A history of the Amiga
arstechnica.comHaving stuck with the Amiga until '98, with an overly expanded computer - capable of playing Quake etc, it was the last real computer platform I cared for. All these useless companies that purchased it without a long term plan was exasperating. If anything, it's taught me to take a step backwards and avoid becoming tribal over any technology.
I hung in there with the Amiga until around 1996. I truly enjoyed that computer system, in a way I haven't enjoyed any computer since. Perhaps part of it was the overall novelty of personal computing, as there was still so much totally new development going on... but I sure didn't have that same enjoyment factor when using IBM-PC clones or even Macintoshes of the same era.
I think, maybe, somehow, probably unintentionally, the Amiga captured the 1970s/early-1980s "hacker spirit" better than any of the other personal computer systems. It wasn't a Lisp machine, and it wasn't a PDP-11, and it wasn't particularly used for artificial intelligence, but its users thoroughly enjoyed tinkering with it and making it do awesome things.
And awesome things it did.
The Amiga remains magical to me, having grown up programming it and having had more "aahaa!" moments thanks to it than any other computer in particular.
I still have things like this, floating around in my brain somewhere[]:
.loop: move.w $dff006,$dff180
btst.b #6,$bfe001
bne.s .loop
[] Somewhere slightly shady, since I mis-remembered the two first register addresses, and also the sign of the /FE0 bit being read by the third instruction. Still, it's been 14 years since I switched to Linux, so I'm kind of happy.
What does this code do?
$dff006 is the vertical raster position register, $dff180 is the background color register, and $bfe001 is one of the registers belonging to one of the two CIAs of the Amiga; the piece of code copies 16 bits of data (on the amiga referred to as a "word") from $dff006 to $dff180, checks if bit 6 in $bfe001 is high - the bit that contains the status of the left mouse button of joy/mouse port #1 - and then branches back to the .loop label if the comparison resulted negatively - that is, if the bit was not high.
In plain-speak, it renders vertical green/blue/cyan gradients in the background until the left mouse button is pressed.
(as a side note, I spent 4-5 years coding on the Amiga in the early 90s.)
I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985 or 86, and hung in there with a 2000 or 3000 (can't remember now) until 1996. Only about a year ago I finally tossed all the old floppies, but I kept several thinking I might write an Amiga retrospective someday.
Here are some highlights. It's been a long time, so I'm sure to make some technical mistakes.
Rexx Plus Compiler -- by Dineen Edwards Group; Implementation of the Rexx language (ARexx). You cold easily hack together the OS and many applications as well. ARexx was one of the things that kept the Amiga alive.
UEdit -- by Rick Stiles; One of the first great things available for the Amiga. A highly programmable editor. If Rick hadn't passed away too soon UEdit may well have lived on past the Amiga.
Migraph OCR -- by Migraph, Inc.; I was scanning financial data from Investors Business Daily, compiled quite a database.
Descartes! -- by Mindware International; Some sort of AI-ish thingy I never found a use for.
Magellan -- by Emerald Intelligence; Expert System generator I never found a use for. The company ran into some sort of trademark infringement and later renamed it Mahogany.
Boole -- by URSIC Computing; Fuzzy logic and Bayesian Inference. Actually a DOS program, but you could run it on the Amiga.
The Amiga was really a hacker's machine. Thanks to programs like ARexx and UEdit you could really do some interesting stuff at a time when a DOS computer mostly just ran stand-alone programs. It was greatly stymied by Commodore's terrible marketing and lack of commercial applications.
I think in a way I was scarred by investing so much learning effort in a technology that dead-ended. It was probably a factor in my taking a career detour to more business, less technical work for several years.
I really wish we had more hardware diversity. With open-source software, it shouldn't be very hard to do.
Having to choose between a Core i3, i5, Athlon, Duron, Sempron, Whateveron, or between embedded, ATI or Nvidia doesn`t really feel like having any choice...
Or, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can choose any architecture, as long as it runs Windows.
If you are irritated by the fact this was only part one, part 7 - with links to the earlier parts - can be found here. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/05/amiga-history-p...
I’m sad that that stopped about halfway through the story, I think they were shooting for about 10 parts or so. But part 7 was a kind of sidetrack listing games on the platform, and the writer might have run out of contacts or behind the scenes info to finish the narrative.
My Amiga 1000 is sitting about five feet from me. I haven't turned it on in a very long while.
Even my beloved Commodore 64 is long gone, but I haven't been able to part with the Amiga. Not saying this is a good thing. Just saying.
I honestly feel as though I missed out on something big regarding the Amiga. While a teenager, I would regularly get .info magazine, and wonder in awe at the games and media tools the platform had. However, in my neck of the country (NW Ohio), there were no stores or support for the platform. Ironically, given its marginal status at the time, it was easier to find tech service and stores selling Macs than other platforms in the late 80’s. When I got my first “modern” computer (a Mac LC) in college, one of the first things I put on it was an Amiga module tracker…
Amiga 500: Best Computer Ever.
second that.
I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice.
(More of my school friends back then had Ataris than Amigas, so it was a no-brainer decision for me.)
I'm curious what spurred the insane die-hard mentality though. Most of us left the Amigas and Ataris for the PC in the early 90s, except for a few who swore by their Amigas and loved them to bits even though their relative performance grew more and more pathetic.
So what caused it? First love? Or was there something genuinely good about the system? I'm genuinely curious.
Same here, and I really did want an Amiga at one time. One of my favorite internet comic writers still apparently uses them to this day.
http://www.sabrina-online.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q
That said, I ended up on Macs, and for the longest time, I though we were going to end up in the same boat. (And in a way, we did. To me, OS X isn’t quite the joy to use due to it’s complexity and design compromises for interoperability versus the classic Mac OS.)
EDIT: Every time this topic comes up, I’m reminded of an old USENET thread I posted to back in the day.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/brows...
I’m the first “Mac user” in that thread.
I think it's for a few reasons:
1) because it was a really powerful system that was just under the complexity curve such that a dedicated person could learn literally everything about the system from top to bottom and do cool stuff with it.
2) It's stock form was insanely powerful out of the box, while PCs were from different vendors, with different configurations and no particular standard "thing" was a PC.
3) It wasn't really meant to be tinkered with, but almost everybody who had an Amiga had done some crazy things to upgrade it. The hacker community on it was vibrant and technically awesome (see #1 above). Whereas if I wanted to upgrade my PC I simply inserted a new card or something, these guys were soldering new OS ROMS and SCSI interfaces into a system that really wasn't supposed to have these things. I remember reading about Power PC expansion boards for the A500 and wondering "where's the expansion slots?"
4) Because of #3, systems took on very individualistic flavors, like muscle cars tricked out by their owners. You knew that a guy with an A500 that had the latest OS ROMs, two hard drives, a VGA monitor, a couple of floppy drives and was on his 3rd keyboard had put a lot of personal time into the physical aspects of his box. The same couldn't really be said (at least not to anywhere near the level) with PC owners.
5) Amiga user group meetings were a blast with people bringing and showing off their machines, trading pirated software (anybody remember "Fish disks"?) and generally have a great time trading trick out secrets with each other. It felt like a car club community event rather than a computer community event.
"I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice."
You do realize that thems is still fightin' words? The Vi/Emacs war is a pillow fight compared with the Amiga/Atari ST wars.
I can almost remember how the arguments went.. Guru meditation sucked more than the bombs, but the 800kB weird-standard diskette format was better than the 720kB one? And MIDI-ports were better than that weird 4096-colour format that noone really used?
I had Amigas, 1000 and 2000. I didn't make much use of its graphics capabilities, as a developer. However, at the time, it was the only affordable, multitasking system with a flat 32-bit address space. Not protected, but this was a long time ago. It also had a nice C++ environment, and I could pretty easily port code back and forth between Solaris and Amiga. Good times.
Oh, so many memories of playing FirePower and Impossible Mission!
And I think the sound for HN should be
"Another Visitor. Stay a while. Stay FOREVERRRR"
I could only imagine what Jay Miner could have done in the mobile space if he was still alive.
The Amiga is a good example of how in the long run a platform always win over a product.
The platform in this case being the PC.