For those who think the rave comments are just fanboys talking, I was working at a government lab when the Amiga came out.
We had multi-million imaging systems built by defence contractors like Harris and MD, yet we were blown away by the Amiga. The Amiga was 1000x cheaper and 100x better.
My first serious bit of computing was on an Amiga2500 with a Video Toaster card. At the time Windows for WorkGroups was getting a lot of attention so I started playing around with PCs and eventually bought a Windows notebook. I was shocked to learn that with Windows I could not seamlessly download a file in the background and continue other work. I eventually installed OS/2 and ran Windows in its own space just so I could multitask like I was accustom to doing on an Amiga. Amiga users were (and some still are) a fanatical bunch for good reason.
The Amiga was a beautiful machine, and had a beautiful OS in many regards. No memory protection, but the concepts were just wonderful compared to PC stuff at the time: flat memory model, everything was a linked list (there were very few hard limits, except physical ones), true multi-tasking, ARexx later on, what great stuff.
I miss it; nothing today matches the freedom, flexibility and simplicity of that platform (IMHO).
Kiki Stockhammer.. I haven't heard that name in a long time! Video Toaster basically opened up a possibility to go where you could go with, at least, 10x as expensive SGI+Software at the time. Well, at least 60% of where you could go with an SGI, which was very good at the time. It was disruptive in every sense you could imagine. PCs and Mac were still a distant dream away from video.
I never had a Video Toaster, but started using an Amiga fully expecting to continue learning the computer programming I had begun on an Apple II, and ended up doing 3D animation and video production for a few years instead before finding my way back to software development.
There was something almost magical about the Amiga... the hardware, the software, the community... I don't think I've ever had such sheer fun with computers as I did then, and I'm not sure if anything will ever be quite like it again.
I was working with Brad at the time (on other projects) and got to watch the design of the Toaster take shape. I was very skeptical at first, but Brad and Tim pulled it off. It was an amazing product that changed several industries.
When I was in middle school, I got really interested in 3D graphics, which led to Lightwave3D. My parents drove us several hours to B&H Photo in NYC so I could look at a video toaster. It was in a box on a shelf and they simply said "Amiga is dying you don't want one of these." Later I got to see one in person at a local computer fair. Not only was the toaster revolutionary for video, Lightwave had a brilliant future as a standalone application. I never owned one (though I'd later own lightwave on Windows), but I subscribed to the magazines and watched tons of demo videos. What a fun time to get into computers.
Interesting thing about Amiga and Lightwave. Even though there was Lightwave for SGI, when Lightwave came about on Windows NT (4 was coming out at the time) and when we had to use that for on of our works - I knew then and there Amiga is dead. I vividly remember that moment when I fired it up on an NT machine. Same thing happened with SGI when I fired up Softimage|3D (as it would be called later) and first beta of Maya on NT. I knew machines were toast.
I have good memories of NT -- which was the last Windows I used before fully switching over to Apple. Same experience for me -- fired up those apps (Softimage, maya) and could see the writing on the wall.
(edit) To clarify, my Dad still has one, and with all the VHS decks and monitors and mixers and such it's kinda like a mainframe and takes up a huge amount of space. But could be fun for the right, uh, museum? :-)
The PC had just got EGA. VGA wouldn't arrive for a couple more years. Everyone was speechless seeing the A1000 after loading a demo, game, or even the desktop. Then make it talk - software speech synth better than hardware solutions of the time. Pre-emptive multi tasking. Windows could background print.
It was so far ahead, how could it possibly fail? C= marketing.
They got so much right. There's still things I miss - Amiga Screens for one. Open IFF file formats and datatypes.library. Arexx. CygnusEd. Intuition was lovely to program. Card autoconfig that worked - none of this plug and pray bull.
I hated every PC I used until probably XP. I bought several fully loaded PCs, but kept going back to the a3000 and a4000 for ages and loaded FreeBSD or Linux on the PCs.
I remember getting some program for both platforms - Superbase maybe, I forget. Something big and businessy. On the Ami it was 2 floppies. On the Win version it was around 20 floppies. The Ami version had a couple more features and lacked none.
>It was so far ahead, how could it possibly fail? C= marketing.
True. But also, the hardware barely advanced for a long time. Commodore didn't even start to architect a next generation graphics chipset until 1988, and didn't release a significant upgrade until the AGA in the Amiga 4000, in 1992. Seven years after the original Amiga! In retrospect they should have been far more aggressive with their hardware upgrades. Their inability to do so let the rest of the market catch up.
Also very true. Don't forget Dave Haynie and the rest had been working (intermittently) on AAA since 1988-89 or thereabouts, and had a prototyped 3000+ running the OS in 91. This was right about the time Medi Ali was appointed CEO and chief asset stripper, who started kicking out people from engineering, replacing with PC people and putting projects on hold. With hindsight they probably distracted too long with CDTV. They never did figure out how to market the professional side though.
3000+ was another good leap forward - 16 bit Paula with 8 full pcm channels, DSP co pro, on board network, a stupid amount of DMA channels (64?), and the AA Agnes graphics that did make it to the 4000. I think also on board soft modem (via yet another DSP).
What we got was the 4000, with IDE (spit). We'd had specs and schematics of the 3000+ going around the developer community for a year or more. I'm hazy now what was AAA and what was 3000+, but no one at all was impressed with the 4000. It was a cheap PC with some Amiga chips. Even Commodore UK were unimpressed (and later called the A600 a total screw up) :)
AAA was another stellar leap in 1988-90. PC's were starting to catch up in 1992/93 so it was abandoned for the RISC project. No idea how far that got, but it wasn't going to be original chipset compatible. Bankruptcy came next in 94. Then all the new owners. Starting with Escom who almost immediately went bankrupt. :D
The Amiga was so far ahead of its time it was truly remarkable. I would have friends over and show them my computer games and they would be stunned. The Amiga was a contemporary platform of the original 8-bit Nintendo and most people had PC's running DOS that maybe supported 256 color VGA (if you were lucky). To see an Amiga flexing all its crazy powers was truly remarkable. You got to experience the future way before everyone else.
I rememver using Amiga to circa 1993 when the problems for Commodore was quickly getting apparent. Switching to PC was weird. It felt like I moved from a platform with good sound and graphics to PC speaker and barely VGA. I quickly had to adjust to the new world of essential expansion cards. Not a world I particularly enjoyed. I kept being puzzled why they didn't just put in awesome miltimedia hardware and custom designed the whole system for it.
The question was more why did the market react more to subpar clones rather than a nice builtin box like the Amiga. I was too young to know, was it much more expensive than the average PC ? or lack of mainstream game / soft ?
The classic excuses for getting a computer back in the day was to 'help the kids with their homework' or to do work at home. Even though the Amiga was capable of being a business machine, it was seen as a hobbyist/gaming machine. If the Amiga had native support for the leading business software (Lotus 1-2-3, etc...) and had the option to work with the IBM-PC compatible disk format, things could've turned out differently. Then again, that was just one of the many missed opportunities with the Amiga.
Amiga DID have the "option to work with the IBM-PC compatible disk format": starting with AmigaOS 2.# (KickStart 37.###), the operating system came with the MS-DOS FAT driver. One could either have it loaded by explicitly clicking on the "PC0" icon in the "DOSDrivers" drawer (directory), or have it be automatically loaded by putting the relevant commands in S:User-Startup.
DF0: would then have the equivalent PC0:, DF1: PC1:, DF2: PC2: and DF3: (the fourth floppy drive) PC3:.
The Amiga floppy drives could read double or high density floppies formatted at 720 KB (although in general, DS-HD floppies were unreliable when formatted at low density 720 KB capacity); if one installed high density floppy drives, the MS-DOS FAT driver could read and write 1.44, and up to 2.88 MB MS-DOS, FAT formatted floppies.
no, unless you mean _one_ particular model sold with Amiga 4000 - chinon FZ357A spinning at half the rpm. Amiga doesnt have traditional fdc controller with hardware MFM/NRZI encoder, instead uses part of audio chip for serialization and operates on raw data stream. Problem is Paula can only handle 500Kbit/s, while HD floppies require 1000Kbit/s.
That was another of the issues that 3000+, and the new Paula + peripheral chips was pegged to resolve. 3000+ was meant to be enough of a step forward to buy time to release AAA. Those 3000+ chips were just about ready if I remember right.
Cancelling AAA was an Ali cost decision, it would probably have been well received releasing AAA even late 90s.
A4000 was a horrible low budget kludge as there was no money for anything 90/91 on.
No it wouldnt. Amiga was dead man walking due to culture of clueless management at Commodore. Tramiel took pride in not knowing a first thing about computers, he would be as happy selling cars or meat. His replacement was even worse, not to mention rest of the management.
Besides world moved on, even cheaper Sega Megadrive was better, never mind PlayStation. Then came the revolution, 1997 was the year of real 3D accelerators, Voodoo/Riva 128, 1998 Voodoo2/tnt. Amiga still couldnt muster a doom clone running at 320x240 above 7 fps while PC saw Quake 2, Unreal, half-life, Tribes and Thief.
Pretty much what I said about ali - he was a hatchet man. Gould making Medi Ali CEO in 90, or whenever it was, destroyed the company. Tramiel was generally disliked, but they did pretty well under him until he left.
Engineering was decimated both in manpower and budget by Ali. Morale was wrecked too - lots who weren't pushed just left. I don't know how many were left in engineering, but it wasn't many. It was also Gould/Ali that destroyed the Unix deal with Sun.
AAA was specced 10x or more faster than original chipset, and way overdue. It was meant to land 91/92 of course. I think the reason they looked at RISC 3D was also cost - budget to get AAA to silicon under Ali was never going to happen, so buy in something. It wasn't 3D so I've no idea how it'd compare with voodoo etc.
I can't say 'need for school' wasn't how I bargained with my mother to get a modem. I can see how people would not spend money on this machine. Which is absurd knowing how it unleashed so many creativity ...
There are a lot of answers to that. Price was an issue, and PC-compatibles very quickly became a race-to-the-bottom in the 90s, putting a lot of PC makers out of business.
Commodore had a lot of self-imposed issues as well, which you can read about in this series of articles.
The Amiga was certainly state of the art for home computers at the time, though they squandered their lead early. To me the biggest mistake was trying to move the original Amiga team to the Commodore headquarters in Westchester, PA which resulted in the original team disbanding.
For those into retro computers, you may also be interested in the Sharp X68000. This was first released in 1987, two years after the A1000, and was another leap forward for home computers, the near arcade perfect ports are very impressive considering when it was released. If the Amiga had continued to have a decent R&D budget we could've had something similar in the Amiga line too:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TQPt69UCyIA
Yeah, me too. The closest i got to feeling how cool these machines were was lurking on wayofthepixel.net, where the admin Helm elevated c64 pixel art into an almost classical art form, waxed philosophical about the expressive quality of the at-first-strange hues of the C64 palette, and delivered incredibly in-depth critiques of pixel art. That board holds some of the deepest and most interesting artistic discussion and teaching on the internet, and it's a pixel art forum with a c64 bent.
I had a friend who worked at Foundation Imaging at that time, and managed to visit him a few times .. it was always amusing to wander past the render farm and see all these machines cranking away, churning out frame after frame of Babylon 5 .. and my pal having to be torn away from his screen to go for lunch. Truly, heady times ..
Amazing that there was so much choice between systems that were completely independent from each other. You could choose between PC, Mac, Amiga, Atari...
Pity this was lost in the years of Windows' dominance. Now it seems unlikely anyone will come up with a new system like the Amiga.
Computers are all the same now. I often think about that. Especially since I've hauled an old SGI box from work to home, encouraged by someone here on HN. Systems were actually designed differently, let alone the OS and CPU architecture differences. Buses, graphics, memory, almost everything was different from system to system. Now, it comes down to bland server boxes and a race for that power/performance ratio and which OS you're using among a few. On desktop it's not any much different. Sure, systems are extremely powerful now and are getting more so. It's just that homogeneity and dominance of intel&clones kind of killed all the fun out of it. I'm not holding out any hopes for ARM either.
Why? ARM devices outsell x86 devices by a massive factor,
and there's a massive amount of diversity in ARM systems that you can buy as general purpose computers, ranging from TV sticks, through devices like the Pi and similar class devices, to experimental computers like the Parallella (A "Zynq" - which is an ARM + FPGA - coupled with a 16 core Epiphany CPU).
In terms of avoiding the same monoculture, consider the rise of FPGA based computers - e.g. there are now multiple re-implementations of classic Amiga hardware, as well as pretty much any other classic home computer, but many of them are being pushed beyond original specs. E.g. there are people working on seriously complicated out-of-order M68k FPGA based accelerators, for example. They're still "slow", but FPGA advances means we're getting steadily closer to the point where home-brew FPGA based platforms are viable for relatively normal use.
Early markets are jungles full of diversity. Every tiny detail is a huge differentiator. A bit more ram means more complex software, a bit more transistor means faster interaction.
For those interested, the video overlay features of this were used for anime fansubbing in the 90s. If you saw a fansub before 1996 or so, it was almost certainly done on a Toaster.
I hung out at and eventually worked weekends at a computer store dedicated to selling all things Amiga. You would not believe the number of systems we sold to Mexican TV stations.
An Amiga 500, genlocker and font package was usually all they needed to be broadcast ready.
We had multi-million imaging systems built by defence contractors like Harris and MD, yet we were blown away by the Amiga. The Amiga was 1000x cheaper and 100x better.