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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
by 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 agoIIR, 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 agoIt'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
- function_seven 11y agoI'm going to re-post a comment I wrote a few days ago here. Your last paragraph really struck a nerve with me (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894670) > One of my best memories was Christmas 1985, waking up to my dad fiddling with the A1000 in the living room. He learned enough from the ComputerLand salesman to type `dpaint` at the `AmigaDOS>` prompt and launch the coolest thing[2] I'd ever seen. > That computer was my only machine from 1985 through 1997, when I finally got a secondhand 486DX2-66 to replace it. It wasn't until well into the 2000s that I had a computer that could do the things I could do with that Amiga. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga....