For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then.
The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.
This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.
As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.
It's so sad to see what happened to AppleScript/the Open Scripting Architecture.
When it arrived you could basically build your whole app around it as a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration.
NeXTpple never properly integrated it into Cocoa, and eventually they wanted a more user-friendly GUI scripting system and put their NIH syndrome to work and made Automator, which never took off because it was too simple. They they built Shortcuts off an acquihire and now Shortcuts introduces NSUserActivity as the new way to... build your whole app around a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. Except now we have all this weird magic templating going on.
It lacks a usable browser for todays websites. Maybe someone gets into the vibe of agentically coding one.
While being at it, the foundations could use heavy fuzzing, lift them up to Open/NetBSD at least. A few looks into Genode for technical inspiration wouldn't be wrong, maybe a port of Aros atop seL4/Genode could be supreme. Same as Haiku.
> AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then
Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)
Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager.
E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool) to change the pixel format, scale and filter, then piping the resulting output image into a custom tool to convert into an engine specific texture format, all the while updating some asset database files, and IIRC also creating an icon file in the process.
Most of this can also be achieved with a pure cmdline workflow today via Python or Node (by glueing together tools like ImageMagick, ffmpeg, various asset pipeline tools), but the special sauce on the Amiga was that most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.
The 'plugin architecture' was mostly about datatypes (globally available file format encoders/decoders), BOOPSI UI components and 'Commodities' (IIRC small background tools that could intercept and manipulate system events).
> most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.
One minor example of the usability was that the ReadArgs() call was fairly extensively used within a year or two after it was introduced and meant that the "?" command line option for help worked "everywhere" and would give a machine parseable, semi-typed options list (annotations like "/T" for toggle, "/N" for number etc.)
Many newspapers in the 90's had their whole classified sections automated using custom AppleScript workflows, it was one of the big things that kept publishers on the Mac instead of Windows, since Microsoft didn't have anything to compete (OLE/VBA was a joke for these things)
Yep the whole AppleScript and (Quark Xpress) Xtension mechanism was remarkably sticky. Apple were treading dangerously during the OSX transition when it became clear much of that would never port over, but Quark was losing their grip by then.
MS were trying a huge NT push into the DTP industry that basically hit that wall and aborted.
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system), dialed into BBSes of many sorts.
At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.
Agreed. In my particular case, it did not help that were not exactly rich, so I got to, however briefly, become a zealot in amiga vs pc war. Still, one of a kind experience.
Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.)
I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...
I was starting as a software developer when the Amiga first came out. We used Lattice C at work on MS-DOS. I bought it for my A2000. Being able to write code on a proper multitasking OS made it easier for me to learn C. I kept updating the compiler through the SAS/C days.
I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running pre-release versions of Amiga DOS 3.1. It was a cool platform and I enjoyed it.
Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.
The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then.
The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.
The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.
And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.
The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.
The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.
Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.
And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.
In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.
In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.
The IIgs had the Ensoniq DOC (ES5503): 32 oscillators allowing for ~16 stereo voices at the same time. But it only had 64K of sound RAM.
The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.
VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.
Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.
> By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.
You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.
A VGA card was not in every aspect better than the Amiga custom chipset, otherwise Doom would have happened much earlier. The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486). For some 2D graphical effects, the Amiga could do much more with much less hardware power and for a much lower price.
But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.
> Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.
Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.
> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].
You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).
> The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486).
Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.
The Mac II (1987) had 640x480 256 color non-interlaced graphics. Multiple display support (which I don't think the Amiga ever had). And square pixels!
Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).
The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).
It was obsolete as soon as the 486 was released, pushing 386 (especially 386SX) systems with SVGA into a lower price tier. Commodore's answer, the Amiga 1200, was released too late with too little (late 1992 with AGA graphics and no changes to the sound, plus no fast RAM?)
I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.
I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems.
Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.
It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.
Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!
This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.
The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.
Windows 95 was hamstrung by DOS compatibility. If you installed OS/2, you could have butter-smooth mouse cursor movement even while formatting a floppy disk and running a DOS (or even Windows!) VM in another window. And if you had a XGA card (which no one did) you had a hardware mouse cursor sprite, just like the Amiga (except only one boring sprite and no cool audio/video tricks)
There were SCSI floppy drives. Rare, though. However, with the right controller, not necessarily Adaptek, and drivers for it, they enabled all of that, too.
If the Amiga's mouse-pointer sprite was removed and the pointer was rendered onto a bitmap, it would still be 50Hz. There is more than enough time to do that.
The flawless refresh rate comes from the fact the update is executed as part of a level 3 priority CPU interrupt triggered by the vblank refresh. Interrupt code reads the hardware register of a dedicated chip that has been measuring the mouse's potentiometers this whole time, to see how much they've moved. The mouse itself is a passive device.
It then sends a input event to Intuition, whose priority 20 input.device task (the highest priority task in any normal Amiga system) processes the event and updates the hardware sprite coordinates, but could equally write it onto the bitmap. It has the time to do that because everything else in the system waits for it.
Compared to a modern PC, which also uses a hardware cursor... the mouse is an active device and sends its own potentiometer readings as USB input events, which arrive to be processed by an independent USB subsystem in the kernel and is bundled with all the other USB traffic from devices attached on the same bus. A vblank interrupt couldn't get the mouse coordinates even if it wanted to.
I should correct myself here and say it's not potentiometers, but that the mouse has vertical/horizontal wheels that let infrared light through to detectors, and the hardware is counting a quadrature-encoded pair of pulse trains, so it can tell how many steps back/forward each axis has moved.
It also estimates that, if the hardware counters are sampled every vblank, it's accurate (no missed wraparound) for the mouse moving at up to 3km/h! But it's still possible to whip the mouse around faster than that, so action games might like to sample the mouse more often than once per frame.
Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing.
Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.
I had a sidecar with my Amiga 1000, which allowed you to use an XT MFM hard drive + controller card for the Amiga side. Once kickstart + the software loaded, it was incredibly fast. It was weird having a full IBM PC + Amiga in one conjoined machine.
But I agree that predictable slowness is a thing. One only need to discuss traffic jams vs a 20 minute car trip without them.
Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.
MUI was slow because it was written in C and went all-in on BOOPSI, as well as supporting fully dynamic layout. It could likely have been faster, but the sort of people who paid for it were also the sort of people who bought CPU accelerators.
Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.
Floppy based Amigas were incredibly clunky. Each file shown in the Workbench GUI has its own icon file (".info" file) which is loaded separately, resulting in additional time for each file in a "drawer" (Amiga folder.)
AmigaOS couldn't be described as a RTOS proper, not like QNX. For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process. It had no guarantees on latency, which is the essence of a RTOS.
It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling than more sophisticated schedulers like in Windows, Linux, and MacOS. At one point I had an A1200 and a Linux Pentium 300-ish, and CD-writer on both systems. I could trust the Amiga to write CDs without creating a coaster every time, where the Linux box would succeed only 2/3 the time due to the unpredictable scheduling and it running the buffer dry.
So it wasn't a real RTOS, but it definitely behaved more like one that what we have now.
That particular tool's purpose was actually to shift the Amiga's very simple RTOS-like static priority scheduler more towards a more complex fairness-based scheduler like Linux/Windows currently has, making it less real-time than before. Yes, you could make rules that could elevate certain tasks by name matching automatically, giving you more control and predictability, but that's not something you couldn't already do.
Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today:
1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties
> 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').
Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked.
What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions
AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.
Implementing mouse cursors as a hardware sprite isn’t that uncommon for 2D accelerated graphics, albeit later than on the Amiga. Something like an ATI Mach32 has one for example. About 15 years ago I had a crappy Dell whose Radeon card would randomly glitch the cursor, so it survived at least until then in newer systems. The extra responsiveness is more of an Amiga thing though.
> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.
That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.
I would not be who I am if my father didn't buy an amiga 1000 for my bigger brother. I was around 7 years old, I still have a few memory frames of the original package unboxing when it arrived.
I was too small but I remember the feeling, after that I merged with computers.
the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.
I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game.
The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”).
The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?
What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.
In theory it had memory protection. Processes were reasonably protected from accidentally stepping on each other's tires, but the OS was not. Any app that tried to be clever (which there were plenty of understandable reasons for) or was actively malicious could mess with absolutely everything.
There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga.
One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.
In all the years I used an Amiga, I don't think I ever had the machine crash because they used Forbid(). I'm not saying it never happened to people - I'm sure there were badly misbehaving programs in use -, but using Forbid()/Permit() outside of very tight sections was very firmly frowned on, and Forbid was overall relatively uncommon apart from games which took over the system on purpose.
Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.
Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.
To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.
The A3000 had a ficker fixer. If you meant that the other later models should have also included it, I agree.
Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases.
I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that it would be possible to retrofit at least limited memory protection onto AmigaOS, but it's decidedly not something that'd be simple to do, and most likely you'd need to basically sandbox old apps and create new API's for new apps to do it properly.
It would be simple, but somewhat incomplete. It would not look like a virtual memory subsystem where merely accessing an address can allocate physical RAM to it.
The API is already there! AllocMem(, MEMF_PUBLIC) allocates shared memory, otherwise you get private memory.
You can then enforce memory protection around that, but obviously the entire OS is still built on message-passing between tasks where the message itself remains at exactly the same (public) address and isn't copied between private memory spaces, and there's a gentlemens' agreement as to who currently owns it (PutMsg/ReplyMsg)
Software like Enforcer and MuGuardianAngel already checked this, and dinged your program for accessing non-allocated memory.
Software that tried to implement memory protection or virtual memory on the Amiga had to have a huge long hit-list of software that set the AllocMem flags incorrectly and had to be treated differently. That's because the MEMF_PUBLIC flag didn't really do anything on the base OS, so programmers didn't bother using it correctly.
I think "somewhat incomplete" is underplaying it as such a large proportion of message exchange tends to include pointers to shared structures. That the message handling uses intrusive lists doesn't help. So "simple" really depends on where you set the bar for what you consider useful levels of memory protection.
I still think it's possible but doing it to a meaningful extent would be a long tedious effort, at least for my definition of meaningful.
You have Janus-UAE which sandboxes/emulates M68k apps for AROS "rootlessly" in that it bridges a number of structures etc. That mostly solves the problem on modern hardware for legacy apps, though it's a painful solution.
Then you could aggressively upgrade message formats for "native" apps to replace pointers with opaque handles.
If done at the time you could of course had relied on more of the developers of various apps still being active and willing to update their code and might have been able to avoid the Janus-UAE approach, but there was never a point at that time where anywhere close to a majority of users had MMU's,
With mmu, every app has its own 32bit address space, and the mmu “maps” the app space to physical space. Legacy apps get shared address space, while newer apps get isolated space. To port apps, its only the messaging system that needs rework, and if the system does its magic with same API, transition is invisible. At the end of the day, only the message address space needs to be shared. Sendmessage() behind the scenes remaps mmu addresses. Not impossible, just requires the will to do it.
The problem with that is that the messaging system permeates everything on the Amiga, so you'd lose basically every app without rework. That might have worked if the Amiga had a growing market share, but at the time this became an option, the Amiga market was already dying and most users still only had 68000 based machines without MMU until long after Commodore died.
It's not "only" the message address space, as e.g. messages included pointers to a lot of other data structures that'd now either need to be copied or mapped into the receiving process, or the message formats reworked.
The 020 didn't ship with an MMU, but it did support an external one (the MC68851) natively via the coprocessor interface. The 030 was the first relevant CPU to ship with an internal MMU (and the EC030 used in the A4000 did not include the MMU).
I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.
In the case of Acorn they had hardware memory protection[1] and their own CPU designs[2].
In place of Irving Gould Acorn ended up with some clown called Stan Boland who decided it was better to change the name, stop making workstations and refocus on TV set top boxes. The company was dead six months later.
nitpick: ARM1/2 were 26-bit. The PC register used the bottom 26 bits for the address of the next instruction, and the upper 6 bits for status flags. Lots of code involves getting or twiddling those flags by amending the PC register directly. There is nowhere in the architecture you could put the missing 6 bits.
This was unlike the "24-bit" 68000 where the hardware package actually only had 24 address lines, but its address registers and PC were 32-bit.
The ARM3 resolved the situation by adding a separate 32-bit clean PC register and a separate status register, instead of the combined monstrosity. All software had to be rewritten to use the new registers if it wanted to be "32-bit clean", unlike 68000 software which either just worked fine, or revealed the programmer was an imbecile who thought they could get away with storing random data in the top 8 bits of addresses.
The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas.
In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.
That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.
In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
The 80's Mac were also two other things that made them less desirable for home users: they were seen as very slow (compared to "contemporary" home computers of the time - "instant-on" Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and DOS machines), and they were monochrome. No colour = terrible for gaming.
Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else.
At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.
It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)
In Spain and Portugal the Mac was the printed press and graphic design platform. Everything for people who truly knew what CMYK and "offset printing" meant. Amiga were for TV studios and odd demoscene people and maybe raster artwork. PC's were for "real work" (even under Windows 95 days). Boring offices with Microsoft Office and custom software, which literally had millions of software for it, from custom Borland ones to Visual Basic 5/6.
Well, that and DOS compability and DOS and Windows games.
In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.
I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.
Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT.
In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.
I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine.
The first 386 PC didn't arrive until September 1986. It wasn't until like 1991 that sales of 386/486 PCs went above 50%.
Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.
DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.
> The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
I remember the Mac emulator running Mac software faster than a classic Mac. Too bad the drive was not compatible so you had to convert disks for them to be readable.
I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be.
However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
I'm a millennial and I discovered the Amiga, the demoscene, the lore and so on way after its era thanks to the catchy tracker music and demos. I've had several different re-introductions over different stages in my life, but the first was by trying to figure out as a kid how the tunes of my games could pack so much in less than 1MB per song, when my mental model was only MIDIs, WAVs or MP3s. Then I figured it out and got Modplug Tracker from the school's computer lab (had no internet at home) and that whole rabbit hole.
I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.
There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:
I recall also getting it working around that time. I gotta admit though that being used to the very straightforward NES, SNES etc emulators Amiga emulation was pretty confusing with all the different models and kickstarts and workbenches.
I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.
My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).
My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.
My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.
I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.
I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.
I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.
(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)
Love it! Any chance you'd be willing to share what you've got on GH? Also, I wonder if anyone has tried creating an Amiga OS style Linux distro? Sounds like your work could be the guts of it.
That last sentence of the article about waiting for the rest of the world to catch up really describes how I felt for way too long after 1994. In addition to the things mentioned in the article and the comments here, by that time I was used to having a standard OS-supplied scripting language that every self-respecting software program integrated with (ARexx), a standardized localization mechanism for software (locale files), and a generic OS-wide mechanism for handling file formats (datatypes).
Finally switching over to Windows and Linux really felt like a big step backwards in some ways, and it took quite some time for the rest of the world to catch up (subjectively at least).
I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing.
Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit.
I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations I'm unaware of that we've largely forgotten about.
As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.
However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.
Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
> ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be
Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.
> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.
Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.
> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).
GenXer signing off.
P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people.
Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then)
Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.
By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.
Almost. I'm technically in the first year of Gen X ('65). I knew a some guys a few years older right into the hobbyist computing scene in the early '80s. I lost touch by the time the Amiga came out but they would definitely have been into it.
When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985."
Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.
Xerox workstations were pretty much unheard of. A few might've seen a Mac. But most people haven't seen trash can functionality until MS-Windows 95 came out.
Personally, I just love the sound of it. Modules were awesome and games continued using them until ~2001.
10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X
The UI found in WorkBench 1.x was designed to be the way it was so that owners could plug their Amigas into television sets of the day and still be able to make out something without requiring a pristine purpose-built CRT monitor.
I'm not seeing it. Sure, the window bgs are gray, but so was 90% the OSes at the time. Everything else is different and even the only things those two have in common, the pseudo-3D on buttons, is applied in different ways, creating different divisions and accents.
When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could.
It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.
What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.
It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.
Somehow the Atari ST is panned because it lacked preemptive multitasking (I'm not sure if this is true). They didn't mention any of the other GUIs that unix was working with - X11 already existed back then, and several unix vendors had their own windowing system that was arguably better (at least their marketing said so - I never used any). Of course Unix systems would have been much more expensive.
> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic.
Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.
The X68000 was amazing, but it was also around double the price. Amiga A1000 was around $1300 in 1985, Sharp X68000 was around $2500 in 1987. The Amiga A500 was released in 1987 and was even cheaper than the A1000 for an equivalent spec.
If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.
10 years ahead of it's time for affordable home computers. You have to take the target market into account. To use an analogy, most people accept that Gran Turismo on the PS1 has great graphics for it's time, despite releasing months after Scud Race on Sega Model 3 hardware, because it's accepted that what's impressive for a 70s/80s/90s console is not what's impressive for arcade hardware.
The X68000 was basically arcade-class hardware in a PC form factor, with a price to match. There are reasons why Capcom used X68000s as their dev machines for CPS1 games.
Ok I had to upvote you for old times sake and to honor the eternal Amiga-vs-Atari flamewars. But of course you are obviously and objectively very wrong.
In hindsight, I think it was. The built in MIDI is extremely useful. The high resoution B&W monitor with high refresh rate as well. My main complaint is that it should have came with the YM2203 sound chip, or at least had an optional card slot for it.
It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.
The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.
It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was.
I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.
Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!
The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo, the total package was extremely good. After the Amiga died I moved on into a Mac running OSX, and later Apple Silicon, when you combine the MacOS with Apple Silicon, it feels very similar to the Commodore Amiga in short, the total package of hardware and software made by one company, provided a level of integration that Microsoft Windows still can’t equal even with all the separate OEM’s making Windows computers across the world.
Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition, if the next computer or the SGI computer was around today with the technology advancements of today I definitely would be in the market for one, back in the day. I couldn’t afford one but today I can.
> The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo [...]
All things considered, no. It didn't. It had, for quite a while, a better bang-for-the-buck appeal, hardware- and software-wise, especially in the market niches it was designed to appeal to. But that headstart was over technically in late 1987 (386, VGA, AdLib, MT-32), and economically from ca. 1990/91 onwards, strongly dependent on market, of course, and not including the lowest margins, e. g. the home computers (based on their use cases, for a lot of people, used or new A500s, A600s or A1200s were still excellent deals even in 1993).
And philosophically? I say that was over before the first Amiga was even born. The adaptability speed and sheer potential of an open platform built around the relative stability/predictability of ever-evolving standards, as well as vendor diversity, ate you raw. It was just a matter of time.
The multitasking OS part is, I think, a quite overrated as well as romanticized retelling of history, written mostly by younger retro nerdlingers with roided-out (largely anachronistic) machines, on top of members of the Old Breed that sometimes still fight the Platform War. I can understand that. If Apple and Google won the hardware race by way of elimination with their to me rather miserable offerings, I'd most likely not be in the best of moods either, lol.
> Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition [...]
Speed and overspecialization/overintegration are not everything. Especially old Amiganers should have learned that lesson by now...
Oddly enough, Apple made exactly one machine I really liked to use: the Newton MessagePad. The rest of their merchandise has been, through the bank, inferior given my specific preferences and use cases. The same goes for all iterations of their mainline operating systems. What remains is a bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIc. Just on account of its really lovely looks.
I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the sound of 80s-era 'lo-fi' sound chips - I just last week remarked on another forum that I realise that much of my adult-era musical appreciation was likely a product of listening to the loading screens on my Spectrum as the data fed in was interpreted as sound...!
Yeah, my old flame wars with Atari users were all largely based on vibes and spec sheets and screenshots in magazines and how ugly TOS looked, not on actual experience with the Atari... But I've been happy to be vindicated by various videos...
I don't really want to come across as an Atari ST fanboy in this thread (although I do love it, and the Amiga) but while TOS is very bare bones, an ST with 4MB of RAM, an HDD, and an install of Neodesk + Geneva is genuinely a nice experience.
Outside of that I've also set up a dev environment consisting of a copy of the Pure-C compiler suite (basically Borland C for the ST), MicroEMACS for editing, Okami shell[1], and pcmake[2] for a very UNIX like development environment. Most people these days would set up a cross compiler on their PC, which is the sensible thing to do, but it's been great fun to do some retro coding with on period correct hardware.
Screenshots of Neodesk makes me want to rekindle the flame wars ;)
(yes, the default AmigaOS look isn't anything impressive either, but "nobody" kept the default look so we're prone to very unfairly judging other systems against not what the default looks like but whatever we think a system should look like - I'm not claiming this was rational)
I own The Amiga /AmigaOne /HombreOne . I open source it. Proof ask Gensia they just didnt want to hurt anybodies feelings.. f it. Im RHRH Constantine XII -Amigaman. Base it off of Aros or something. Amigaone model name will be x86 compatible. Hombre will be RISC/ARM compatible. Proof .. how in the heck do u think u got all the Amiga OS on aminet ,and avaibole to u. Plus to boot the hardware that is open to u now. I know Dave and Karl. I know them ALL. People, should check instead of beLIVING liars illumanti stool pidgins like rj and david pleansance, bill, coloanto, so called commodore, and any other so called amiga company. So contact I if u want to see and get that Open source Amiga that u really have.. search my name.
The PC made it. Decisively and on all accounts. Save one. You Amiga nerdlingers got adequate enough hardware in them nice wedge-style keyboard computer cases (i. e. not counting Amiga buckets).
AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)
>"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable.
But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue."
Not true!
Well, not entirely true...
Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding...
I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience!
Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's.
The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc.
Any program could crash any of those.
So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...)
If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day...
Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it!
So, to the Author, I say "well done!"
An excellent article overall!
That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!
For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then.
The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.
This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.
As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.
It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS.
Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.
It's so sad to see what happened to AppleScript/the Open Scripting Architecture.
When it arrived you could basically build your whole app around it as a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration.
NeXTpple never properly integrated it into Cocoa, and eventually they wanted a more user-friendly GUI scripting system and put their NIH syndrome to work and made Automator, which never took off because it was too simple. They they built Shortcuts off an acquihire and now Shortcuts introduces NSUserActivity as the new way to... build your whole app around a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. Except now we have all this weird magic templating going on.
BeOS/Haiku uses datatypes natively
Interesting, I didn't use it much beyond the famous demo CD.
There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System nowadays.
It lacks a usable browser for todays websites. Maybe someone gets into the vibe of agentically coding one.
While being at it, the foundations could use heavy fuzzing, lift them up to Open/NetBSD at least. A few looks into Genode for technical inspiration wouldn't be wrong, maybe a port of Aros atop seL4/Genode could be supreme. Same as Haiku.
> AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then
Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)
Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager.
E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool) to change the pixel format, scale and filter, then piping the resulting output image into a custom tool to convert into an engine specific texture format, all the while updating some asset database files, and IIRC also creating an icon file in the process.
Most of this can also be achieved with a pure cmdline workflow today via Python or Node (by glueing together tools like ImageMagick, ffmpeg, various asset pipeline tools), but the special sauce on the Amiga was that most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.
The 'plugin architecture' was mostly about datatypes (globally available file format encoders/decoders), BOOPSI UI components and 'Commodities' (IIRC small background tools that could intercept and manipulate system events).
> most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.
One minor example of the usability was that the ReadArgs() call was fairly extensively used within a year or two after it was introduced and meant that the "?" command line option for help worked "everywhere" and would give a machine parseable, semi-typed options list (annotations like "/T" for toggle, "/N" for number etc.)
Many newspapers in the 90's had their whole classified sections automated using custom AppleScript workflows, it was one of the big things that kept publishers on the Mac instead of Windows, since Microsoft didn't have anything to compete (OLE/VBA was a joke for these things)
Yep the whole AppleScript and (Quark Xpress) Xtension mechanism was remarkably sticky. Apple were treading dangerously during the OSX transition when it became clear much of that would never port over, but Quark was losing their grip by then.
MS were trying a huge NT push into the DTP industry that basically hit that wall and aborted.
> some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool)
Possibly Art Department Professional (aka ADPro)?
Hmmm, I use Claude Code to make those two worlds work together -- where a GUI is an obvious complement (visualization, discoverability)
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system), dialed into BBSes of many sorts.
At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.
The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos
Agreed. In my particular case, it did not help that were not exactly rich, so I got to, however briefly, become a zealot in amiga vs pc war. Still, one of a kind experience.
Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.)
You are right about graphics.
And then someone decided it's time for "Weekend at Commodore's"
I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...
I was starting as a software developer when the Amiga first came out. We used Lattice C at work on MS-DOS. I bought it for my A2000. Being able to write code on a proper multitasking OS made it easier for me to learn C. I kept updating the compiler through the SAS/C days.
I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running pre-release versions of Amiga DOS 3.1. It was a cool platform and I enjoyed it.
I had an A3000 as my last Amiga. It was my favorite machine growing up as a teen and I still regret selling it.
Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.
The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then.
The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.
The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.
And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.
The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.
The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.
Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.
And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.
In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.
In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.
The IIgs had the Ensoniq DOC (ES5503): 32 oscillators allowing for ~16 stereo voices at the same time. But it only had 64K of sound RAM.
The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NTrYGFlImQM
VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.
Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.
> By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.
You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.
A VGA card was not in every aspect better than the Amiga custom chipset, otherwise Doom would have happened much earlier. The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486). For some 2D graphical effects, the Amiga could do much more with much less hardware power and for a much lower price.
But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.
> Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.
Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.
> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].
You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).
> The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486).
Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.
The Mac II (1987) had 640x480 256 color non-interlaced graphics. Multiple display support (which I don't think the Amiga ever had). And square pixels!
Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).
The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).
It was obsolete as soon as the 486 was released, pushing 386 (especially 386SX) systems with SVGA into a lower price tier. Commodore's answer, the Amiga 1200, was released too late with too little (late 1992 with AGA graphics and no changes to the sound, plus no fast RAM?)
I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.
And how long did apps & games take to make full USE of SVGA/SBlaster on DOS vs Windows?
The FULL experience of Wintel was definitely 10 years behind the full experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.
Wintel is still waiting for the interlace flicker experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.
I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems.
Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.
It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw
In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.
Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!
This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.
The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.
Windows 95 was hamstrung by DOS compatibility. If you installed OS/2, you could have butter-smooth mouse cursor movement even while formatting a floppy disk and running a DOS (or even Windows!) VM in another window. And if you had a XGA card (which no one did) you had a hardware mouse cursor sprite, just like the Amiga (except only one boring sprite and no cool audio/video tricks)
DOS was only about 3 years older than Workbench, and OS/2 was about 8 years younger.
There were SCSI floppy drives. Rare, though. However, with the right controller, not necessarily Adaptek, and drivers for it, they enabled all of that, too.
The mouse pointer on Amiga was a sprite. So it flies above the bitmaps below, thence the 50fps frame rate.
If the Amiga's mouse-pointer sprite was removed and the pointer was rendered onto a bitmap, it would still be 50Hz. There is more than enough time to do that.
The flawless refresh rate comes from the fact the update is executed as part of a level 3 priority CPU interrupt triggered by the vblank refresh. Interrupt code reads the hardware register of a dedicated chip that has been measuring the mouse's potentiometers this whole time, to see how much they've moved. The mouse itself is a passive device.
It then sends a input event to Intuition, whose priority 20 input.device task (the highest priority task in any normal Amiga system) processes the event and updates the hardware sprite coordinates, but could equally write it onto the bitmap. It has the time to do that because everything else in the system waits for it.
Compared to a modern PC, which also uses a hardware cursor... the mouse is an active device and sends its own potentiometer readings as USB input events, which arrive to be processed by an independent USB subsystem in the kernel and is bundled with all the other USB traffic from devices attached on the same bus. A vblank interrupt couldn't get the mouse coordinates even if it wanted to.
I should correct myself here and say it's not potentiometers, but that the mouse has vertical/horizontal wheels that let infrared light through to detectors, and the hardware is counting a quadrature-encoded pair of pulse trains, so it can tell how many steps back/forward each axis has moved.
Nice article about it: https://www.markwrobel.dk/post/amiga-machine-code-letter11/
It also estimates that, if the hardware counters are sampled every vblank, it's accurate (no missed wraparound) for the mouse moving at up to 3km/h! But it's still possible to whip the mouse around faster than that, so action games might like to sample the mouse more often than once per frame.
Famously Gates thought that the Mac cursor may have been a sprite, when it was actually in software https://www.folklore.org/Shut_Up.html
Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing.
Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.
There's a good article about this:
https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/
(previous discussion)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972
The Amiga feels fast because its slowness is predictable. Modern systems have unexpected slowness, and unexpected things are always more noticeable.
I had a sidecar with my Amiga 1000, which allowed you to use an XT MFM hard drive + controller card for the Amiga side. Once kickstart + the software loaded, it was incredibly fast. It was weird having a full IBM PC + Amiga in one conjoined machine.
But I agree that predictable slowness is a thing. One only need to discuss traffic jams vs a 20 minute car trip without them.
Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.
MUI was slow because it layered on a crazy amount of configurability. You didn't need things to get slow with resizeable/dynamic layouts even then.
MUI was slow because it was written in C and went all-in on BOOPSI, as well as supporting fully dynamic layout. It could likely have been faster, but the sort of people who paid for it were also the sort of people who bought CPU accelerators.
Not surprising since this is a floppy-based system. An HD-based A3000 cold booted faster than most modern systems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-e3w7Hh9eU
Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.
Floppy based Amigas were incredibly clunky. Each file shown in the Workbench GUI has its own icon file (".info" file) which is loaded separately, resulting in additional time for each file in a "drawer" (Amiga folder.)
The keyword being latency.
Even a powerful PC, such as running WinNT or Linux on my 9800x3d, doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does.
It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).
AmigaOS couldn't be described as a RTOS proper, not like QNX. For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process. It had no guarantees on latency, which is the essence of a RTOS.
It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling than more sophisticated schedulers like in Windows, Linux, and MacOS. At one point I had an A1200 and a Linux Pentium 300-ish, and CD-writer on both systems. I could trust the Amiga to write CDs without creating a coaster every time, where the Linux box would succeed only 2/3 the time due to the unpredictable scheduling and it running the buffer dry.
So it wasn't a real RTOS, but it definitely behaved more like one that what we have now.
There was a Shareware tool called Executive that would manipulate task priorities to, amongst other things, prioritize the active application.
That particular tool's purpose was actually to shift the Amiga's very simple RTOS-like static priority scheduler more towards a more complex fairness-based scheduler like Linux/Windows currently has, making it less real-time than before. Yes, you could make rules that could elevate certain tasks by name matching automatically, giving you more control and predictability, but that's not something you couldn't already do.
>For one, it had a forbid() system call which would stop the scheduler from pre-empting the current running process.
This is, by the way, equivalent to SCHED_FIFO on Linux.
There are very legitimate reasons a hard realtime task may need to be non-interruptable.
Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today:
1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties
> 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').
Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked.
What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions
AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.
Implementing mouse cursors as a hardware sprite isn’t that uncommon for 2D accelerated graphics, albeit later than on the Amiga. Something like an ATI Mach32 has one for example. About 15 years ago I had a crappy Dell whose Radeon card would randomly glitch the cursor, so it survived at least until then in newer systems. The extra responsiveness is more of an Amiga thing though.
> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.
That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.
Wowzers!
The trackpad is not "locked", it's moving just as much as it used to, but the driver running the haptic fake click feedback is dead.
Apple's haptic technology is some deep black magic
It's very convincing, my fingers believed the illusion for years. When the Mac finally crashed, for a minute I thought the touchpad was broken.
I would not be who I am if my father didn't buy an amiga 1000 for my bigger brother. I was around 7 years old, I still have a few memory frames of the original package unboxing when it arrived. I was too small but I remember the feeling, after that I merged with computers.
the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.
thank you commodore, thank you dad.
and thanks for this time traveling post!
I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game.
The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”).
The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?
What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.
> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected
This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.
No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.
In theory it had memory protection. Processes were reasonably protected from accidentally stepping on each other's tires, but the OS was not. Any app that tried to be clever (which there were plenty of understandable reasons for) or was actively malicious could mess with absolutely everything.
There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga.
One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.
In all the years I used an Amiga, I don't think I ever had the machine crash because they used Forbid(). I'm not saying it never happened to people - I'm sure there were badly misbehaving programs in use -, but using Forbid()/Permit() outside of very tight sections was very firmly frowned on, and Forbid was overall relatively uncommon apart from games which took over the system on purpose.
Probably Windows NT rather, which turned into Windows 2000 (and then XP)
Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.
Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.
Windows 3.x could (and defaulted to where possible) to running in "386 enhanced" mode which actually used protected mode, IIRC.
The problem was that the Win16 part ran all in one address space, and the separation support was mainly used to handle DOS windows.
To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.
The A3000 had a ficker fixer. If you meant that the other later models should have also included it, I agree.
Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases.
I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that it would be possible to retrofit at least limited memory protection onto AmigaOS, but it's decidedly not something that'd be simple to do, and most likely you'd need to basically sandbox old apps and create new API's for new apps to do it properly.
It would be simple, but somewhat incomplete. It would not look like a virtual memory subsystem where merely accessing an address can allocate physical RAM to it.
The API is already there! AllocMem(, MEMF_PUBLIC) allocates shared memory, otherwise you get private memory.
You can then enforce memory protection around that, but obviously the entire OS is still built on message-passing between tasks where the message itself remains at exactly the same (public) address and isn't copied between private memory spaces, and there's a gentlemens' agreement as to who currently owns it (PutMsg/ReplyMsg)
Software like Enforcer and MuGuardianAngel already checked this, and dinged your program for accessing non-allocated memory.
Software that tried to implement memory protection or virtual memory on the Amiga had to have a huge long hit-list of software that set the AllocMem flags incorrectly and had to be treated differently. That's because the MEMF_PUBLIC flag didn't really do anything on the base OS, so programmers didn't bother using it correctly.
I think "somewhat incomplete" is underplaying it as such a large proportion of message exchange tends to include pointers to shared structures. That the message handling uses intrusive lists doesn't help. So "simple" really depends on where you set the bar for what you consider useful levels of memory protection.
I still think it's possible but doing it to a meaningful extent would be a long tedious effort, at least for my definition of meaningful.
You have Janus-UAE which sandboxes/emulates M68k apps for AROS "rootlessly" in that it bridges a number of structures etc. That mostly solves the problem on modern hardware for legacy apps, though it's a painful solution.
Then you could aggressively upgrade message formats for "native" apps to replace pointers with opaque handles.
If done at the time you could of course had relied on more of the developers of various apps still being active and willing to update their code and might have been able to avoid the Janus-UAE approach, but there was never a point at that time where anywhere close to a majority of users had MMU's,
With mmu, every app has its own 32bit address space, and the mmu “maps” the app space to physical space. Legacy apps get shared address space, while newer apps get isolated space. To port apps, its only the messaging system that needs rework, and if the system does its magic with same API, transition is invisible. At the end of the day, only the message address space needs to be shared. Sendmessage() behind the scenes remaps mmu addresses. Not impossible, just requires the will to do it.
The problem with that is that the messaging system permeates everything on the Amiga, so you'd lose basically every app without rework. That might have worked if the Amiga had a growing market share, but at the time this became an option, the Amiga market was already dying and most users still only had 68000 based machines without MMU until long after Commodore died.
It's not "only" the message address space, as e.g. messages included pointers to a lot of other data structures that'd now either need to be copied or mapped into the receiving process, or the message formats reworked.
> The A3000 had a ficker fixer.
That's demonstratably false. But the A3000 was a ficker fixer.
The 020 didn't ship with an MMU, but it did support an external one (the MC68851) natively via the coprocessor interface. The 030 was the first relevant CPU to ship with an internal MMU (and the EC030 used in the A4000 did not include the MMU).
The UK also had the Sinclair QL (68008-based) in 1984 for £399, famously owned by Linus Torvalds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Linux
I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.
In the case of Acorn they had hardware memory protection[1] and their own CPU designs[2].
In place of Irving Gould Acorn ended up with some clown called Stan Boland who decided it was better to change the name, stop making workstations and refocus on TV set top boxes. The company was dead six months later.
1. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/29468/Acorn-MEMC-Dat...
2. Not sure whatever happened to the Acorn Risc Machine but I'm sure it'll turn up again. :P
nitpick: ARM1/2 were 26-bit. The PC register used the bottom 26 bits for the address of the next instruction, and the upper 6 bits for status flags. Lots of code involves getting or twiddling those flags by amending the PC register directly. There is nowhere in the architecture you could put the missing 6 bits.
This was unlike the "24-bit" 68000 where the hardware package actually only had 24 address lines, but its address registers and PC were 32-bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26-bit_computing#Early_ARM_pro...
The ARM3 resolved the situation by adding a separate 32-bit clean PC register and a separate status register, instead of the combined monstrosity. All software had to be rewritten to use the new registers if it wanted to be "32-bit clean", unlike 68000 software which either just worked fine, or revealed the programmer was an imbecile who thought they could get away with storing random data in the top 8 bits of addresses.
Bonus: the Archimedes memory map (00000000-03FFFFFF, i.e. 26 bits) https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/docs/ArcMem...
> or revealed the programmer was an imbecile who thought they could get away with storing random data in the top 8 bits of addresses.
Case in point: Microsofts Amiga BASIC.
And a great BASIC with inline Assembly.
That was awesome, but to be fair it was a carry-over from BBC BASIC.
To match the Amiga in gaming, only from STE improvements onwards.
At least when the Amiga crashed it got to do some meditation. :)
ST crashes, meanwhile were “da bomb”
The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas.
In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.
That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.
In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
The 80's Mac were also two other things that made them less desirable for home users: they were seen as very slow (compared to "contemporary" home computers of the time - "instant-on" Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and DOS machines), and they were monochrome. No colour = terrible for gaming.
Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else.
At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.
Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)
In Spain and Portugal the Mac was the printed press and graphic design platform. Everything for people who truly knew what CMYK and "offset printing" meant. Amiga were for TV studios and odd demoscene people and maybe raster artwork. PC's were for "real work" (even under Windows 95 days). Boring offices with Microsoft Office and custom software, which literally had millions of software for it, from custom Borland ones to Visual Basic 5/6. Well, that and DOS compability and DOS and Windows games.
In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.
I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.
Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT.
In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.
Mac was the platform for journalists and printed press audio and media producers in Spain. Outside of that niche... good luck.
I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine.
Different times...
You also got a battery backed clock with the 512kb memory upgrade :)
> The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K
Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!
The first 386 PC didn't arrive until September 1986. It wasn't until like 1991 that sales of 386/486 PCs went above 50%.
Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.
DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.
> The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
I remember the Mac emulator running Mac software faster than a classic Mac. Too bad the drive was not compatible so you had to convert disks for them to be readable.
I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be.
However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
I'm a millennial and I discovered the Amiga, the demoscene, the lore and so on way after its era thanks to the catchy tracker music and demos. I've had several different re-introductions over different stages in my life, but the first was by trying to figure out as a kid how the tunes of my games could pack so much in less than 1MB per song, when my mental model was only MIDIs, WAVs or MP3s. Then I figured it out and got Modplug Tracker from the school's computer lab (had no internet at home) and that whole rabbit hole.
I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.
There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ
A millenial there; I could emualte it with ease under UAE and floppies and multiple guides in early 00's.
I recall also getting it working around that time. I gotta admit though that being used to the very straightforward NES, SNES etc emulators Amiga emulation was pretty confusing with all the different models and kickstarts and workbenches.
I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.
My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).
My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.
My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.
I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.
I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.
I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.
(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/
> I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.
Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9
I love this so much. Did you ever take it further? Did you find anything close to ARexx?
Love it! Any chance you'd be willing to share what you've got on GH? Also, I wonder if anyone has tried creating an Amiga OS style Linux distro? Sounds like your work could be the guts of it.
That last sentence of the article about waiting for the rest of the world to catch up really describes how I felt for way too long after 1994. In addition to the things mentioned in the article and the comments here, by that time I was used to having a standard OS-supplied scripting language that every self-respecting software program integrated with (ARexx), a standardized localization mechanism for software (locale files), and a generic OS-wide mechanism for handling file formats (datatypes). Finally switching over to Windows and Linux really felt like a big step backwards in some ways, and it took quite some time for the rest of the world to catch up (subjectively at least).
I'm still waiting...
I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing.
Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit.
I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations I'm unaware of that we've largely forgotten about.
Being able to simply write to the SPEAK: device was nice
It was magical.
Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background.
And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music.
I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.
I sign the sibling comment about being magical.
As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.
However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.
Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
> ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be
Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.
> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.
Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.
> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).
GenXer signing off.
P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people.
Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then)
Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.
By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.
> Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people.
We Gen-Xers are used to being completely ignored as a generation. That is not new at all.
Yeah, apparently we suffer from too much "I don't care attitude". :)
Almost. I'm technically in the first year of Gen X ('65). I knew a some guys a few years older right into the hobbyist computing scene in the early '80s. I lost touch by the time the Amiga came out but they would definitely have been into it.
When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985."
Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.
Xerox workstations were pretty much unheard of. A few might've seen a Mac. But most people haven't seen trash can functionality until MS-Windows 95 came out.
Personally, I just love the sound of it. Modules were awesome and games continued using them until ~2001.
10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X
The UI found in WorkBench 1.x was designed to be the way it was so that owners could plug their Amigas into television sets of the day and still be able to make out something without requiring a pristine purpose-built CRT monitor.
AmigaOS 2.X is pretty much a copy of NeXTStep, visually speaking
I'm not seeing it. Sure, the window bgs are gray, but so was 90% the OSes at the time. Everything else is different and even the only things those two have in common, the pseudo-3D on buttons, is applied in different ways, creating different divisions and accents.
When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could.
It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.
What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.
It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.
I thought “I think I have an Amiga 1200 in the garage in a box.”
Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.
Please recap them, or find a pro to do it. Otherwise they get damaged by leaking capacitors.
Terrific, but not sure about the ten years ahead.
Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.
Somehow the Atari ST is panned because it lacked preemptive multitasking (I'm not sure if this is true). They didn't mention any of the other GUIs that unix was working with - X11 already existed back then, and several unix vendors had their own windowing system that was arguably better (at least their marketing said so - I never used any). Of course Unix systems would have been much more expensive.
The ST got preemptive multitasking in 92 AFAIK with MINT/Multitos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS
> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic.
Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
In the early 90s I had an elementary teacher who was an amiga nerd and had a couple for us to play with. Best class ever.
Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.
I wanted one, but unlike the C64 I could not afford it.. but I wanted that and a Video Toaster.
I'm an Amiga diehard from the start but the industry caught up in a lot less than 10 years. Also, the amazing X68000 was a thing in Japan as of 1987.
The X68000 was amazing, but it was also around double the price. Amiga A1000 was around $1300 in 1985, Sharp X68000 was around $2500 in 1987. The Amiga A500 was released in 1987 and was even cheaper than the A1000 for an equivalent spec.
If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.
Yes but the point of the article was simply that the tech was 10 years ahead of it's time, but it provably wasn't.
10 years ahead of it's time for affordable home computers. You have to take the target market into account. To use an analogy, most people accept that Gran Turismo on the PS1 has great graphics for it's time, despite releasing months after Scud Race on Sega Model 3 hardware, because it's accepted that what's impressive for a 70s/80s/90s console is not what's impressive for arcade hardware.
The X68000 was basically arcade-class hardware in a PC form factor, with a price to match. There are reasons why Capcom used X68000s as their dev machines for CPS1 games.
One of my game's main characters is an Amiga fan and the Amiga vs ST rivalry has small cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...
Unrelated fact: My German Amiga 1000 keyboard has a serial number that ends with ... 00012. loved memories.
Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.
Ok I had to upvote you for old times sake and to honor the eternal Amiga-vs-Atari flamewars. But of course you are obviously and objectively very wrong.
Amiga 4 Ever! :D
Of course, everybody knows that the X68000 is better than both the Amiga and Atari ST
Hard to argue with that tbh, what a beauty.
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In hindsight, I think it was. The built in MIDI is extremely useful. The high resoution B&W monitor with high refresh rate as well. My main complaint is that it should have came with the YM2203 sound chip, or at least had an optional card slot for it.
It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.
That monitor was amazing. Crisp and clear.
We all have our delusions.
The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.
It wouldn't be a proper Amiga thread without some Atari ST guys showing up.
It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was.
I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.
Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!
The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo, the total package was extremely good. After the Amiga died I moved on into a Mac running OSX, and later Apple Silicon, when you combine the MacOS with Apple Silicon, it feels very similar to the Commodore Amiga in short, the total package of hardware and software made by one company, provided a level of integration that Microsoft Windows still can’t equal even with all the separate OEM’s making Windows computers across the world.
Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition, if the next computer or the SGI computer was around today with the technology advancements of today I definitely would be in the market for one, back in the day. I couldn’t afford one but today I can.
> The Amiga had a superior and hardware and software combo [...]
All things considered, no. It didn't. It had, for quite a while, a better bang-for-the-buck appeal, hardware- and software-wise, especially in the market niches it was designed to appeal to. But that headstart was over technically in late 1987 (386, VGA, AdLib, MT-32), and economically from ca. 1990/91 onwards, strongly dependent on market, of course, and not including the lowest margins, e. g. the home computers (based on their use cases, for a lot of people, used or new A500s, A600s or A1200s were still excellent deals even in 1993).
And philosophically? I say that was over before the first Amiga was even born. The adaptability speed and sheer potential of an open platform built around the relative stability/predictability of ever-evolving standards, as well as vendor diversity, ate you raw. It was just a matter of time.
The multitasking OS part is, I think, a quite overrated as well as romanticized retelling of history, written mostly by younger retro nerdlingers with roided-out (largely anachronistic) machines, on top of members of the Old Breed that sometimes still fight the Platform War. I can understand that. If Apple and Google won the hardware race by way of elimination with their to me rather miserable offerings, I'd most likely not be in the best of moods either, lol.
> Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition [...]
Speed and overspecialization/overintegration are not everything. Especially old Amiganers should have learned that lesson by now...
Oddly enough, Apple made exactly one machine I really liked to use: the Newton MessagePad. The rest of their merchandise has been, through the bank, inferior given my specific preferences and use cases. The same goes for all iterations of their mainline operating systems. What remains is a bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIc. Just on account of its really lovely looks.
I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I love the sound of 80s-era 'lo-fi' sound chips - I just last week remarked on another forum that I realise that much of my adult-era musical appreciation was likely a product of listening to the loading screens on my Spectrum as the data fed in was interpreted as sound...!
(eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv8WfmI4TiI - loading screen for Dizzy)
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Yeah, my old flame wars with Atari users were all largely based on vibes and spec sheets and screenshots in magazines and how ugly TOS looked, not on actual experience with the Atari... But I've been happy to be vindicated by various videos...
I don't really want to come across as an Atari ST fanboy in this thread (although I do love it, and the Amiga) but while TOS is very bare bones, an ST with 4MB of RAM, an HDD, and an install of Neodesk + Geneva is genuinely a nice experience.
Outside of that I've also set up a dev environment consisting of a copy of the Pure-C compiler suite (basically Borland C for the ST), MicroEMACS for editing, Okami shell[1], and pcmake[2] for a very UNIX like development environment. Most people these days would set up a cross compiler on their PC, which is the sensible thing to do, but it's been great fun to do some retro coding with on period correct hardware.
[1] https://gitlab.com/wolframroesler/okami-shell [2] https://github.com/th-otto/pcmake/
Screenshots of Neodesk makes me want to rekindle the flame wars ;)
(yes, the default AmigaOS look isn't anything impressive either, but "nobody" kept the default look so we're prone to very unfairly judging other systems against not what the default looks like but whatever we think a system should look like - I'm not claiming this was rational)
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I own The Amiga /AmigaOne /HombreOne . I open source it. Proof ask Gensia they just didnt want to hurt anybodies feelings.. f it. Im RHRH Constantine XII -Amigaman. Base it off of Aros or something. Amigaone model name will be x86 compatible. Hombre will be RISC/ARM compatible. Proof .. how in the heck do u think u got all the Amiga OS on aminet ,and avaibole to u. Plus to boot the hardware that is open to u now. I know Dave and Karl. I know them ALL. People, should check instead of beLIVING liars illumanti stool pidgins like rj and david pleansance, bill, coloanto, so called commodore, and any other so called amiga company. So contact I if u want to see and get that Open source Amiga that u really have.. search my name.
The PC made it. Decisively and on all accounts. Save one. You Amiga nerdlingers got adequate enough hardware in them nice wedge-style keyboard computer cases (i. e. not counting Amiga buckets).
AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)
Great article overall!
But:
>"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable.
But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue."
Not true!
Well, not entirely true...
Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding...
I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience!
Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's.
The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc.
Any program could crash any of those.
So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...)
If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day...
Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it!
So, to the Author, I say "well done!"
An excellent article overall!
That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!
wow