17 ms·

Today, 30 years ago, Commodore introduced the Amiga

217 points by pdknsk 11y ago

shawndumas 11y ago
I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend.
- rogeryu 11y ago
  > I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend. I suppose you mean your 13yo inner child?
foobarge 11y ago
One can read "The Future Was Here", to learn more about the platform and its contributors. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here - there's also an accompanying website: http://amiga.filfre.net http://amiga.filfre.net Note that the Platform Studies series (http://www.platformstudies.com http://www.platformstudies.com) has exciting upcoming stuff.
- bane 11y ago
  These are absolutely fantastic books. They hit the nostalgia buttons, but then go into some nitty gritty details about what these things were. Racing the Beam absolutely changed how I think about pixels on a computer screen in a way that's hard to explain, but is quite profound.
nsxwolf 11y ago
In 4th grade a friend got an Amiga. He boasted that it had 4096 colors, and we ridiculed him mercilessly. There aren't that many colors! Can you name them? We had our Apple IIs and TI-99/4As with their 16 colors or less and couldn't imagine anything greater. Then we went to his house and saw Defender of the Crown, and we were humbled.
- pavlov 11y ago
  I remember having similar trouble imagining why a PC would need a sound card. After all, the PC speaker could already play every note: C, D, E and so on... What could a sound card possibly add? Then I got a copy of Sierra's demo cassette that had sounds from games like King's Quest IV and Space Quest 3. It blew my mind. I listened to it a hundred times. (The whole cassette is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A ) Of course the Amiga had 4-channel sample playback several years before my Sierra cassette revelation, but I didn't know anyone with an Amiga at that time.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    I had a similar experience calling into Sierra's 800 number and listening to their hold music, which was music from their games played on a Roland MT-32. I had an 8 bit Sound Blaster at the time, which sounded pretty good, but this just absolutely blew my mind. Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time, there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent. In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Yeah, it's interesting how we pretty much hit the ceiling on digital audio quality more than a decade ago. If I'd built my computers instead of buying premade, I could still be using the audio card I bought in 2000 and not have any problems with it. That's so alien to the general hardware experience.
  - bemmu 11y ago
    Similarly I used to think that resolutions above 320 x 256 are just unnecessarily hi-fi. After that it becomes very difficult to see individual pixels, so how can you really appreciate the artwork of the game anymore?
  - redwall_hp 11y ago
    There's a cool video on YouTube of the Monkey Island theme playing on different systems with varying sound cards, from the farty PC speaker, across a decade's worth of sound cards playing the MIDI differently, all the way up to the modern WAV audio mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y
walkingolof 11y ago
If you want an excellent book about Commodore: http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907 http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/...
- Syssiphus 11y ago
  Or a great DVD about it's end - The Deathbed Vigil: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/video.html http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/video.html
- vidarh 11y ago
  Note that there's a second edition that's split into two volumes. The first covers the "8-bit era". The second, covering the "Amiga years" has just had a successful kickstarter [1] and should be ready by end of year hopefully. It greatly expands on the original. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-the-amiga-years-book https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-th...
ThomPete 11y ago
For a 41 year old man like me and many of my generation the influence of Commodore was life altering. It was the Apple of it's time, better in many ways than Apple itself with so much potential. Seeing Defender of the Crown for the first time, or using Deluxe Paint, or ProTracker. You just felt like living in the not evenly distributed future where you were in the forefront and everyone without an Amiga was years in the past. The innocence and magic feeling of all this at the time, unexplored possibilities an amazing time I hope every generation gets to experience in their own way.
- walkingolof 11y ago
  Well said, its just hard to see that combination of accessibility and magic happening again, everything was new to everyone (almost) back then.
- danmaz74 11y ago
  Same age, same experience. I also remember when years later I first started really using Windows and an IBM PC at university - they were already 486DX2 at a whopping 66MHz, but the UI still felt more sluggish than my 7MHz at home. Computations, on the other hand, were incomparably faster.
  - Toenex 11y ago
    I'm a little older (46) and my first computer was a Vic20. That was followed by a C64 which I owned when the Amiga 500 was released and the difference was staggering. The introduction of the workbench desktop was jaw dropping compared to the relatively clunky Commodore Basic interface of the older machines. I couldn't afford one at the time so I only got to play with the 500 at a friends or in stores which probably made them even more fabulous - it was years before I actually owned an Amiga and that was the 1200. The next time I had such an experience was when I started using Sun Sparc stations connected to a network and the SunView interface. Great days.
    - foobarge 11y ago
      First computer was a PC1211. Then I got an ORIC ATMOS and an Atari ST. Never really had a chance to play with an Amiga and couldn't buy it (a bit pricey - although maybe an other way to play that hand would have been to save the money spent in other computers to only buy the Amiga. But at that rate, I'd probably still be waiting for something better to come around. "The Future Was Here" really got me to understand what was so great about the Amiga (because, the ST also had the Boing demo - but the sound wasn't as nice.)
emptybits 11y ago
I loved my Amiga A1000. I forgave the early, buggy floppy-based firmware (Kickstart) and OS (Workbench). I think this experience tempered me for a life working with good-intentioned but buggy operating systems. :-)
jcr 11y ago
The "Viva Amiga" film project doesn't seem to be finished yet, but according to their July 3, 2013 blog post, they interviewed Tim Jenison, the creator of the Video Toaster [2], and the current NewTek CEO, Jim Plant. That alone will be interesting. Even if you aren't old enough to remember how the whole world somehow overlooked the amazing capabilities of the Amigas, it's an interesting and humbling historical lesson in how the best tech does not always win. [1] http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-video-toaster.html http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-video-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
- bemmu 11y ago
  There also this movie coming some time soon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-bedrooms-to-billions-the-amiga-years https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-bedroom...
expertentipp 11y ago
If you can afford it you should always sell a product for no more than a 100% of your cost. [1] [1] 31:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk
nirai 11y ago
I was in love with my C64 and everything Commodore including the Amiga, as any Apple die hard is today; but isn't it time we moved on? it was a computer, and it is no more... chao, and thanks for all the fish...
- vidarh 11y ago
  We won't move on until we have systems that consistently beat it. My phone is incomparably more powerful than my old Amiga - with a quad core CPU running on a clock frequency hundreds of times faster and with overall performance at least three orders of magnitude greater, yet even simple apps are often more sluggish, for example. Sometimes it feels like we've moved backwards in many respects (yes, there are amazing improvements too)
  - nirai 11y ago
    and I seem to remember "the 6 million dollar man" as the most awesome series ever, and yet once every couple of years when I get the urge to look up an episode for old times sake I need to confront reality, that it actually totally sucked. take a look at this top 10 games video for the Amiga - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4 , it may have rated as awesome in 1985-1990 but comparing it with anything today is totally ridiculous; and gaming is just an example, since this comparison extends to any other software genre, such as office, communication, engineering, scientific tools, programming tools, etc...
    - vidarh 11y ago
      I have used AmigaOS and "descendants" like AROS many times in recent years, so I'm not just looking at this with rose-tinted nostalgia. In fact, I've contributed code to AROS. And yes, there are still awesome things about it. I've pointed out here before, for example, that I can booth AmigaOS or AROS on modern hardware (either under an emulator in the case of AmigaOS, or the Linux hosted version in the case of AROS) and have it boot straight into a text editor, and that whole process starts faster than Emacs on my laptop. And there are still massive amounts of functionality that isn't readily available in mainstream OS's today. Exactly because attitudes like yours means that lots of developers ignore a lot of the lessons these systems have for us - it's not just the Amiga.
kirk21 11y ago
Good old times! Cool overview of the history of programming languages: http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Banzaaaai 11y ago
Amazed at an Amiga 1000 of a friend. Amiga 500 then A4000/40/RetinaZ3.
ice303 11y ago
My first contact with a A500 was in a friends house. I was amazed by the graphics and the sound. At that time, I had a ZX Spectrum 48k, and had to save money for about 2 years to buy it. never had the money to buy a Amiga. Last month, got myself a A500 and I'm discovering a whole computer world that I've missed.
mgkimsal 11y ago
One interesting memory that I still have trouble explaining to people - multiple video modes on the same screen. I remember having a 640x400(ish) 256 color screen, then pulling it down halfway and having a 320x200(ish) workbench screen behind it. "Huh?" is what I usually get. Then "why would you want that?"
- pjc50 11y ago
  A nifty feature that's only possible on analogue monitors, I think. Like light guns.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    It was also only worthwhile as long as multiple resolutions had different tradeoffs in terms of supported palette etc. On the Amiga you even had paint programs using this to display the image you were editing at one resolution/palette, and the UI / tools etc. in a strip displayed at a different resolution.
toyg 11y ago
I got an Amiga 500 the following year (or 2 years later? I can't remember). I was a kid, so 99% of my time was spent on games; most of my friends had a C64 or a ZXSpectrum, so basically they queued to come to my house... My father went on to use Logistix extensively in his work, and even to compute results for some school election -- printing tons of pie charts with a dot-matrix. He also used some graphic effects software (3dtext? Videotext? Can't remember). Because we did not have any video equipment or laser printer, he ended up taking pictures of the screen with his Reflex and then have them printed on actual slides. His colleagues were in awe. Now I can't believe he went to all that trouble! By the time I actually paid some attention to the manuals and tried my hand at Workbench stuff, Amiga was on its way out. I ended up using an IBM emulator to run WordPerfect, and then just moved to a Windows 3.1 laptop; by then, "real" games had moved to consoles anyway.
branchless 11y ago
Got my amiga 500 down from the loft about a year ago. It had lay dormant for at least a decade. Plastic had yellowed. I plugged it in and turned on the power switch, expecting to hear a fizz/pop and declare it dead. It booted up fine. And ran kick-off 2. Seems the only thing to degrade in those 10 years is my reaction time.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Assuming you're hoping to play more Kick Off 2 (plus a bit of Sensi perhaps ;-) ), it's highly recommended to replace the capacitors, as leaking capacitors have a nasty habit of ruining old computers. Also, regarding "Plastic had yellowed.", you may be interested in this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright
pezz 11y ago
Need to add to the Amiga love anecdotes. - My first Amiga was an A500, eventually ended up with a chip RAM upgrade, an A520 20MB hard disk and some extra Fast RAM. - I owned several Amigas in the early 90s, but I actually cried when I sold my A1200 to buy a 486 DX2 66! Why you may ask? Doom. It changed everything.
- pkroll 11y ago
  Doom was the death knell for my Amiga days as well. That and by that time, IIRC, it was obvious that Commodore was going under fast. I don't want to go pull out an Amiga and play, but it's rare to experience something that actually feels like a whole new ball game. (The Oculus Rift is close.)
  - lakkal 11y ago
    After my first machine, an Atari 800, I had an Amiga 500 and loved it. But I didn't keep up with industry news at the time, so my first indication that All Was Not Well was when I walked into my local Amiga store (Omnitek, in Tewksbury, MA) and the Amiga stuff had been moved aside to make room for IBM PC-contemptibles... some of them with Commodore badges.
morsch 11y ago
There's a YouTube channel with excrutiatingly in-depth Amiga repairs: https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos He goes down to the circuit level, including within microchips, identifies problems with all kinds of tools including spectrum analysers, and shows off some (to me) amazing soldering skills. Here's a four hour (I kid you not) video of the repair of an Amiga CD32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  Wow
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  RetroGameModz videos are extremely by the book, IPC to the letter. Afair he is from Netherlands, or some other old rich European country, so he can afford 'wasting time' during repairs as a hobby. In real life this level of attention to detail (pedantry) is present _only_ in military, aviation and space (even medical is not that crazy). For example normal people dont reconstruct pads, they jumper over with kynar/enamel wire.
- MagerValp 11y ago
  Couldn't agree more, his videos are extremely detailed and very easy to follow! I followed his A4000 audio repair video and managed to fix all the problems with my board.
justuk 11y ago
Been reading about modern Amiga hardware recently like the upcoming X5000 with Amiga OS 4.1. Almost tempted to try it. I forced myself to use Windows, OS X and various Linux for years, but they never felt right.
LBarret 11y ago
The real question : Where do I download a dvd image with an emulator and 1000 games to replay my youth ?
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Here: http://www.amigaforever.com/ http://www.amigaforever.com/
Paul_S 11y ago
I missed out on the Amiga, going straight from 8bit Atari to x86. I used a A500 but never owned anything made by Commodore. I still find it fascinating and the Deathbed Vigil video was a great but melancholy watch. I never programmed for the Amiga but like everyone else I was always impressed by what the Amiga demoscene could do. An unfortunate clash for the opening weekend with quakecon dates.
vanderZwan 11y ago
There's a very nice interview on Tweakers.net taken on the Amsterdam Amiga day, with many influential developers: http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-de-invloed-van-de-eerste-multimediacomputer.html http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-de-i... RJ Mical and Dave Haynie are interviewed, who did hardware development for the Amigas, as well as Mike Dailly (creator of Lemmings) and Allister Brimble (composed for some well-known games of the platforms). Lot's of Dutch inbetween explaining the historical significance, without subtitles, but probably worth a listen to just for what these guys have to say about the platform.
jcadam 11y ago
I remember when we upgraded the family computer from a (second-hand) Apple ][e to an (also second-hand) Amiga 500. I had gotten my start programming in BASIC on the Apple ][, and was blown away by the stuff I could do using AMOS on the Amiga. The Amiga 500 was eventually replaced by a new Amiga 1200. Sometime after the end of Commodore (I must have been 14 or so) my parents bought our first PC, a 486 (the latest and greatest at the time) running DOS / Windows 3.1... it just wasn't the same.
yason 11y ago
Amiga was like Tesla (the car) is now. Not that it was (is) blazing fast and technologically advanced in comparison to other models but the fact that it seems to have come from a whole another plane of technology. Surely it helps to have multiple special-purpose chips onboard as it helps to have dense battery pack worth of 500km baked into the chassis. But that's not the thing. What a 32-bit pre-emptively multitasking operating system with modern library stacks and system services for building user interfaces and applications was to old machines where you poked memory addresses directly to draw something on the screen is quite akin to what an internet-connected fully electrically powered and from-the-ground-up architected smart&mobile device-on-wheels is to clunkers primarily designed to host an oily, fire-burning engine and an appropriate steel drivetrain, with a passenger cabin retrofitted wherever there's space left from the mechanical components. You could write high-level code and put that space ship spinning on the screen, and still have it rotate more smoothly than in any of the machines from preceding era—where no operating system or user interface was messing in the way. That was like having the cake and eating it too. And yet you could switch to "insane mode" by suspending the operating system and commanding the special chips directly, and do things people couldn't even imagine on 8-bit machines (and for the most part, on 16-bit machines too). Amiga had elements so modern that it almost lasted till the end of the 90's, except for cpu power and marketshare. Considering it was born in the early 80's when 8-bit cpus could beep and produce blocks of color on the screen and died (for all practical purposes) in the internet era, that's one long stretch of time where it made the difference.
- bane 11y ago
  IIR, there were still Amigas buried deep in TV studios right up to the switch to HD. I remember watching local weather broadcasts and every once in a while that tell-tale amiga mouse cursor would make an appearance, and this was into the 2000s.
- MagerValp 11y ago
  It's interesting that the OS has actually aged pretty well. I went back the other year and wrote a small application in AmigaE, a great little OO language specifically tailored for the M68k, and had a blast. I architectured it to use multiple processes and IPC, with the UI running at high priority at a steady 60 fps while image loading a decoding is done in the background. No assembly code or direct hardware access, just plain E and the full OS multitasking int he background, and it still runs without dropping a frame on a 7 MHz A500 with a floppy drive. The code is on Github if anyone's curious: https://github.com/MagerValp/ArcadeGameSelector
bane 11y ago
I'm reading "The Future Was Here" and it gives an excellent dive into the guts and history of the machine. I've really come to a new appreciation for how this crazy machine worked. Highly recommend this book for anybody with more than a passing interest in this legendary machine.
tjr 11y ago
I was about 12 years old. I had been engrossed with both the family Apple IIe computer and the fleet of Apple computers installed at my school, learning how to write BASIC programs. Wandering through the local shopping mall with my dad, we saw in the window of a software shop an Amiga 1200 running Lemmings. I was awestruck. I started getting copies of Amiga-related magazines, and saw these amazing three-dimensional pictures of things like balls and rubber ducks. It was like gazing into the future. Thankfully, my dad was likewise impressed, and within a few months we received delivery of a shiny new Amiga 3000. In anticipation of continuing my pursuit of programming, we got a compiler for an Amiga variant of BASIC, but I ended up focusing on two-dimensional graphics with Brillance, three-dimensional graphics with Imagine, and video editing with a variety of tools. A friend at school picked up an Amiga 2000 and joined the multimedia production fun. It might be a good thing that we didn't have YouTube back then, as we likely would have published all sorts of embarrassingly poorly-done animations and videos. We persuaded our school to buy its own Amiga computer for us to edit the student newsletter on, but we both left the school the following year, and it was reported that the Amiga got shoved into a storage space, never to be used again. I tried hard to persuade anyone who would listen to get an Amiga. The IBM-clones and Macs of the day just seemed so flat-out inferior, I couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't want an Amiga if they just realized what it could do. I suppose I would have been happy to still be using the Amiga to this day, except that, after the demise of Commodore, it became increasingly (but not surprisingly) clear that support for the Amiga platform was dwindling. Some users have heroically clung to the Amiga even to this day, but even by 1996 or so it was looking prudent to move elsewhere. Like remembering a corned beef sandwich from a deli you visited twenty years ago, I might be remembering the Amiga greater than it actually was. But even after thirteen years of using modern Apple computers (and iPads and iPhones and what-not), I still feel there was something magical about the Amiga that has not been captured in anything else. Or maybe the Amiga captured something magical in me.
gdubs 11y ago
Fun fact: Comedian Dana Carvey's brother Brad Carvey built the first wire-wrapped Video Toaster -- arguably the Amiga's "Killer App", which spawned Lightwave3D and powered the visual effects of countless 90's science fiction shows (as well as some film work). In Wayne's World II you can spot Garth wearing a Video Toaster t-shirt to their music festival.
- kstrauser 11y ago
  Also, Wil Wheaton did QA for the Video Toaster (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-Star_Trek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-Star_Trek).
  - gdubs 11y ago
    Wow, that's really something -- stars on hit TV show for better part of a decade and moves to Kansas to QA an Amiga product. Illustrative of how passionate people were about the Amiga.
mrbill 11y ago
I was 13-14, and a member of Telenet's "Net Exchange" BBS, which existed to support members of its "PC Pursuit" [1] service. I dialed in via a backdoor on one of Telenet's 800 numbers, using (at first) a 300 baud modem on a HP 110 laptop. I got to be friends with a number of the folks on the system, and at the time, my main system was an Atari 520STfm (it was all we could afford). A bunch of the guys on the board took pity on me, took up a collection, and (secretly) called my mom. A month or so later, a Very Large Box arrived in the mail. The guys had gotten together with one of their own who owned a computer store, and bought me a used, but well-equipped, Amiga 1000 system, along with an adapter that let me use my Atari monitor with it. The letter that came along with the system said "No smart kid should be without a decent computer. All we ask is that you do the same for someone else when you're able." It made my mom cry. I used that system every day. Took it to school to show off a couple of times (we were using PS/2 Model 25s there, in comparison). It was used to do titling for the public-access news show my media class produced, among other things. It was my main system up until I had to "upgrade" (blech) to a 386sx-33 so I could run 1-2-3, Wordperfect 5.1, and DBase III+ for college classes. Over the years I acquired numerous A2000s, an A3000 or two, and even an A4K, but nothing beat the fun of firing up that A1000 back in the day. I turn 41 this year, and have had a great 20+-year career as a UNIX/Linux systems administrator. I'll never forget those guys who pitched in and helped out some kid living in a tiny rural Oklahoma town - they really helped get me to where I am today. To continue the tradition, I build and give away at least 2-3 computers a year to people who are less fortunate. It's the least I can do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit
gleegum 11y ago
I still have my Amiga 500, working. Some years ago I built this 'website', imagining how an Amiga comeback would be: http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/ http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/
ezy 11y ago
Often the software and OS APIs on that system are glossed over in favor of the hardware or the graphical shell. The Exec[1] was a marvel at the time -- and in some ways, still is. I don't know how much ARexx[2] preceeded AppleScript, but it was also, something that other OSes seldom got right. It took other user-oriented operating systems about a decade to catch up, and in fact, the hardware everyone raves about in the Amiga fell behind far sooner than the system software. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx

217 points by pdknsk 11y ago

shawndumas 11y ago

I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend.

rogeryu 11y ago
> I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend. I suppose you mean your 13yo inner child?

foobarge 11y ago

One can read "The Future Was Here", to learn more about the platform and its contributors. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here - there's also an accompanying website: http://amiga.filfre.net http://amiga.filfre.net Note that the Platform Studies series (http://www.platformstudies.com http://www.platformstudies.com) has exciting upcoming stuff.

bane 11y ago
These are absolutely fantastic books. They hit the nostalgia buttons, but then go into some nitty gritty details about what these things were. Racing the Beam absolutely changed how I think about pixels on a computer screen in a way that's hard to explain, but is quite profound.

nsxwolf 11y ago

In 4th grade a friend got an Amiga. He boasted that it had 4096 colors, and we ridiculed him mercilessly. There aren't that many colors! Can you name them? We had our Apple IIs and TI-99/4As with their 16 colors or less and couldn't imagine anything greater. Then we went to his house and saw Defender of the Crown, and we were humbled.

pavlov 11y ago
I remember having similar trouble imagining why a PC would need a sound card. After all, the PC speaker could already play every note: C, D, E and so on... What could a sound card possibly add? Then I got a copy of Sierra's demo cassette that had sounds from games like King's Quest IV and Space Quest 3. It blew my mind. I listened to it a hundred times. (The whole cassette is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A ) Of course the Amiga had 4-channel sample playback several years before my Sierra cassette revelation, but I didn't know anyone with an Amiga at that time.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  I had a similar experience calling into Sierra's 800 number and listening to their hold music, which was music from their games played on a Roland MT-32. I had an 8 bit Sound Blaster at the time, which sounded pretty good, but this just absolutely blew my mind. Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time, there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent. In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Yeah, it's interesting how we pretty much hit the ceiling on digital audio quality more than a decade ago. If I'd built my computers instead of buying premade, I could still be using the audio card I bought in 2000 and not have any problems with it. That's so alien to the general hardware experience.
- bemmu 11y ago
  Similarly I used to think that resolutions above 320 x 256 are just unnecessarily hi-fi. After that it becomes very difficult to see individual pixels, so how can you really appreciate the artwork of the game anymore?
- redwall_hp 11y ago
  There's a cool video on YouTube of the Monkey Island theme playing on different systems with varying sound cards, from the farty PC speaker, across a decade's worth of sound cards playing the MIDI differently, all the way up to the modern WAV audio mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y

walkingolof 11y ago

If you want an excellent book about Commodore: http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907 http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/...

Syssiphus 11y ago
Or a great DVD about it's end - The Deathbed Vigil: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/video.html http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/video.html
vidarh 11y ago
Note that there's a second edition that's split into two volumes. The first covers the "8-bit era". The second, covering the "Amiga years" has just had a successful kickstarter [1] and should be ready by end of year hopefully. It greatly expands on the original. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-the-amiga-years-book https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-th...

ThomPete 11y ago

For a 41 year old man like me and many of my generation the influence of Commodore was life altering. It was the Apple of it's time, better in many ways than Apple itself with so much potential. Seeing Defender of the Crown for the first time, or using Deluxe Paint, or ProTracker. You just felt like living in the not evenly distributed future where you were in the forefront and everyone without an Amiga was years in the past. The innocence and magic feeling of all this at the time, unexplored possibilities an amazing time I hope every generation gets to experience in their own way.

walkingolof 11y ago
Well said, its just hard to see that combination of accessibility and magic happening again, everything was new to everyone (almost) back then.
danmaz74 11y ago
Same age, same experience. I also remember when years later I first started really using Windows and an IBM PC at university - they were already 486DX2 at a whopping 66MHz, but the UI still felt more sluggish than my 7MHz at home. Computations, on the other hand, were incomparably faster.
- Toenex 11y ago
  I'm a little older (46) and my first computer was a Vic20. That was followed by a C64 which I owned when the Amiga 500 was released and the difference was staggering. The introduction of the workbench desktop was jaw dropping compared to the relatively clunky Commodore Basic interface of the older machines. I couldn't afford one at the time so I only got to play with the 500 at a friends or in stores which probably made them even more fabulous - it was years before I actually owned an Amiga and that was the 1200. The next time I had such an experience was when I started using Sun Sparc stations connected to a network and the SunView interface. Great days.
  - foobarge 11y ago
    First computer was a PC1211. Then I got an ORIC ATMOS and an Atari ST. Never really had a chance to play with an Amiga and couldn't buy it (a bit pricey - although maybe an other way to play that hand would have been to save the money spent in other computers to only buy the Amiga. But at that rate, I'd probably still be waiting for something better to come around. "The Future Was Here" really got me to understand what was so great about the Amiga (because, the ST also had the Boing demo - but the sound wasn't as nice.)

emptybits 11y ago

I loved my Amiga A1000. I forgave the early, buggy floppy-based firmware (Kickstart) and OS (Workbench). I think this experience tempered me for a life working with good-intentioned but buggy operating systems. :-)

jcr 11y ago

The "Viva Amiga" film project doesn't seem to be finished yet, but according to their July 3, 2013 blog post, they interviewed Tim Jenison, the creator of the Video Toaster [2], and the current NewTek CEO, Jim Plant. That alone will be interesting. Even if you aren't old enough to remember how the whole world somehow overlooked the amazing capabilities of the Amigas, it's an interesting and humbling historical lesson in how the best tech does not always win. [1] http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-video-toaster.html http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-video-t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

bemmu 11y ago
There also this movie coming some time soon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-bedrooms-to-billions-the-amiga-years https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-bedroom...

expertentipp 11y ago

If you can afford it you should always sell a product for no more than a 100% of your cost. [1] [1] 31:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk

nirai 11y ago

I was in love with my C64 and everything Commodore including the Amiga, as any Apple die hard is today; but isn't it time we moved on? it was a computer, and it is no more... chao, and thanks for all the fish...

vidarh 11y ago
We won't move on until we have systems that consistently beat it. My phone is incomparably more powerful than my old Amiga - with a quad core CPU running on a clock frequency hundreds of times faster and with overall performance at least three orders of magnitude greater, yet even simple apps are often more sluggish, for example. Sometimes it feels like we've moved backwards in many respects (yes, there are amazing improvements too)
- nirai 11y ago
  and I seem to remember "the 6 million dollar man" as the most awesome series ever, and yet once every couple of years when I get the urge to look up an episode for old times sake I need to confront reality, that it actually totally sucked. take a look at this top 10 games video for the Amiga - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4 , it may have rated as awesome in 1985-1990 but comparing it with anything today is totally ridiculous; and gaming is just an example, since this comparison extends to any other software genre, such as office, communication, engineering, scientific tools, programming tools, etc...
  - vidarh 11y ago
    I have used AmigaOS and "descendants" like AROS many times in recent years, so I'm not just looking at this with rose-tinted nostalgia. In fact, I've contributed code to AROS. And yes, there are still awesome things about it. I've pointed out here before, for example, that I can booth AmigaOS or AROS on modern hardware (either under an emulator in the case of AmigaOS, or the Linux hosted version in the case of AROS) and have it boot straight into a text editor, and that whole process starts faster than Emacs on my laptop. And there are still massive amounts of functionality that isn't readily available in mainstream OS's today. Exactly because attitudes like yours means that lots of developers ignore a lot of the lessons these systems have for us - it's not just the Amiga.

kirk21 11y ago

Good old times! Cool overview of the history of programming languages: http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi

deleted 11y ago

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Banzaaaai 11y ago

Amazed at an Amiga 1000 of a friend. Amiga 500 then A4000/40/RetinaZ3.

ice303 11y ago

My first contact with a A500 was in a friends house. I was amazed by the graphics and the sound. At that time, I had a ZX Spectrum 48k, and had to save money for about 2 years to buy it. never had the money to buy a Amiga. Last month, got myself a A500 and I'm discovering a whole computer world that I've missed.

mgkimsal 11y ago

One interesting memory that I still have trouble explaining to people - multiple video modes on the same screen. I remember having a 640x400(ish) 256 color screen, then pulling it down halfway and having a 320x200(ish) workbench screen behind it. "Huh?" is what I usually get. Then "why would you want that?"

pjc50 11y ago
A nifty feature that's only possible on analogue monitors, I think. Like light guns.
- vidarh 11y ago
  It was also only worthwhile as long as multiple resolutions had different tradeoffs in terms of supported palette etc. On the Amiga you even had paint programs using this to display the image you were editing at one resolution/palette, and the UI / tools etc. in a strip displayed at a different resolution.

toyg 11y ago

I got an Amiga 500 the following year (or 2 years later? I can't remember). I was a kid, so 99% of my time was spent on games; most of my friends had a C64 or a ZXSpectrum, so basically they queued to come to my house... My father went on to use Logistix extensively in his work, and even to compute results for some school election -- printing tons of pie charts with a dot-matrix. He also used some graphic effects software (3dtext? Videotext? Can't remember). Because we did not have any video equipment or laser printer, he ended up taking pictures of the screen with his Reflex and then have them printed on actual slides. His colleagues were in awe. Now I can't believe he went to all that trouble! By the time I actually paid some attention to the manuals and tried my hand at Workbench stuff, Amiga was on its way out. I ended up using an IBM emulator to run WordPerfect, and then just moved to a Windows 3.1 laptop; by then, "real" games had moved to consoles anyway.

branchless 11y ago

Got my amiga 500 down from the loft about a year ago. It had lay dormant for at least a decade. Plastic had yellowed. I plugged it in and turned on the power switch, expecting to hear a fizz/pop and declare it dead. It booted up fine. And ran kick-off 2. Seems the only thing to degrade in those 10 years is my reaction time.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
Assuming you're hoping to play more Kick Off 2 (plus a bit of Sensi perhaps ;-) ), it's highly recommended to replace the capacitors, as leaking capacitors have a nasty habit of ruining old computers. Also, regarding "Plastic had yellowed.", you may be interested in this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright

pezz 11y ago

Need to add to the Amiga love anecdotes. - My first Amiga was an A500, eventually ended up with a chip RAM upgrade, an A520 20MB hard disk and some extra Fast RAM. - I owned several Amigas in the early 90s, but I actually cried when I sold my A1200 to buy a 486 DX2 66! Why you may ask? Doom. It changed everything.

pkroll 11y ago
Doom was the death knell for my Amiga days as well. That and by that time, IIRC, it was obvious that Commodore was going under fast. I don't want to go pull out an Amiga and play, but it's rare to experience something that actually feels like a whole new ball game. (The Oculus Rift is close.)
- lakkal 11y ago
  After my first machine, an Atari 800, I had an Amiga 500 and loved it. But I didn't keep up with industry news at the time, so my first indication that All Was Not Well was when I walked into my local Amiga store (Omnitek, in Tewksbury, MA) and the Amiga stuff had been moved aside to make room for IBM PC-contemptibles... some of them with Commodore badges.

morsch 11y ago

There's a YouTube channel with excrutiatingly in-depth Amiga repairs: https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos He goes down to the circuit level, including within microchips, identifies problems with all kinds of tools including spectrum analysers, and shows off some (to me) amazing soldering skills. Here's a four hour (I kid you not) video of the repair of an Amiga CD32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
Wow
rasz_pl 11y ago
RetroGameModz videos are extremely by the book, IPC to the letter. Afair he is from Netherlands, or some other old rich European country, so he can afford 'wasting time' during repairs as a hobby. In real life this level of attention to detail (pedantry) is present _only_ in military, aviation and space (even medical is not that crazy). For example normal people dont reconstruct pads, they jumper over with kynar/enamel wire.
MagerValp 11y ago
Couldn't agree more, his videos are extremely detailed and very easy to follow! I followed his A4000 audio repair video and managed to fix all the problems with my board.

justuk 11y ago

Been reading about modern Amiga hardware recently like the upcoming X5000 with Amiga OS 4.1. Almost tempted to try it. I forced myself to use Windows, OS X and various Linux for years, but they never felt right.

LBarret 11y ago

The real question : Where do I download a dvd image with an emulator and 1000 games to replay my youth ?

smacktoward 11y ago
Here: http://www.amigaforever.com/ http://www.amigaforever.com/

Paul_S 11y ago

I missed out on the Amiga, going straight from 8bit Atari to x86. I used a A500 but never owned anything made by Commodore. I still find it fascinating and the Deathbed Vigil video was a great but melancholy watch. I never programmed for the Amiga but like everyone else I was always impressed by what the Amiga demoscene could do. An unfortunate clash for the opening weekend with quakecon dates.

vanderZwan 11y ago

There's a very nice interview on Tweakers.net taken on the Amsterdam Amiga day, with many influential developers: http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-de-invloed-van-de-eerste-multimediacomputer.html http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-de-i... RJ Mical and Dave Haynie are interviewed, who did hardware development for the Amigas, as well as Mike Dailly (creator of Lemmings) and Allister Brimble (composed for some well-known games of the platforms). Lot's of Dutch inbetween explaining the historical significance, without subtitles, but probably worth a listen to just for what these guys have to say about the platform.

jcadam 11y ago

I remember when we upgraded the family computer from a (second-hand) Apple ][e to an (also second-hand) Amiga 500. I had gotten my start programming in BASIC on the Apple ][, and was blown away by the stuff I could do using AMOS on the Amiga. The Amiga 500 was eventually replaced by a new Amiga 1200. Sometime after the end of Commodore (I must have been 14 or so) my parents bought our first PC, a 486 (the latest and greatest at the time) running DOS / Windows 3.1... it just wasn't the same.

yason 11y ago

Amiga was like Tesla (the car) is now. Not that it was (is) blazing fast and technologically advanced in comparison to other models but the fact that it seems to have come from a whole another plane of technology. Surely it helps to have multiple special-purpose chips onboard as it helps to have dense battery pack worth of 500km baked into the chassis. But that's not the thing. What a 32-bit pre-emptively multitasking operating system with modern library stacks and system services for building user interfaces and applications was to old machines where you poked memory addresses directly to draw something on the screen is quite akin to what an internet-connected fully electrically powered and from-the-ground-up architected smart&mobile device-on-wheels is to clunkers primarily designed to host an oily, fire-burning engine and an appropriate steel drivetrain, with a passenger cabin retrofitted wherever there's space left from the mechanical components. You could write high-level code and put that space ship spinning on the screen, and still have it rotate more smoothly than in any of the machines from preceding era—where no operating system or user interface was messing in the way. That was like having the cake and eating it too. And yet you could switch to "insane mode" by suspending the operating system and commanding the special chips directly, and do things people couldn't even imagine on 8-bit machines (and for the most part, on 16-bit machines too). Amiga had elements so modern that it almost lasted till the end of the 90's, except for cpu power and marketshare. Considering it was born in the early 80's when 8-bit cpus could beep and produce blocks of color on the screen and died (for all practical purposes) in the internet era, that's one long stretch of time where it made the difference.

bane 11y ago
IIR, there were still Amigas buried deep in TV studios right up to the switch to HD. I remember watching local weather broadcasts and every once in a while that tell-tale amiga mouse cursor would make an appearance, and this was into the 2000s.
MagerValp 11y ago
It's interesting that the OS has actually aged pretty well. I went back the other year and wrote a small application in AmigaE, a great little OO language specifically tailored for the M68k, and had a blast. I architectured it to use multiple processes and IPC, with the UI running at high priority at a steady 60 fps while image loading a decoding is done in the background. No assembly code or direct hardware access, just plain E and the full OS multitasking int he background, and it still runs without dropping a frame on a 7 MHz A500 with a floppy drive. The code is on Github if anyone's curious: https://github.com/MagerValp/ArcadeGameSelector

bane 11y ago

I'm reading "The Future Was Here" and it gives an excellent dive into the guts and history of the machine. I've really come to a new appreciation for how this crazy machine worked. Highly recommend this book for anybody with more than a passing interest in this legendary machine.

tjr 11y ago

I was about 12 years old. I had been engrossed with both the family Apple IIe computer and the fleet of Apple computers installed at my school, learning how to write BASIC programs. Wandering through the local shopping mall with my dad, we saw in the window of a software shop an Amiga 1200 running Lemmings. I was awestruck. I started getting copies of Amiga-related magazines, and saw these amazing three-dimensional pictures of things like balls and rubber ducks. It was like gazing into the future. Thankfully, my dad was likewise impressed, and within a few months we received delivery of a shiny new Amiga 3000. In anticipation of continuing my pursuit of programming, we got a compiler for an Amiga variant of BASIC, but I ended up focusing on two-dimensional graphics with Brillance, three-dimensional graphics with Imagine, and video editing with a variety of tools. A friend at school picked up an Amiga 2000 and joined the multimedia production fun. It might be a good thing that we didn't have YouTube back then, as we likely would have published all sorts of embarrassingly poorly-done animations and videos. We persuaded our school to buy its own Amiga computer for us to edit the student newsletter on, but we both left the school the following year, and it was reported that the Amiga got shoved into a storage space, never to be used again. I tried hard to persuade anyone who would listen to get an Amiga. The IBM-clones and Macs of the day just seemed so flat-out inferior, I couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't want an Amiga if they just realized what it could do. I suppose I would have been happy to still be using the Amiga to this day, except that, after the demise of Commodore, it became increasingly (but not surprisingly) clear that support for the Amiga platform was dwindling. Some users have heroically clung to the Amiga even to this day, but even by 1996 or so it was looking prudent to move elsewhere. Like remembering a corned beef sandwich from a deli you visited twenty years ago, I might be remembering the Amiga greater than it actually was. But even after thirteen years of using modern Apple computers (and iPads and iPhones and what-not), I still feel there was something magical about the Amiga that has not been captured in anything else. Or maybe the Amiga captured something magical in me.

gdubs 11y ago

Fun fact: Comedian Dana Carvey's brother Brad Carvey built the first wire-wrapped Video Toaster -- arguably the Amiga's "Killer App", which spawned Lightwave3D and powered the visual effects of countless 90's science fiction shows (as well as some film work). In Wayne's World II you can spot Garth wearing a Video Toaster t-shirt to their music festival.

kstrauser 11y ago
Also, Wil Wheaton did QA for the Video Toaster (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-Star_Trek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-Star_Trek).
- gdubs 11y ago
  Wow, that's really something -- stars on hit TV show for better part of a decade and moves to Kansas to QA an Amiga product. Illustrative of how passionate people were about the Amiga.

mrbill 11y ago

I was 13-14, and a member of Telenet's "Net Exchange" BBS, which existed to support members of its "PC Pursuit" [1] service. I dialed in via a backdoor on one of Telenet's 800 numbers, using (at first) a 300 baud modem on a HP 110 laptop. I got to be friends with a number of the folks on the system, and at the time, my main system was an Atari 520STfm (it was all we could afford). A bunch of the guys on the board took pity on me, took up a collection, and (secretly) called my mom. A month or so later, a Very Large Box arrived in the mail. The guys had gotten together with one of their own who owned a computer store, and bought me a used, but well-equipped, Amiga 1000 system, along with an adapter that let me use my Atari monitor with it. The letter that came along with the system said "No smart kid should be without a decent computer. All we ask is that you do the same for someone else when you're able." It made my mom cry. I used that system every day. Took it to school to show off a couple of times (we were using PS/2 Model 25s there, in comparison). It was used to do titling for the public-access news show my media class produced, among other things. It was my main system up until I had to "upgrade" (blech) to a 386sx-33 so I could run 1-2-3, Wordperfect 5.1, and DBase III+ for college classes. Over the years I acquired numerous A2000s, an A3000 or two, and even an A4K, but nothing beat the fun of firing up that A1000 back in the day. I turn 41 this year, and have had a great 20+-year career as a UNIX/Linux systems administrator. I'll never forget those guys who pitched in and helped out some kid living in a tiny rural Oklahoma town - they really helped get me to where I am today. To continue the tradition, I build and give away at least 2-3 computers a year to people who are less fortunate. It's the least I can do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit

gleegum 11y ago

I still have my Amiga 500, working. Some years ago I built this 'website', imagining how an Amiga comeback would be: http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/ http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/

ezy 11y ago

Often the software and OS APIs on that system are glossed over in favor of the hardware or the graphical shell. The Exec[1] was a marvel at the time -- and in some ways, still is. I don't know how much ARexx[2] preceeded AppleScript, but it was also, something that other OSes seldom got right. It took other user-oriented operating systems about a decade to catch up, and in fact, the hardware everyone raves about in the Amiga fell behind far sooner than the system software. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx