10 ms·

The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up

139 points by mgunes 12y ago

billpg 12y ago
Obligitory links as they are not on the page... Part 1: http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/ Part 2: http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-back/
niklasni1 12y ago
This is a great series. I can also really recommend the book the author wrote, which presents a more technical view of the Amiga: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here
- rsync 12y ago
  Yes, the whole "platform series" from MIT press is fantastic. The first book in the series "racing the beam", especially so.
- carlesfe 12y ago
  Are they complementary? As in, is it worth to read the book after reading the blogposts, or do they tell the same story?
  - niklasni1 12y ago
    Yes, very much so. The book contains some quite technical walkthroughs of the Amiga, both software and hardware. In enough detail that a technical person will be able to understand more or less exactly what's going on, but without requiring any knowledge about the Amiga.
    - mwcampbell 12y ago
      Conversely, the blog posts tell the story of the Amiga's origin in more detail than the book. So they do complement each other.
      - carlesfe 12y ago
        Thank you both. I'll definitely have a look at it, I'm fascinated by computer history.
spiritplumber 12y ago
I'm still wondering why the Amiga didn't become ubiquitous. I had one and I kept getting called a liar about its price - for the performance compared to PCs of the time, surely I omitted a zero.
- ido 12y ago
  Some of it is in the article. Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caught up. While the amiga 1000 was revolutionary in 1985, AGA[1] was not that special in 1992 (especially as it wasn't particularly beneficial to 3d games like doom, which were becoming the new hotstuff). The amiga of the 90s was the 3dfx voodoo. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Archite...
  - Gracana 12y ago
    If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's "Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A
  - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
    And frankly by the late 80s the 680000 architecture itself had hit a dead end performance wise. Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems. I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.) I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-) What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.
empressplay 12y ago
The Deathbed Vigil: The Last Day At Commodore https://youtu.be/jvJjFYHGTnU https://youtu.be/jvJjFYHGTnU
gaius 12y ago
I sometimes like to escape into a fantasy daydream world when I'm at work, where the British government of the 80s realized the importance of controlling your own destiny, and just bought a million Acorn Archimedes for the entire civil service, military, universities etc, enough that it became a no-brainer for everyone else in the UK. We could be 10-20 years ahead of where we are now. Same if the Germans and Dutch had just bought Commmodore and Atari outright and moved their production over. Of course if they had they would probably have been tricked into buying Amstrad shit.
- Yuioup 12y ago
  Hey! I loved my Amstrad.
- new299 12y ago
  I live in a similar fantasy land, however I think Acorn had ample help from the UK government. After all, pretty much every secondary school in the UK purchased them. That and free national TV advertising from the BBC. The problem was that platforms that were limited to a single nation were not viable, Acorn never really broke into the US market. I don't believe there was even much adoption in Europe. You can see the same story in Japan with MSX. That said, I agree that RiscOS was far superior to many competitors. But as we still see, it is adoption and the ecosystem around the platform which is often the deciding factor in success than the superiority of the basic technology. Still more than a little nostalgic though... and wish it was able to address international markets better. Anyone have some cash to buy the rights to RiscOS and open source it? I think it only take 30K GBP or so. :)
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    If just the cash were the problem I'd be happy to do it but I think RiscOS's time has past. QnX now, that would be another matter but I suspect RIM will want more then 30 K for it. I already approached Quantum when they still owned it but there was absolutely no way to get them to even respond. Which is a pity because I think something like QnX in open source form would absolutely rock.
  - gaius 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
carlesfe 12y ago
I just realized that the Amiga story is exactly what would have happened to Apple in an alternative timeline where the company had filed for bankruptcy without Jobs. Or the other way around, if they had succeeded we all may be wearing Amiga Watches on our wrists right now. It's very interesting to see how good/bad managerial decisions or tiny details can totally sink an advanced technology and change the course of the future. Can we imagine a present with a current technology without the advances that, for example, Apple has brought? Maybe we'll all be still using Nokia phones or Palm PDAs.
WalterBright 12y ago
I had an Amiga for a while. You couldn't hook up standard keyboards and monitors to it, everything was just different enough to be incompatible. It didn't bode well for Amiga's future.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  A "standard" keyboard here means "a keyboard made for IBM PC AT clones". When you put everything in context (and consider the Amiga predates the first 386-based PCs by a couple years), it made no sense for the Amiga to have a PC keyboard connector any more than it would make sense for an Apple II to have one.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 12y ago
    The monitor issue is/was more serious, though not really an issue early on. The problem there was that the Amiga graphics modes would not work with many cheaper PC monitors, so we had to spend extra on expensive multisync monitors or Commodore branded monitors. And unlike the keyboard, that was something people wanted to upgrade.
    - cmrdporcupine 11y ago
      Yep same nonsense on the Atari. Computer vendors back then really did frustrating things around peripherals. It was bad enough they were so expensive, but external disks, monitors, mice, RAM everything was proprietary, which made it worse. Eventually things settled on SCSI, then IDE, but there were many years there where it was wild west on standards for all of the above. I just bought an Atari TT off eBay. It will nicely drive a VGA monitor, but not for its highest resolution (1280x960), for which it needs a special ("ECL") monitor. An adapter from that to VGA is $175 from a hobbyist -- almost as much as I paid for the computer.
yeureka 12y ago
My favourite computers of all time were my A500 and A1200. I learned the most about how a computer works and how to program it. I learned how to create and control sound and graphics and how these are represented inside the machine. I made my own games in a mix of high-level languages ( Amos! ) and 68000 assembly. I made 3D animations assembled frame by frame onto a VHS tape deck. I even used the Amiga to VJ at clubs and student parties. Really loved those machines.
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
The Sharp X68000 was more successful and powerful than any other machine in the "68000 wars." It came a few years later, but outsold both Atari and Amiga (the number I heard was 15 million units sold). However it sold only in Japan, and really only for games -- despite having higher spec'd multimedia and even having video input that could have made a "video toaster" type app like the Amiga possible. Just shows you how massive the Japanese gaming market was in the 80s/early 90s that that niche machine sold only there could outsell them.
kw71 12y ago
My favorite 68k machine is the 3b1. It had a windowing system with mouse, but never any apps that would be interesting for the desktop user. Funny that Apple switched to UNIX fifteen years later. If they had started with it, instead of that stupid system where half the OS was in ROM, it would have been so far ahead.

139 points by mgunes 12y ago

Obligitory links as they are not on the page... Part 1: http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/ Part 2: http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-back/

niklasni1 12y ago

This is a great series. I can also really recommend the book the author wrote, which presents a more technical view of the Amiga: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here

rsync 12y ago
Yes, the whole "platform series" from MIT press is fantastic. The first book in the series "racing the beam", especially so.
carlesfe 12y ago
Are they complementary? As in, is it worth to read the book after reading the blogposts, or do they tell the same story?
- niklasni1 12y ago
  Yes, very much so. The book contains some quite technical walkthroughs of the Amiga, both software and hardware. In enough detail that a technical person will be able to understand more or less exactly what's going on, but without requiring any knowledge about the Amiga.
  - mwcampbell 12y ago
    Conversely, the blog posts tell the story of the Amiga's origin in more detail than the book. So they do complement each other.
    - carlesfe 12y ago
      Thank you both. I'll definitely have a look at it, I'm fascinated by computer history.

spiritplumber 12y ago

I'm still wondering why the Amiga didn't become ubiquitous. I had one and I kept getting called a liar about its price - for the performance compared to PCs of the time, surely I omitted a zero.

ido 12y ago
Some of it is in the article. Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caught up. While the amiga 1000 was revolutionary in 1985, AGA[1] was not that special in 1992 (especially as it wasn't particularly beneficial to 3d games like doom, which were becoming the new hotstuff). The amiga of the 90s was the 3dfx voodoo. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Archite...
- Gracana 12y ago
  If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's "Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A
- cmrdporcupine 12y ago
  And frankly by the late 80s the 680000 architecture itself had hit a dead end performance wise. Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems. I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.) I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-) What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.

empressplay 12y ago

The Deathbed Vigil: The Last Day At Commodore https://youtu.be/jvJjFYHGTnU https://youtu.be/jvJjFYHGTnU

gaius 12y ago

I sometimes like to escape into a fantasy daydream world when I'm at work, where the British government of the 80s realized the importance of controlling your own destiny, and just bought a million Acorn Archimedes for the entire civil service, military, universities etc, enough that it became a no-brainer for everyone else in the UK. We could be 10-20 years ahead of where we are now. Same if the Germans and Dutch had just bought Commmodore and Atari outright and moved their production over. Of course if they had they would probably have been tricked into buying Amstrad shit.

Yuioup 12y ago
Hey! I loved my Amstrad.
new299 12y ago
I live in a similar fantasy land, however I think Acorn had ample help from the UK government. After all, pretty much every secondary school in the UK purchased them. That and free national TV advertising from the BBC. The problem was that platforms that were limited to a single nation were not viable, Acorn never really broke into the US market. I don't believe there was even much adoption in Europe. You can see the same story in Japan with MSX. That said, I agree that RiscOS was far superior to many competitors. But as we still see, it is adoption and the ecosystem around the platform which is often the deciding factor in success than the superiority of the basic technology. Still more than a little nostalgic though... and wish it was able to address international markets better. Anyone have some cash to buy the rights to RiscOS and open source it? I think it only take 30K GBP or so. :)
- jacquesm 12y ago
  If just the cash were the problem I'd be happy to do it but I think RiscOS's time has past. QnX now, that would be another matter but I suspect RIM will want more then 30 K for it. I already approached Quantum when they still owned it but there was absolutely no way to get them to even respond. Which is a pity because I think something like QnX in open source form would absolutely rock.
- gaius 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

carlesfe 12y ago

I just realized that the Amiga story is exactly what would have happened to Apple in an alternative timeline where the company had filed for bankruptcy without Jobs. Or the other way around, if they had succeeded we all may be wearing Amiga Watches on our wrists right now. It's very interesting to see how good/bad managerial decisions or tiny details can totally sink an advanced technology and change the course of the future. Can we imagine a present with a current technology without the advances that, for example, Apple has brought? Maybe we'll all be still using Nokia phones or Palm PDAs.

WalterBright 12y ago

I had an Amiga for a while. You couldn't hook up standard keyboards and monitors to it, everything was just different enough to be incompatible. It didn't bode well for Amiga's future.

rbanffy 12y ago
A "standard" keyboard here means "a keyboard made for IBM PC AT clones". When you put everything in context (and consider the Amiga predates the first 386-based PCs by a couple years), it made no sense for the Amiga to have a PC keyboard connector any more than it would make sense for an Apple II to have one.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 12y ago
  The monitor issue is/was more serious, though not really an issue early on. The problem there was that the Amiga graphics modes would not work with many cheaper PC monitors, so we had to spend extra on expensive multisync monitors or Commodore branded monitors. And unlike the keyboard, that was something people wanted to upgrade.
  - cmrdporcupine 11y ago
    Yep same nonsense on the Atari. Computer vendors back then really did frustrating things around peripherals. It was bad enough they were so expensive, but external disks, monitors, mice, RAM everything was proprietary, which made it worse. Eventually things settled on SCSI, then IDE, but there were many years there where it was wild west on standards for all of the above. I just bought an Atari TT off eBay. It will nicely drive a VGA monitor, but not for its highest resolution (1280x960), for which it needs a special ("ECL") monitor. An adapter from that to VGA is $175 from a hobbyist -- almost as much as I paid for the computer.

yeureka 12y ago

My favourite computers of all time were my A500 and A1200. I learned the most about how a computer works and how to program it. I learned how to create and control sound and graphics and how these are represented inside the machine. I made my own games in a mix of high-level languages ( Amos! ) and 68000 assembly. I made 3D animations assembled frame by frame onto a VHS tape deck. I even used the Amiga to VJ at clubs and student parties. Really loved those machines.

cmrdporcupine 12y ago

The Sharp X68000 was more successful and powerful than any other machine in the "68000 wars." It came a few years later, but outsold both Atari and Amiga (the number I heard was 15 million units sold). However it sold only in Japan, and really only for games -- despite having higher spec'd multimedia and even having video input that could have made a "video toaster" type app like the Amiga possible. Just shows you how massive the Japanese gaming market was in the 80s/early 90s that that niche machine sold only there could outsell them.

kw71 12y ago

My favorite 68k machine is the 3b1. It had a windowing system with mouse, but never any apps that would be interesting for the desktop user. Funny that Apple switched to UNIX fifteen years later. If they had started with it, instead of that stupid system where half the OS was in ROM, it would have been so far ahead.