When it first arrived, the Amiga was a dream machine, and some have said it was ten years ahead of its time. The first installment of this multipart history of the Amiga looks at the events that led up to the birth of the company and the PC that bore its name.
sniff – i still miss her!
I feel your pain. I really wish we could go back to the days gone by of video gaming. I know the Amiga is certainly more than a gaming machine.
When I think of Amiga I think of brilliant gaming and a simpler desktop life.
I also long for the days of my C64 gaming. Incredible to think such a time existed in history and I was around to enjoy it!
The cornerstone in evolution i cant remember EVER using bloatware on amiga.
It sure let me spend times both in joy and guru meditation.
Someone should use intel and put amiga custom chips inside and redisign architecture so that people could get a ram disk for os3.9 .
About the closest I can find to having the Amiga experience on Intel is Amiga Forever.
http://www.amigaforever.com/
Brilliant product.
…it’s beautiful
;_; *manly tears*
I believe there arnt many of us geeks who used amiga back in the day , that wont spill a tear when the good old times are brought back .
I think the Amiga folks should do like Apple and port AmigaOS to the x86. Tho, I’m not sure if it’s possible because I don’t know the amount of assembler code AmigaOS uses. And I don’t know if they have the resources to do that.
Having AmigaOS on the x86 would be really sweet. I think it would generate enough interest to make newer versions and maybe compete with other OSes. I don’t think “opening” AmigaOS is necessary but of course, they could use a development model that would allow 3rd party developers to contribute in the OS development (mostly for drivers).
Anyway, just for my information, do they have paid people working on it? If so, where the money comes from?
Man, I wanted to work at Commodore so much when I was a kid…
The thing about resurrecting the Amiga is that it was truly ahead of its time — then. However, all the features (hardware and software) that made Amiga truly stand out among the crowd are now standard features in all sorts of machines and all sorts of OSs.
And that’s discounting the technical problems — a lot of AmigaOS’s code was 680×0 dependent. At that time, that was a fair tradeoff for the speed and power returns; they were trying to write code to sell in their era, not for us nostalgics 10-20 years later…
Yes, they have (or at least, at one point, had) people working on it; and as to where the money came from, I don’t know. Which may be part of the problem with the current Amiga owners.
Edited 2007-08-01 14:55 UTC
But at what cost ? I have a P4@2,4GHz PC with
512mb ram, and, while considered ancient by some, and feels so running windows or linux, it would feel like a super computer with an efficient operating system like AmigaOS for instance. I’m counting the days ’till this OS trio, aka dinosaurs undergone plastic surgery, is putten back into the TrashCan and kept there. (sorry linux, but you have to workout or get out of my sight, and windows I’m not even going to mention you!)
There are two other OSs based on AmigaOS and of which one is open source for X86 (and other architectures) already.
But seriously they should implement security within the different security critical OS subsystems in a not too distant future, it’s the internet world now we live in dammit.
Didn’t we all…
Aros exist is, an AmigaOS 3.1 (source compatible) running on a x86 hardware
just a 68000 and custom chip should be written for running old amiga classic software.
Maybe one day Amiga Inc will close and free the amiga os source That’s my only hope
Bob
They can put an entire 68000-based Sega Genesis into a $20 direct-to-TV controller. Add a $20 flash drive to function as a hard drive, a $20 CD-ROM, a $10 license to the Amiga OS, and a $5 floppy drive, and you have a $75 retro-Amiga thin client — heck, you could probably put that into an Amiga 500-styled shell for maybe $5 more.
You could put Jeri Ellsworth in charge of the project, she’s handled firmware design and Commodore design before.
Uhm… how could they both close the source, and free it at the same time?
Arg I mean Amiga Colapse (close)
and free the source
AI never made anything with the amiga
I must go back to school to learn english
Bob
Edited 2007-08-01 22:49
That was a beautifully written and informative article that captures the spirit of the Amiga – I look forward to the next installation! I do miss my Amiga.
For those of you that aren’t aware, a bright spark called ‘Dennis’ has been spending years re-creating the Amiga in a small form factor, and he’s just released the hardware design and the necessary supporting software as open source. The project is called “MiniMig”. It looks as though there might even be a small scale production run.
I’m sick of all these old nerds lording their Amiga experience over me. This article has just convinced me to try an Amiga emulator. Then I can parade around the net pretending to be old school, looking down on everyone else and their johnny-come-lately multimedia pcs.
A quick search found the UAE
http://uae.coresystems.de/
Anyone have any experience with this emulator?
Edited 2007-08-01 15:10
Real men input there programs with toggle switches and read their output from flashing LED’s. [Insert Tim Allen grunt]
UAE is good. I recommend it.
It’s a nice emulator, but you need the ROM images and Amiga OS to use it. Both of which aren’t free.
Yes, just one of the way us “old nerds” (I’m 28 for pete’s sake) keep the Amiga all to ourselves. Muhahahaha.
(Actually it is just whoever owns Amiga these days being greedy asses)
UAE is great and there are ports for all major OS’s Linux/OsX/Windows. You probably want WinUAE.
I was going to recommend Amigainabox as a great way of having a complete AmigaOS setup with minimal trouble, but it seems the site is down. Check this forum thread for a link to download it from the wayback machine (5th comment) :
http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=39414&for…
Legal Kickstart and Workbench ROMS can be bought from Amiga forever : http://www.amigaforever.com/ ( googling kick31.rom also works, but is very very naughty )
If you want to emulate a Classic Amiga you’re running Linux or some other POSIX-like operating system, you’d be better off checking out http://rcdrummond.net/uae/ for EUAE the extended version with backported features from http://winuae.net WinUAE the Windows version of UAE. As mentioned earlier, AmigaForever comes with what you need to do this.
Was all I could think after seeing a demo of the Amiga in the mid-eighties. It blew everything at that price level out of the water. Not only was the OS, graphics and sound amazing but at the demo I watched they had the Sidecar (integrated hardware IBM PC compatibility) as well. 68000 apps and x86 apps running at the same time on the same monitor on an affordable home PC !
To this day no machine has ever been so far ahead of its time as the Amiga was.
P.S. Give Dave Haynie’s ¨Deathbed Vigil¨ video a look if you want to watch Commodore’s last days.
And what about the Atari ST line??!!
It was there along side the Amiga in every step of the way. It was just as advanced and some may urge more advanced as the Amiga. The article complained about “no respect” for the Amiga, but it doesn’t mention Atari…. <Shrug> oh well.
The original ST wasn’t in the same class as the Amiga.
What ? All Atari ST had was a 68000, Amiga had that plus an army of custom chips and an OS putting atari gem in bed every night, sorry.
The Atari ST really was inferior to the Amiga except where MIDI was concerned.
The Atari STe was much better, but still had crappy single tasking TOS and low color GEM.
The Atari ST line didn’t get decent until the TT030 came out, which was too pricey (though I own one now after many years) and then the Falcon030. Then of course the morons at Atari decided after the Falcon030 was out for around a year that they were pulling out of the computer business forever and wanted to go with game consoles again, after their name had already been ruined by things such as the 5200 and the XEGS. Well maybe ruined is a bit harsh, and more likely it was stuck with the 2600. When people heard Atari, that’s what they thought. With the Mega STe and TT030, they were trying to get into the serious DTP and workstation area, but being known for gaming screwed them for the most part there. They did (and still do) have a place in the music studio though.
Unfortunately the Jaguar was also a commercial failure, and as others have said about Marketing being the death of Amiga, the same was for all the Atari machines (including the Jaguar, which I also own). If they had released more than five commercials and played them at times other than late night, maybe they would have gotten a bigger install base, along with more developers…..
Oh well all is the past, much like the Amiga there are some small(er) projects which are trying to resurrect interest in the Atari line of computers. Even the Jaguar still has some home brew games being hacked together for it.
For the record, my Atari Mega STe has a 16Mhz 68000, and my Atari 1040ST has a 8Mhz 68000. If I recall correctly, the Amiga 500 had a 7.49Mhz 68000. Not much of a difference, and the custom graphics chip actually made them a lot faster. Ah, the good ol’ days of the 16bit computers. Too bad the crappiest of them all won out.
Those were the good days where anything made for the Atari ST or Amiga would work on any of them, unless it actually stated 1mb of ram. Which pretty much everyone had.
Not in any universe I’ve been in it wasn’t.
No way. The ST was a vanilla 68K machine running a hacked up 68K port of MS-DOS with a hacked up incomplete 68K port of GEM. The Amiga was chock full of custom processors and ran a beautifully integrated and efficient custom multitasking OS that took full advantage of the hardware. There was no comparison.
And I’m saying this as a former ST owner who had previously owned and enjoyed several Atari 8-bit computers. I naively believed the ST would be the next generation Atari design with custom processors and all. Instead the Amiga was that, and no wonder; it was designed by former Atari people (see Jay Miner). Some of the Amiga’s coolest capabilities (e.g., split-resolution graphics) had first appeared on the Atari 8-bit line. The ST on the other hand was the product of former Commodore management (see Jack Tramiel). It was all very interesting; Atari’s talented techies had moved to Commodore, while Commodore’s inept management had moved to Atari. The ST was my first great computing disappointment.
Don’t get me wrong though. The Amiga wasn’t perfect. The OS was chained to the custom hardware and achieved its multitasking efficiency by completely sacrificing robustness. The whole thing was essentially one big multithreaded process and wouldn’t last a day in today’s malware-ridden world.
the tos of the atari st wasn’t a port of ms-dos. it just looks like ms-dos because both were clones of cp/m.
i liked the crisp b/w screen of the ataris st, and there were some nice programms, but the amiga definitly in another league.
Sometimes the whole _marketing_ thing drives me crazy – it seems like consumers are the losers. Let me explain:
There were so many competitors to the IBM PC in the 80’s. In this article we read about one – the Amiga. What an awesome machine. I also owned what I considered to be a much superior machine – the Texas Instuments TI 99/4A. While the cheesy 8-bit IBM was beeping and booping its PC-speaker and green-screen text was crawling by, my TI had beautiful 3-voice synthesized music, brilliant (for its time) graphics, and was just a heck of a lot of fun.
But then marketing comes in – the PC had giant IBM behind it. Thousands of PC software titles flooded the market. Meanwhile, all TI could do was create some of the cheesiest games ever made. Anyone remember “Hunt the Wumpus”? Awful! There were some good third-party games, etc. But an absolutely wonderful machine went down the crapper. The Atari’s were also wonderful. I am just thankful that Apple survived!
Bottom line – the best machine didn’t win. Marketing did! We saw the same thing played out in the OS wars on the PC itself.
Marketing Sucks!
[EDIT: Kan’t Spelle]
Edited 2007-08-01 15:36
You can’t possibly be serious…the TI 99/4A wasn’t even in the same generation as the Amiga. It was discontinued 2 years before the first Amiga model (the 1000) came out. Then, the Amiga moved up with the 2000 model, (the 2000HD models even came with a SCSI hard drive).
The TI 99/4A was a fine computer, but it was at best a competitor to the Commodore 64. It was nowhere in the same league as Amiga computers.
Sorry for the dangling modifier – I mean’t much superior to the IBM PC. My bad!
English is my second language. Unfortunately, I don’t have a first!
I see, never mind!
Don’t worry, English is my second language as well…
Showing my age here a little.
It was either 1981 or early 1982 and I was learning how to program mainframes at school. We were learning COBOL, FORTRAN IV, and RPG II. Some of you will remember those very fondly.
One day I went into class and the teacher and other students were talking about this new computer we just got. A new mainframe? What other kind of computer would we be getting? None that I knew of.
I asked them and they showed me the Atari 400. Nobody was doing anything on it because it wasn’t even put together yet. Meaning that the monitor wasn’t plugged into the CPU box or anything. It was barely out of the boxes that they came in. And they were just staring at it.
It was a two year class and I had been there for at least a year and a half so I kind of used my authority of having been there “a long time” and pushed my way through and without reading the manuals I started hooking it up and kind of “ordering” someone else to pull out the manual and start telling me the instructions for booting it up, if it was more than just plugging everything in and turning it on.
It turns out that was all we needed, at least just to get it to a command prompt.
Nothing much of interest got done that day on the Atari 400. I did drop everything I was doing that day and read through the manuals learning about BASIC for the Atari and how, if you wanted to load or save anything you had to hook up the audio tape player and tell the Atari to load while hitting the play button the tape player or tell it to save something and hit the record button on the tape player.
Over the months I did the most with that Atari 400 and shortly thereafter the Atari 800 that arrived. Wow! 8k or RAM? Hard to image at the time. Laughable now.
With that little bit of RAM there wasn’t a whole lot that could be done. For that you need more RAM and the school wasn’t buying that.
The instructor did have programs he wanted us to learn on it and when I left I was the only one that had completed more than 10% of them. I had finished all of them.
But there was one more thing (yes I use Macs now). I’m a VERY visual person. I like travel, I like adventure, hey, DND (Dungeons and Dragons had BOTH in a game – cool). But DND was all in your imagination (other than little figures which we didn’t use) other than maps we made. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could see it on a computer? Yes it would.
I quickly found out the limitations of the Atari 800 with 8K of RAM. I could barely make mazes that were big enough to confuse people. I’m not talking about top down mazes but walk through mazes like DOOM that would come out years later but without any graphics. Well, other than just lines going from the corners of the screen towards the center to make it look like you were walking down a hallway with hallways leading off from it.
The other students found what I was trying to do VERY cool. I did too. The frustration was that I really couldn’t do much more with it. I was ahead of my time. Years ahead.
It wasn’t really until the Balder’s Gate series from BioWare did I finally have a computer game that came a tiny bit close to what I wanted. Actually Never Winter Nights was the first to start coming close. Those TSR DND games? HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED (you get the idea) them!!!!! Messing up the rules. Taking “creative license” with them. Hated that.
Maybe Dragon Age will finally be what I pictured back in 1981 or ’82. It won’t be DND but something with that kind of idea. No mostly hack and slash game gets my attention. It’s all about adventure for me. VISUALLY seeing the adventure.
Anyway, that was my experience a loooong time ago with the Atari 400 and 800 computers. Hopefully it was of some interest to at least one person.
you should have mentioned that jay miner designed the atari 400 and 800 before he designed the amiga – nobody really reads the article!
You really are showing your age. While I read what you wrote, I was thinking, “The Atari 800 had 48KB of RAM, not 8KB”. But just to make sure my memory wasn’t fuzzy, I checked wikipedia, and it stated that the original Atari 800s did have 8KB of RAM, and that by the time they were released in a decent amount, RAM prices had dropped, so it had 16KB of RAM, but then later they expanded them to have 48KB.
I started my computing world at 8 years old when my parents picked up an Atari 800XL with it’s nice 64KB of RAM and a 1050 Floppy Drive (still have the original Atari 800XL, but the Floppy Drive was sent off to repair, and then never returned after the company went out of business. Though my Atari 800XL has seen better days, last time I connected it, it only displayed in black and white…. if I ever get time, and room, I will try to find a replacement RF modulator for it, see if I can’t get the thing to work again!)
The beauty of those old timer computers, is that they never break. Actually my 800XL had been dropped down my stairs a few times. Ah, the memories. I still run the Atari800 emulator from time to time.
“You really are showing your age. While I read what you wrote, I was thinking, “The Atari 800 had 48KB of RAM, not 8KB”. But just to make sure my memory wasn’t fuzzy, I checked wikipedia, and it stated that the original Atari 800s did have 8KB of RAM, and that by the time they were released in a decent amount, RAM prices had dropped, so it had 16KB of RAM, but then later they expanded them to have 48KB. ”
I –wish– it had come with 48kb of RAM. Man what I could have done with “all of that” (laughing to myself) RAM… (drifting off into my own world thinking about what I could have done.).
I think it’s a real shame that the Amiga never took of as an office computer in the 80’s and early 90’s. It was marketed as a gaming machine, but it had an operating system that was _way_ more advanced that MS-DOS and even early Windows versions.
My first computer was an Amiga and it taught me to use the command line in conjunction with with a GUI. I never felt at home with Windows, but Linux and and OS X is just like the good old Amiga days.
To this day, I still feel extremely bitter that AAA was never finished. Damn you, Commodore management. Damn you all to the Bahamas.
When I saw “Genesis” in the title of this article, I expected it to be about Genesi (http://genesi.lu/). I read the whole way through it expecting the next topic to be MorphOS and the new Amiga, etc.
Oh well. Despite the confusion, it was very interesting. I have come to regret the disdain I felt toward my old roommate and his Amiga back when I was very proud of my new ‘386.
And ARM was more powerful than 68K.
Yet people are making so much fuss about a failed console chipset what was Amiga.
It failed. Why do you are so licking it so much when there were better machines at the time (FM Town, Sharp efforts, SNES chipset). Because it was when you were young so then everything were tasting so much better?
And from the moment when 486/localbus PCs showed it was the end for Amiga. Simply put raw power will always prevail as results show.
1. SNES came like 5-6 years later ?! and was it a computer ? hellooo !!
No, because it tasted so much better than anything else (since it was so much better).
8-9 years later right ? It wasnt the silly 486 localbus that made the end for amiga, it was something else, something called stagnation, follow the story you might learn a thing or two.
Betamax was apparently superior to VHS and it failed.
“Why do you are so licking it so much when there were better machines at the time (FM Town, Sharp efforts, SNES chipset)”
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? The SNES a) came out years later, b) wasn’t nearly as powerful, c) wasn’t a computer.
FM Towns came out years later.
Sharp efforts? You’ll have to be more specific than that.
“And from the moment when 486/localbus PCs showed it was the end for Amiga”
And in other news, a new product that came out many years later is, much to everyone’s surprise, better. The wonders of the world, eh?
If you can call it that.
The Amiga hardware/OS combo was amazing. I had a souped up Amiga 2000 just as 286/386’s were hitting the market and I would rate that as one of my most creative periods in computing. However, I got married, had different priorities so never really had enough usable money to go for a A3000/4000 or somehow getting an AGA compatible computer (getting an A600 or A1200 would have seemed like a downgrade).
Later, when I was freer to do so I did however try and get back into the scene several times but wish I hadn’t. It was expensive, frustrating with the only high point being a certain supplier sending me a naked picture of his wife by accident.
The aftermath of the downfall of Commodore/Amiga is that various companies were or are still out there trying to suck the Amiga name dry to the last cent they can and this is sad to say the least.
Siamese, Boxer, Genesis, Pegasys, Amigaone, Eyetech, Hyperion, Morphos, ACK and even “Amiga” are all familiar names to anyone who is still chasing the Amiga dream. Everyone of these leaves a sort of nasty taste in my mouth when I mention them now…
Edited 2007-08-01 21:14
Even on a quad core intel box, a floppy or a cdrom insert can pause an XP desktop.
I remember back in the amiga days, people where emulating the mac just to get software. As with linux, no software, people wont switch. Linux now has enough software people can use it for most tasks, except the newest games.
The emphasis is on *most* tasks. There is software missing for pretty much all specialized tasks. So, yes, for Office use and Webbrowsing Linux is a good choice now, but there is software missing to get the people with less mainstream requirements.
I realy like KUbuntu better than any other OS now, but there are apps i want to use which are too demanding for emulation, don’t run in Wine and have no Linux counterparts, so i’m stuck.
I still have a working Amiga 1000…sold my 2000. I keep the 1000 around to play Marble Madness and Xenon. The Amiga version of Xenon made the Atari ST’s version sound and look like crap (Yes I did have a 520ST back in the day). I still have a lot of 8 bits around too…
Dano
Xenon on the ST did kind of look like ass. The second one was identical on the Amiga and ST (well I had an STe, so I’m not sure if that helped or not), I’ll have to give the first one on the Amiga a try one of these days to see how it compares. I absolutely loved the second one. Bitmap Bros. put out some awesome games…
Wonder where they are these days?
I remember the conversations of BYTE Information eXchange and how developers were having a tough time keeping Amiga’s operating system working for more than 30 seconds at a time.
Commodore was a mess and bought some really great hardware that Atari had apparently also funded prior to the sale of the company to Commodore. I seriously doubt that anyone who worked at Commodore shed a tear when it closed. The people I knew from there certainly were glad to get away from it.
At least, it’s finally getting some real attention, but now, it’s even more of niche machine than it was then.
If you are interested in the history of the Amiga and Commodore, there is a really nice book which you might want to read: On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall. There seems to be a second edition called: The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge. I enjoyed this book a lot!
What a great article! The story of Amiga must be retold as it really illustrates the bright spots and pitfalls of computer industry. And maybe someday somebody will learn from it.
Totally awesome reading!! I’m so looking forward to next weeks second part of this article series. Oh, I miss the decade of Amiga … when computers where fun!