y ago
    I think of the Atari ST as being much more like the ZX Spectrum. "Minimalism" is a polite way of describing it: you have a CPU and you have an area of memory (with a slightly bizarre layout) that represents what will appear on screen. Like the Spectrum, the CPU is nice enough to code for, but takes its time when doing anything remotely useful. (Maybe similar to Apple II as well. Very uncommon in the UK - never used it.) Of course, the ST has a few things going for it compared to the Spectrum: configurable display RAM address, minimally contended RAM, timer interrupts, quite apart from the increase in colours and pixels and the properly bitmapped display. But overall, it's the same sort of thing, to be used in the same sort of way. You'd approach coding for the C64 or Amiga very differently.
kenjackson 12y ago
I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than anything else out at the time, yet never caught on. Is there anything like that happening today, where there is something significantly better than its competitors, but has no traction. I don't mean something debatable (e.g., Windows Phone vs iPhone or MacOS vs Windows), but something clear cut? Probably the closest thing I could think of is Tesla, if they go belly up.
- kryptiskt 12y ago
  Amiga was a major success, it did catch on after the jury-rigged A1000 was put out to pasture. It was Commodore that squandered it, by milking it financially and stagnating technologically. I wish Acorn Archimedes had had half the opportunity Amiga got.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    The Archimedes had processing power by the bucket compared to the 68K machines of the time but it lacked the fantastic software/hardware integration that the Amiga offered.
    - watmough 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure the Amiga couldn't have run Zarch at anything like the smoothness that the Archimedes managed. And the difference was purely down to the stripped down Acorn RISC Machine chip running at 8 MHz, compared with the 8 MHz 68000 CISC chip. There are so many if-only's about the Amiga. If only it could have managed 640x480 un-interlaced, and if-only someone with even a modicum of taste had worked on the Workbench GUI. If only they'd used a decent disk drive, like Apple were forced to on the Mac. Commodore's pivot to selling to Business was doomed when selling a games machine, though the cost-pared A500 was very successful as a gaming computer in (non-UK) Europe.
- renaudg 12y ago
  Never caught on ? No traction ? That certainly wasn't true in Europe. It seemed like every kid around me in the early 90s had an Amiga 500, a few years after they all seemed to have an Amstrad CPC (wildly popular in France, even though it was a British computer. The Spectrum was the UK darling, and the C64 was the more popular one everywhere else) A generation of game publishers (mainly in the UK and France) thrived on the Amiga and went on to become household names today (UbiSoft comes to mind) As the article notes, there were even Amiga magazines on UK newsstands as far as Y2K, years after Commodore's demise. So yeah, pretty big deal over here. In some ways, the Amiga reminds me of Techno music : invented in the US, but found its true home in Europe.
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
This is a good honest account of the Amiga, I'm glad to see somebody to admit its faults and quirks rather than blindly sing glorious praise to it as is often the case with its former (or present) users. I was an Atari ST user back then, the "other 68000 home computer". When comparing the ST and Amiga it is easy to get caught up in hardware capability comparisons, but the ST was 2/3rds the price of an Amiga, and shipped with more RAM and didn't have the interlaced video. There was nothing like the ST's hi-rez monochrome monitor (very good quality) for the Amiga. Really the ST was like a budget Mac, but with a higher clock rate, higher monochrome screen resolution, and disk format compatibility with MS-DOS. Here's a similar accounting of the first genesis of the ST: http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html The Amiga was a great piece of hardware, and the games for it were generally the best in class. And it was made by some really inspired people. But it only took a few years and that hardware advantage meant little anymore. Mainstream Macs and PCs absorbed the multimedia capabilities. Game consoles from Sega and Sony were able to outplay it, and there were even machines like the Sharp X68000 that blew it away on the hardware front by the late 80s (and even outsold it, albeit only sold in Japan.)
- NoPiece 12y ago
  You are right that the advantages the Atari ST and Amiga had were absorbed into mainstream consoles and computers, but I think the time gap is a little longer than a few years. The Amiga released in 1985, but the Sega Genesis/Masterdrive didn't come to the US until 1989, and didn't arrive in the UK until 1990. Windows 3.1 was 1992, first color Mac was 1993, and Sony PSX was 1994.
  - niklasni1 12y ago
    The first colour-capable Mac was the Mac II in 1987.
- bane 12y ago
  I'm glad you brought up the X68000 truly a remarkable machine that's forgotten when people talk fondly about the 68k machines. I agree with the other comments here that other machines didn't quickly catch up to the Amiga. I remember growing up with a couple friends who had Amigas in the late 80s, early 90s. My parents ended up buying a PC for home because of work stuff sometime in 90-91 and it didn't hold a candle to the Amigas my friends had. I had to add a Sound Blaster to even get audio (digital sounds were all computed by the CPU so 4ch sound and Amiga quality video almost brought it to its knees) and it really wasn't until I upgraded to an SB Pro and a decent graphics card (this was before 3dfx) that I could say audio and visuals were capable of what an Amiga could do out of the box. But then it took forever for the software ecosystem to catch up. There were popular games coming out at that time that were still EGA and quite a few with CGA and Mono graphics. Even then, most of my friends had modded and hacked on the A500s to get them faster processors, more memory etc and they were easily as capable as my PC. I don't think it was really until the mid90s where PCs started to comfortably pull ahead in both hardware and software. I remember getting a GUS MAX and maxing out the memory on it, and finally knowing for sure that I had audio that was clearly superior to anything the Amiga could pull off and it really wasn't until Doom that you could say that a PC could finally do something an Amiga couldn't. By then we were in 1993/1994, 486s were finally becoming consumer level chips, and high-end systems were running 486DX2s or DX4s and clock multipliers were finally putting the final nail in the Amiga's coffin. But I was on my 3rd or 4th computer by then and my friend were still on their 5-6 year old A500s (though heavily modded by this point). One of my friends toyed around with getting an A4000, but stories of incompatibilities and other issues scared them away and eventually they just ended up with a PC like everybody else. I think the final nail was when Apple switched from Motorola to PowerPC and it became apparent to everybody that the 680x0 line was a technological dead-end and with it the Amiga. But 5-6 years was an eternity in hardware in those days. If you use Moore's law (18 months) as a generational guide, the Amiga was 3 or 4 generations ahead of the rest of the PC market in terms of hardware and software capability. There's really nothing like that today that's comparable.
andrewstuart 12y ago
It's hard to convey the feeling when I first saw an Amiga. In the office, surrounded by monochrome early DOS machines someone had set up an Amiga 1000 showing the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. It's like someone had switched on an electric light for the first time.
- NoPiece 12y ago
  This was exactly my experience. I was at college, walking to the bookstore to buy a 286. There was a guy from Creative Computers with table set up demoing an Amiga. I couldn't believe what I was seeing - it looked so much better than anything else at the time. I bought one the same day, and struggled to find a decent word processor for the next 4 years. But the games made it worth it.
jug 12y ago
Still reading this, just wanted to thank you for posting this! I owned an Amiga back in the day. I wasn't old at all, I was only just barely getting my toes wet in programming, but I knew I was using something special, and when I look back and see an Amiga 500, I still think it is. It's even pretty despite the design's age. Or maybe it's my pretty memories of it speaking. Making me even more nostalgic about this era, is that it felt like the golden age of computing, so many wildly different concepts. My ZX Spectrum 48K, my Atari 520 STE, then my Amiga 500 Plus. It felt like anything was possible, that anyone had a chance of building a famous new computer with its own operating system and all. And all that felt on countless LAN's. Man, those were the days!
babuskov 12y ago
Ah, those were the days. I learned Assembly on A500. You would just load an image into memory, tell the video card to point to that location and it got shown on the screen. I recall writing a simple program to extract images from games. After reboot, the game graphics would remain in RAM. Using the program I would change the address with keyboard controls until I got something that looked like an image from game on my screen and then I would save it into a file. And I got docs for programming it via a friend who had access to some BBS. Kids these days don't know what they have.
protomyth 12y ago
Jay Miner was one heck of a designer. I do wish there was a book that focused on the forgotten hardware designers of that era.
icedchai 12y ago
I got an Amiga in 7th grade! It was a hugeee step up from my previous computer (an Apple II.) It felt truly amazing for the time (late 80's).
NoPiece 12y ago
In the comments of the article some pointed to a Kickstarter in progress right now for an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain view to celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Amiga. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-anniversary-in-california https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-an...
bitwize 12y ago
Ah, the Amiga -- computing's Lamborghini Countach. Sexy, powerful, revolutionary engineering for its time. Fueler of many a pubescent schoolboy's wet dreams. But also hopelessly stuck in the 80s in terms of design and fiddly enough to put off non-enthusiasts.
josteink 12y ago
As someone who grew up on the Commodore 64 and Amiga, I sorely miss the 68k platform. The few times I'm still forced to deal with the X86-architecture at assembly-level it just pains me to see the clusterfuck that modern the Intel-platform represents. The 68k was clean, nice, logical and let you work on the data you wanted to process. The X86 looks like a patchwork of instructions and registers added cumulatively over time, with no design behind them, and the majority of code is moving data in and out of registers, not actually processing the data. The X86-architecture marked the end for when I cared about knowing how things worked all through the stack. It was just too ugly for me to embrace.

85 points by mgunes 12y ago

bane 12y ago

I think this bit was really interesting analysis: "Amiga’s financial difficulties provided the opportunity of a lifetime to a bunch of folks that may have struggled to get in the door in even the most junior of positions at someplace like Apple, IBM, or Microsoft." It reminds me a bit of the recent realization Google has had (after trolling through vast amount of employment data) they see virtually no difference in performance from people with high pedigrees that people without. http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-not-impressed-by-your-fancy-ivy-league-credentials/ http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-no... It's a lesson that seems to keep getting relearned over and over again. Hire the individual, not the GPA, not the degree, not the school. These guys produced an amazing machine virtually on a shoe-string. It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. A podcast I've been listening to recently has some wonderful interviews with some of the industry people from that time period and there's some great insight into this transition. http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/ http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

cmrdporcupine 12y ago
Yeah it's funny, the Amiga is kind of a spiritual successor to the the A8, and the ST is kind of a spiritual successor to the Commodore 64 (lead designer on the ST, Shiraz Shivji, was a designer on the C64).
- protomyth 12y ago
  Given the shift in ownership of Atari, it does make sense. Atari was basically the old Commodore owners.
jacquesm 12y ago
The ST was a way to get access to a 32 bit address space without spending a very large amount of money. The Amiga was the fore-runner of the multi-media PC.
- cmrdporcupine 12y ago
  32-bit address space, GUI, hi-rez screen, and good-enough games. In 1987 my choice was a Commodore 128 or an Atari ST -- I wanted 80 columns, modern graphics, and more memory and couldn't afford a PC or Mac (nor did I like the PC anyways). I was coming from a VIC-20. The ST fit the niche and lasted me until I went Linux on a 486 in 1992. The Amiga was another step up in the price tier, and less geared around productivity and more around entertainment.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    If you were into video at the time, the Amiga was most definitely the more productive machine.
    - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
      Oh for sure. But if you were into MIDI, the ST was by far the better choice. The Amiga sold more the ST in the end. But neither really made a dent in the market % wise. Both had a lot of potential and were let down by bad management. Commodore I think did a marginally better job than Atari did in growing their platform. Atari had a last gasp of inspiration with the TT and Falcon and MultiTOS that seemed like they were making up for 5 years of neglect. But then they packed it in. I still turn my Falcon on occasionally. It is a really nice machine.
      - protomyth 12y ago
        Neither understood the fundamental truth that they had to be priced in the C64 range to stay alive. The C64 was replaced market share-wise by the IBM PC and neither company repeated the success of their earlier, cheaper machines. They needed games and price to keep winning.
        cmrdporcupine 12y ago
        PCs didn't become affordable for non-business uses until the early 90s. By then you could get a 486 or 386 for about $2000. When you think about inflation, that's a heck of a lot in today's money, but if you take into account that the original IBM PC was $1500 in 1981 dollars when it was introduced, that's a heck of a lot more cash. ($3,873.30 according to http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) That was really out of the reach of middle/working class people.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Indeed. When I did interviews (and I didn't do a ton, but I did enough) I noticed zero correlation between having a CS degree and being able to code worth a damn. I noticed only a moderate correlation between having a degree from a "good" school and coding ability, but nowhere near enough to warrant the overwhelming degree of credentialism that exists in the industry today. On a similar note, a lot of the best coders I've known have had degrees in non-CS fields (such as physics) or no degree at all.
rbanffy 12y ago
> It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. The Amiga offloads a lot of functionality to the custom chips, much like Atari 8-bit machines (ANTIC is an incredible piece of hardware design). I liked to compare the ST to the minimalism of the Apple II, but I agree, it's more like the C64.
- to3m 12y ago
  I think of the Atari ST as being much more like the ZX Spectrum. "Minimalism" is a polite way of describing it: you have a CPU and you have an area of memory (with a slightly bizarre layout) that represents what will appear on screen. Like the Spectrum, the CPU is nice enough to code for, but takes its time when doing anything remotely useful. (Maybe similar to Apple II as well. Very uncommon in the UK - never used it.) Of course, the ST has a few things going for it compared to the Spectrum: configurable display RAM address, minimally contended RAM, timer interrupts, quite apart from the increase in colours and pixels and the properly bitmapped display. But overall, it's the same sort of thing, to be used in the same sort of way. You'd approach coding for the C64 or Amiga very differently.

kenjackson 12y ago

I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than anything else out at the time, yet never caught on. Is there anything like that happening today, where there is something significantly better than its competitors, but has no traction. I don't mean something debatable (e.g., Windows Phone vs iPhone or MacOS vs Windows), but something clear cut? Probably the closest thing I could think of is Tesla, if they go belly up.

kryptiskt 12y ago
Amiga was a major success, it did catch on after the jury-rigged A1000 was put out to pasture. It was Commodore that squandered it, by milking it financially and stagnating technologically. I wish Acorn Archimedes had had half the opportunity Amiga got.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The Archimedes had processing power by the bucket compared to the 68K machines of the time but it lacked the fantastic software/hardware integration that the Amiga offered.
  - watmough 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure the Amiga couldn't have run Zarch at anything like the smoothness that the Archimedes managed. And the difference was purely down to the stripped down Acorn RISC Machine chip running at 8 MHz, compared with the 8 MHz 68000 CISC chip. There are so many if-only's about the Amiga. If only it could have managed 640x480 un-interlaced, and if-only someone with even a modicum of taste had worked on the Workbench GUI. If only they'd used a decent disk drive, like Apple were forced to on the Mac. Commodore's pivot to selling to Business was doomed when selling a games machine, though the cost-pared A500 was very successful as a gaming computer in (non-UK) Europe.
renaudg 12y ago
Never caught on ? No traction ? That certainly wasn't true in Europe. It seemed like every kid around me in the early 90s had an Amiga 500, a few years after they all seemed to have an Amstrad CPC (wildly popular in France, even though it was a British computer. The Spectrum was the UK darling, and the C64 was the more popular one everywhere else) A generation of game publishers (mainly in the UK and France) thrived on the Amiga and went on to become household names today (UbiSoft comes to mind) As the article notes, there were even Amiga magazines on UK newsstands as far as Y2K, years after Commodore's demise. So yeah, pretty big deal over here. In some ways, the Amiga reminds me of Techno music : invented in the US, but found its true home in Europe.

cmrdporcupine 12y ago

This is a good honest account of the Amiga, I'm glad to see somebody to admit its faults and quirks rather than blindly sing glorious praise to it as is often the case with its former (or present) users. I was an Atari ST user back then, the "other 68000 home computer". When comparing the ST and Amiga it is easy to get caught up in hardware capability comparisons, but the ST was 2/3rds the price of an Amiga, and shipped with more RAM and didn't have the interlaced video. There was nothing like the ST's hi-rez monochrome monitor (very good quality) for the Amiga. Really the ST was like a budget Mac, but with a higher clock rate, higher monochrome screen resolution, and disk format compatibility with MS-DOS. Here's a similar accounting of the first genesis of the ST: http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html The Amiga was a great piece of hardware, and the games for it were generally the best in class. And it was made by some really inspired people. But it only took a few years and that hardware advantage meant little anymore. Mainstream Macs and PCs absorbed the multimedia capabilities. Game consoles from Sega and Sony were able to outplay it, and there were even machines like the Sharp X68000 that blew it away on the hardware front by the late 80s (and even outsold it, albeit only sold in Japan.)

NoPiece 12y ago
You are right that the advantages the Atari ST and Amiga had were absorbed into mainstream consoles and computers, but I think the time gap is a little longer than a few years. The Amiga released in 1985, but the Sega Genesis/Masterdrive didn't come to the US until 1989, and didn't arrive in the UK until 1990. Windows 3.1 was 1992, first color Mac was 1993, and Sony PSX was 1994.
- niklasni1 12y ago
  The first colour-capable Mac was the Mac II in 1987.
bane 12y ago
I'm glad you brought up the X68000 truly a remarkable machine that's forgotten when people talk fondly about the 68k machines. I agree with the other comments here that other machines didn't quickly catch up to the Amiga. I remember growing up with a couple friends who had Amigas in the late 80s, early 90s. My parents ended up buying a PC for home because of work stuff sometime in 90-91 and it didn't hold a candle to the Amigas my friends had. I had to add a Sound Blaster to even get audio (digital sounds were all computed by the CPU so 4ch sound and Amiga quality video almost brought it to its knees) and it really wasn't until I upgraded to an SB Pro and a decent graphics card (this was before 3dfx) that I could say audio and visuals were capable of what an Amiga could do out of the box. But then it took forever for the software ecosystem to catch up. There were popular games coming out at that time that were still EGA and quite a few with CGA and Mono graphics. Even then, most of my friends had modded and hacked on the A500s to get them faster processors, more memory etc and they were easily as capable as my PC. I don't think it was really until the mid90s where PCs started to comfortably pull ahead in both hardware and software. I remember getting a GUS MAX and maxing out the memory on it, and finally knowing for sure that I had audio that was clearly superior to anything the Amiga could pull off and it really wasn't until Doom that you could say that a PC could finally do something an Amiga couldn't. By then we were in 1993/1994, 486s were finally becoming consumer level chips, and high-end systems were running 486DX2s or DX4s and clock multipliers were finally putting the final nail in the Amiga's coffin. But I was on my 3rd or 4th computer by then and my friend were still on their 5-6 year old A500s (though heavily modded by this point). One of my friends toyed around with getting an A4000, but stories of incompatibilities and other issues scared them away and eventually they just ended up with a PC like everybody else. I think the final nail was when Apple switched from Motorola to PowerPC and it became apparent to everybody that the 680x0 line was a technological dead-end and with it the Amiga. But 5-6 years was an eternity in hardware in those days. If you use Moore's law (18 months) as a generational guide, the Amiga was 3 or 4 generations ahead of the rest of the PC market in terms of hardware and software capability. There's really nothing like that today that's comparable.

andrewstuart 12y ago

It's hard to convey the feeling when I first saw an Amiga. In the office, surrounded by monochrome early DOS machines someone had set up an Amiga 1000 showing the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. It's like someone had switched on an electric light for the first time.

NoPiece 12y ago
This was exactly my experience. I was at college, walking to the bookstore to buy a 286. There was a guy from Creative Computers with table set up demoing an Amiga. I couldn't believe what I was seeing - it looked so much better than anything else at the time. I bought one the same day, and struggled to find a decent word processor for the next 4 years. But the games made it worth it.

jug 12y ago

Still reading this, just wanted to thank you for posting this! I owned an Amiga back in the day. I wasn't old at all, I was only just barely getting my toes wet in programming, but I knew I was using something special, and when I look back and see an Amiga 500, I still think it is. It's even pretty despite the design's age. Or maybe it's my pretty memories of it speaking. Making me even more nostalgic about this era, is that it felt like the golden age of computing, so many wildly different concepts. My ZX Spectrum 48K, my Atari 520 STE, then my Amiga 500 Plus. It felt like anything was possible, that anyone had a chance of building a famous new computer with its own operating system and all. And all that felt on countless LAN's. Man, those were the days!

babuskov 12y ago

Ah, those were the days. I learned Assembly on A500. You would just load an image into memory, tell the video card to point to that location and it got shown on the screen. I recall writing a simple program to extract images from games. After reboot, the game graphics would remain in RAM. Using the program I would change the address with keyboard controls until I got something that looked like an image from game on my screen and then I would save it into a file. And I got docs for programming it via a friend who had access to some BBS. Kids these days don't know what they have.

protomyth 12y ago

Jay Miner was one heck of a designer. I do wish there was a book that focused on the forgotten hardware designers of that era.

icedchai 12y ago

I got an Amiga in 7th grade! It was a hugeee step up from my previous computer (an Apple II.) It felt truly amazing for the time (late 80's).

NoPiece 12y ago

In the comments of the article some pointed to a Kickstarter in progress right now for an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain view to celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Amiga. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-anniversary-in-california https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-an...

bitwize 12y ago

Ah, the Amiga -- computing's Lamborghini Countach. Sexy, powerful, revolutionary engineering for its time. Fueler of many a pubescent schoolboy's wet dreams. But also hopelessly stuck in the 80s in terms of design and fiddly enough to put off non-enthusiasts.

josteink 12y ago

As someone who grew up on the Commodore 64 and Amiga, I sorely miss the 68k platform. The few times I'm still forced to deal with the X86-architecture at assembly-level it just pains me to see the clusterfuck that modern the Intel-platform represents. The 68k was clean, nice, logical and let you work on the data you wanted to process. The X86 looks like a patchwork of instructions and registers added cumulatively over time, with no design behind them, and the majority of code is moving data in and out of registers, not actually processing the data. The X86-architecture marked the end for when I cared about knowing how things worked all through the stack. It was just too ugly for me to embrace.