There exists a global community, a loosely knit consciousness of individuals that crosses boundaries of language and artistic disciplines. It resides in both the online and physical space, its followers are dedicated, if not fervent. The object and to some extent, philosophy that unites these adherents, is a computer system called the Commodore Amiga. So why does a machine made by a company that went bankrupt in 1994 have a cult like following? Throughout this essay I will present to you, the reader, a study of qualitative data that has been collected at community events, social gatherings and conversations. The resulting narrative is intended to illuminate the origins of the community, how it is structured and how members participate in it. Game industry professionals, such as the person interviewed during the research for this paper, will attest to the properties, characteristics and creative application of the machine, and how this creativity plays a role in the sphere of their community. I will examine the bonds of the society, to determine if the creative linage of the computer plays a role in community interactions.
The Amiga community is probably one of the most fascinating technology subcommunity out there. Lots of infighting, various competing Amiga operating systems, incredibly expensive but still outdated hardware, dubious ownership situations – it’s all there. Yet, they keep going, they keep pushing out new software and new hardware, and they’re in no danger of falling apart.
Amazing.
And very proud to still be part of it after 30 years!
The Amiga still hits my sense of wonder every time I switch it on. The only other thing that comes close is BeOS, may both of them continue!
As someone who has had zero experience with Amiga, can you explain in words what makes it different from other systems? I’m curious.
IMHO: deep integration between hardware and software …kinda console-like, which was sort of no accident, since Amiga chips originally were meant to be used in games console, not a computer.
(and arguably, this characteristic brought to Amiga its doom, since it wasn’t that straightforward to upgrade; also, it was typically used for gaming but without the financing/licensing model of games consoles …and when hardware prices plummeted, Commodore had no alternative revenue streams)
Also, it’s Amiga news again!
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-28483217
That’s a tricky one, and different people will have different answers. For me, it’s mostly the OS. It has its quirks and failings of course, but it’s implemented in a really elegant way and gives the user a no-nonsense experience where nothing is really cryptic and things tend to make sense. Many little behavioural things just make so much more sense, and I miss them when I work on other systems. Things like:
– separate logical screens in layers (like multiple desktops but different)
– assigns (like a virtual mount point but different)
– being able to set an open file dialog to the location of a file you have on the desktop (hard to describe, but Haiku has a similar feature too)
– still being able to move and arrange windows that are locked waiting on the user (helps to figure out what’s going on)
– windows that don’t automatically jump to the front unless you want them to
– filetype recognition that doesn’t rely on filename extensions
– window close gadgets that aren’t beside any other buttons (avoids accidentally closing windows)
– a system-wide scripting and IPC language
The original hardware shares the elegance of design, at a low level it really is nice to work with, and for a lot of people that is the essence. It lets the lean OS do a lot with not much computing power. Of course it can’t hold a candle to modern hardware, but it’s still worthy of admiration.
Coding for it is also a refreshing change, and once you get used to its ways of working it’s a very capable, if low level, API.
Sounds like an earlier, more polished version of the features list which drew me from Windows XP to KDE on Linux.
Am I correct in assuming that AmigaOS also has some hard-to-describe air of good design that just calls to you? (Similar to how, despite it being old, having barely used it in my childhood, and disagreeing with Apple and the Mac software ecosystem on various ideological grounds, something about classic MacOS’s UI just appeals to me.)
Yep, that sounds about right. There’s a feeling that, if it was possible to have a blank canvas at this stage, I might come up with a very similar design.
As I type this in Windows in work, you reminded me of another point:
– Logical keyboard shortcuts
By and large, the Amiga shares the Mac’s keyboard shortcuts, including a dedicated shortcut key on the keyboard. Apple-Q / Amiga-Q to quit instead of Alt-F4 for example.
All of my Amiga stuff is stored away, I just don’t seem to have the time these days, However every so often I fire up my 1200 and somehow it still feels nicer than anything modern.
I wonder if newer operating systems with so many contributors simply have their personality diluted too much to be fun.
I only got my first Amigaq last year. My god is it a fantastic machine. There is nothing contemporary that can hold a candle to the Amiga. Even my (slightly newer) powermac looks old and simplistic compared to the Amiga. Sure, it’s not the best interface, but that custom chipset just makes it so much more
And all that with 8 MHz or less. I wonder what would happen if I ran something like OpenOffice or Firefox on an 8 MHz machine?
I used to code in Assembler on the Amiga. It was straightforward, position independent code. The Amiga was rather efficient. I bet that even the old BCPL crap is more efficient than most of today’s stuff ^aEUR“ and that library did really hurt.
68k assembler made sense. If I compare it to the x86 chaos, I’m tempted to declare it a high-level language. GUI programming was the default. You could do pretty much anything with an Amiga ^aEUR“ and ^aEUR“ they were affordable, too.
I thought part of the reason for their lack of long-term success was that they weren’t affordable, at least by comparison to competition prices as the market matured? I could be mistaken, however.
Amiga (and Atari) was very affordable compared to the PC in the late 80s. The turning point was around 1991, with Amiga and Atari losing more and more ground until than, due to the lack of development.
The Amiga war great and lightyears ahead in 85, but selling the same machines, with the same gfx-capabilities and cpu-speed 6 years later was not working out.
The next generation of chipset came 92 (AGA), but it reached only about SVGA capabilities. The price for the high-end model A4000 was too high – the A1200 not powerful enough.
The OS (3.0) on the other side, was still the best until BeOS came along.
Edited 2018-03-15 16:26 UTC
You are 100% right!! People usually say “Amiga was cheap” and that’s NOT TRUE.
Amiga 500 was cheap and that’s all. And a vanilla A500 was useless as a workstation, without expansions, it was a videogame console.
If you wanted an Amiga system for work, similar to a PC, you had to buy an accelerator, a SCSI controller and a hard disk. Or buy an A2000 or A3000 and they were expensive, more expensive than a PC clone.
Later, in the middle 90s, during the A1200 and A4000 era, an accelator and a memory expansion was a MUST if you wanted to work with the machine like a Windows PC or a Mac. And believe me, accelerators for the Amiga were super expensive.
In fact, everything in the Amiga world was expensive and very exclusive. Amiga main market was Germany, and germans are rich.
People who say “Amiga was cheap” usually didn’t have an Amiga or had an A500 to play videogames. They don’t know the Amiga world at all.
Amiga stuff was, is and will be expensive.
http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/sales.html I think you’re mistaking germany for the UK
I can assure you that in Portugal, many people on my circle of friends were successfully using Amiga 500 for everything they needed to do for their work.
Even with monitors and external hard-disks it was still cheaper than 286 and 386 fully equiped PCs
That’s exactly what was “Expensive”.
The Amiga had to use it’s own special Monitors. You couldnt use the VGA ones a regular PC user could.
So the $600 Amiga 500 needed the $425 monitor to go with it.
And then you got vision problems, so you ended up buying a $1400 A3000 with a flicker fixer…
Also, I spent $1100 adding a _32 meg_ SCSI HDrive to my Amiga 500. The HD was $400, but the external case, external power, and the FastTrak SCSI adapter was a pretty penny.
Edited 2018-03-19 02:23 UTC
I used my amiga with my colour TV via SCART cable…
And with the Amiga 520, you could hook it up via RF if your TV had no SCART
“Home computer” (500, 600, somewhat also 1200) models in basic configuration, what most people had experience with, were quite inexpensive…
They were quite inexpensive as videogame machines (like the C64)… but if you wanted to use them for real work (like a PC or a Mac) you had to drop a huge amount of money.
Don’t get me wrong I think Amiga was the best and most innovative computer platform ever created… but saying “Amiga was cheap” is half of the truth.
PS: I suffered crazy Amiga prices during the 90s, many times, buying an entire PC clone was cheaper than buying an accelerator for the A1200.
It still is cheaper to buy a whole PC than it is to buy an Amiga Accelerator. Prices are still super expensive, and devices like the Vampire V4 aren’t helping
Replying to darknexus: “I thought part of the reason for their lack of long-term success was that they weren’t affordable, at least by comparison to competition prices as the market matured? I could be mistaken, however.”
Within the general-purpose home computer market, the Amiga was only expensive compared to the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 that came before it. It was a bargain compared to PC setups.
Eventually the PC pricing drifted downwards as it became ubiquitous, and there were some truly expensive Amigas on the high end (for example the 4000T tower model.) But all high-end workstations (PC, MAC or Amiga) have always been eye-wateringly expensive.
In my memory, through the mid to late 80’s there were a few distinct price stata (and customer groups that went along with them). For a reasonably complete setup (CPU, monitor, floppy drive, maybe a printer) you could pay:
< $800 – Commodore 64, most other 8-bit home computers
< $1200 – Amiga (home models like A500 or A1200)
$2000 to $3000 – Amiga (pro model like an A2000 with a hard drive)
$1500 to $4000 – PC compatible (higher priced units probably had a hard drive)
$6000 – a “real” IBM PC/AT
$3000 to $4000 – Mac (like an SE or Plus)
All the regular, working class and middle class people I knew had only the cheapest 8-bit computers.
In my town of there were only a handful of Macs. Only doctors and dentists (by way of example) could afford them.
PCs made inroads as middle-class folks had PCs introduced at work. There was growing pressure to buy a PC for home, to be able to work with the same software and documents as used at work. This pressured a lot of people into buying a PC as their first computer; and many who upgraded from 8-bit went to PC for the same reason.
The Amiga users I knew (and count myself among) were folks who were well-read about all different computers, who recognized the potential and the price/performance ratio. We were usually less concerned about “work” compatibility, being interested in or employed in the arts. The top uses for Amigas seemed to be – gaming, visual arts (DPaint was the bomb), music (rival to Atari ST), and general home productivity (like word processing of homework.)
Edited 2018-03-16 15:33 UTC
Please take into consideration the Atari ST line (8MHz, 512/1024KB), the MegaST (8/16MHz, 2/4MB), the TT (32MHz, 4/8MB) and the late Falcon030 (16MHz, 4/14MB). Not counting in accelerator cards.
Most home computers at the time was affordable compared to what was on offer from PC compatibles and Apple.
What killed the Amiga was that PC’s got cheaper and cheaper and better and better while the Amiga stagnated and didn’t significantly improve.
8MHz, 1MB memory, you had “publisher” :
https://sites.google.com/site/stessential/wordprocessors/papyrus
https://milan.kovac.cc/atari/software/?folder=/DTP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pNKojIjU3k
Edited 2018-03-15 14:52 UTC
The CPU frequency was tied to the vertical blank interrupt. I could switch from PAL (50Hz => 7.1MHz) to NTSC (60Hz => 8MHz).
Yes, we had text processors and DTP. And the Amiga was pretty much the first with real “WYSIWYG”.
My point was a different one. I was wondering how OpenOffice or Firefox would “perform”, when running on a computer clocked at 8MHz. Would they be usable, responsive even? Of course, they are not going to run on 1 MB RAM; that goes without saying…
Not specifically an application, just the operating system to start with :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGeLGpecjEo -> Windows 7 @ 133 MHz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDmXBKZXqf0 -> Windows XP @ 25 MHz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d33rIWdgc_A -> Windows 2000 @ 25 MHz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGSgl_nn300 -> Pentium III in 2015
…
Hahaha, nice one!
Basically you can wander off and take a leak whenever you click on something. *lol*
They would perform very badly.
While the speed and responsiveness of a 7MHz Amiga was astonishing compared to the rest of the field at the time, it has no magical powers.
Almost every Amiga-user in the 90s was expanding its Amiga with a faster processor and more RAM.
For many tasks like office-tools, something like a 100Mhz 68060 or a Vampire “68080”, would probably be sufficient with some slightly improved old software.
I guess 99% of all MS Word users do not use more functionality than Word for Windows 3.11 offered. And there are plenty of Wordprocessors an the Amiga that offer comparable functionality.
Browsers on the other hand offer a whole OS and hardware-abstraction on its own today… no fun on 68K and still sluggish on PPC
Well, maybe among the most vocal ones, and who were actually using AmigaOS. But most probably were just continuing to use it mostly as a gaming machine for A500-specs games (that was certainly still true at my place in ~1997 timeframe, mostly with A600s)
True. But we were talking about productive software … so I should say:
Almost every Amiga user, that was using the Amiga for more than gaming in the 90s, was upgrading
But thats what the Amiga is all about: it is much more than just games…
While I agree 100% with the browsers… I have to say “what?” to requiring a 100Mhz 68000 or the Vampire for word processing and such. AmigaOS is pretty tight, and it works extremely efficiently. About the only thing I can think of if you wanted to do more modern things on an Amiga where you’d want the faster accelerators is graphics rendering. For the most part I think the fastest systems available at the time they were still being made would be the PPC@200-300Mhz? Even the ‘060s generally topped at 75Mhz then. I have an A4000D with an 50Mhz 060, and it flies for most things. It is a little slow if you run something like Amikit for Real, but then it’s got a lot of really awesome features.
The slowness actually comes from the AGA chipset, which I admit is pretty terrible for productivity software, and is much faster with RTG.
Speed and memory aren’t for word processing, but video and sound processing.
I was very comfortable with my 68060@50 and PPC604@240 combination until around 2001. I used it for everything.
I did mention a 100Mhz 68K, because we are all spoiled now by the speed of modern computers. Editing a document with lots of pictures takes its tolls, so most people would want something faster even for simple office work.
Some developer is remastering “Final Writer” (in my opinion the best “word” for Amiga). I hope it will be released soon and I am eager to test it!
Just the accelerator you had costed more than a cheap PC clone. Am I wrong?
Every serious Amiga user during the middle and late 90s had his A1200 with accelerators and extra hardware… and all that stuff was super expensive and elite. Amiga users were elite people, not the average Joe at all.
People think “Amiga” was only the A500 and they get all the history wrong.
Amiga was much more than the A500, Amiga wasn’t a cheap videogame platform like most people think, Amiga was a serious system used by very hardcore people who knew what they wanted and that’s why Amiga community is alive and kicking even today.
well… still cheaper than Apple Mac
That’s great news. Final Writer was the best of the WYSIWYG word processors, and I used it every day.
I used my Amiga 3000 full time until 1995 and part time until 2002. I wish I had kept it.
I need simple things to come back to the Amiga — a cheap machine with support for HDMI displays, USB, and a good word processor. I’m keeping my eyes on the Apollo Vampire V4 Stand-alone and the Tabor A1222. I’d rather have dedicated hardware than run in emulation-land.
The Amiga spoke to an inherent desire for our machines to be like us: do chores, get inspired and change the world and then go home and play games. Other machines were stuck too much in one of these paradigms. Amazingly, the Amiga was at the time better at all three, a master of all trades.
I would really love to see Amiga become mainstream again and become more affordable for the average joe again.
Back in the 80s there was no serious comparison to other machines (Apart from the Atari ST which was second best, like a 2 button Apple but with colors and audio!), 4096 colors vs monochrome or 16 color graphics, stereo sound vs soundless (Apple) mono (c64) or crappy beeping built-in speakers, pre-emptive multitasking vs single tasking, video editing, 2 button mouse controlled GUI, etc.
I have recently started to re-discover/evaluate the progress that has been made since I was more actively involved in the community (late 80s till circa 2007). Great to see the Amiga32 event last year was sold out well in advance and good progress was being shown!
Looking forward to AmigaOS 4.2 and those bad a$$ quadcore PowerPC AmigaOne X5000s currently undergoing betatesting.
“Remember when computing was fun?!”
Edited 2018-03-15 15:01 UTC
Does AmigaOS support multicore processors?
Also P5020 is anemic by today’s standards (~ on par with dual-core Cortex-A15).
Well, looks fast enough for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i57NZb9Q0UE
Ehh, AmigaOS is trailing with SMP behind others / it will have it over a decade after it became popular; how times have changed… :/
(and still no memory protection?)
It already includes some form of memory protection, as well as resource tracking and virtual memory now. AmigaOS 4.2 is said to introduce SMP support for PowerPCs and it’s still in beta.
Rome wasn’t built in a day and they have come a long way since the 90s announcement of migrating towards PowerPC. AFIAK for AmigaOS 5.0 it is/was planned to have a clean break which will probably sacrifice seamless backwards compatibility and they will resort to some kind of box approach for classic software. But the underlying OS components were designed for long term modernization.
After some BeOS and QNX ‘adventures’, it’s still AmigaOS and its clones which still offer some hope for the future. I can wait a few more years…
“Some form” of memory protection isn’t good enough for a system which claims to be a shining model of multitasking since… forever (IMHO there’s no proper multitasking without full memory protection)
Rome sort of was built in a day in the case of other platforms – in the meantime, over the past quarter of a century, they showed much faster paces of development, they flew past Amiga. Amiga which would do good to abandon the mistake of PowerPC aped after Apple (its CEO from the time of 68k->PPC transition said that not going Intel back then was his biggest mistake), and migrate towards x86 (but that would require giving up the irrational hate of x86, present for a long time in large part of Amiga community) – 5.0 would be a good opportunity for that, with a planned clean break as you say; Amithlon in its time was the fastest Amiga… (still largely ~hated; and killed almost in its cradle… so I won’t hold my breath this time)
You mean right now?
Usually I resort to emulation for my kicks. Most systems are a lot more closed compared to Amiga except for Linux, but on Amiga things were much easier to modify yourself.
I am used to completely customize my operating system, that’s still an important reason why I still follow Amiga with a passion.
I was a loyal Amiga user for years until Commodore went bankrupt in the mid nineties. I had an Amiga 500+, an Amiga 2000 and an Amiga 4000. I loved the Amiga in part for its sheer power and also for the hundreds if not thousands of expansion mods that were always coming out. I sold the A4000 in the late nineties when I decided to bite the bullet and go Wintel (at first) before finally settling on Linux for everything once XP came out with product activation. I sorely regret not keeping it. Even in the early years I knew that if Commodore had stuck around, Apple wouldn’t even exist today, or at least the Macintosh wouldn’t. These were fantastic computers and the Amiga community was always bar none.
I feel your pain bro. BTW you were very lucky having an A4000 back in the day, they were the Lambo of the Amigas… amazing machine, way ahead of its time, an instant classic.
Sadly I never had enough money to buy the A4000, I had a A1200 back in the day but I think the real deal was the A4000… the A1200 was obsolete and weak even the day of its release, no hard disk and a 14mhz CPU in 1993!! What were they thinking?! Crazy!
I love my A1200 but I think it was Commodore biggest mistake ever, the A4000 was the right way to go and the only machine with enough power and innovation to beat PC clones and Macs… only if it had the right price.
But the A4000 was so expensive and PC clones with 486 cpus, Sound Blasters and VGAs started to be really affordable… and the rest is history. What a shame.
Both Atari and Commodore were just bleeding money, I think. A1200 should have been released with a full ‘030, not a stripped ‘020. Just like the Falcon should have been fully 32bit and had a 32mhz 030 instead of the 16mhz one.
At least the Falcon had the DSP going for it, which still do this day makes it slightly more capable than the A4000. Though from what I’ve read, the engineers wanted a DSP in either the 3000 or 4000.
With the Meltdown/Spectre stuff, I’ve been telling co-workers I’m just going to start doing work from my Amiga or Falcon. I would too, if either would get an updated SSH client…
I agree, the Falcon was amazing and very innovative. The A1200 on the other hand was completely outdated from top to bottom… and the most offending thing was the lack of an HDD… in 1993!!
You can add one, sure, but trying to sell a computer without an HDD in 1993 shows how crazy and out of reality Commodore was back then.
A1200 could’ve been a killer product in 1989… not in 92/93.
I didn’t regret having one at all, I think it’s a wonderful little machine but It was a huge step back.
The A1000 was revolutionary and forward thinking, the A1200 was conservative and with a complete lack of vision.
PS: let’s take into account DOOM was launched in 1993!!!! A vanilla A1200 cannot even dream about it.
First we had a 286, without color, and pc speaker. I liked not a single of the boring and beeping games. Even with a 386 and VGA PC games were initially not that much better. The PC beeper was just annoying. Only after also buying a sound blaster and the first better VGA games appearing PC games became a similar fun than the colourful A500 at the neighbour that had awesome sound from the beginning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC4JCPb4v1Q but then even with a VGA card the PC did not even had hardware stripes.
Ha, around that time just the VGA card and Soundblaster cost more than an A500 with the 1mb upgrade.
(Why doesn’t OSAlert allow corrections of comment titles?)
Me, I’m a fan of these FPGA recreations of the Amiga. I was recently checking out the new RISC-V developer’s boards which feature a Xilinx FPGA and wondering if that might not be a scene for an Amiga renaissance. Hardware acceleration has always been one of the Amiga’s hallmarks, and accelerating a custom software payload along with newer architectures seems very in keeping with the philosophy.
The Amiga’s fate with Commodore is one of the reasons I prefer open platforms; I never want a single team of suits to take my preferred platform down again. If the Amiga becomes open in both hardware and software, and embraces the future as well as the past – it could get really interesting.
Edited 2018-03-17 06:08 UTC
Would be fun if ~Amiga led again, instead of badly trailing behind…
There’s actually a few things that went on with the Amiga’s price. They were more expensive than comparable PCs. In the USA. However in Europe and Australia which had high import taxes on computer equipment. It was often cheaper to purchase an Amiga system. This is why the Amiga is seen a lot more commonly in the UK and the UK Colonial nations than in the USA.
I wish Aros would communicate their progress better. WINE has similar problems. I just want an accurate % of APIs completed, and future roadmap/% completed of roadmap. Is it too much to ask for?
> WINE has similar problems. I just want an accurate % of
> APIs completed, and future roadmap/% completed of
> roadmap. Is it too much to ask for?
Yes, it is. Microsoft never played fair. They use ‘hidden’ APIs for their own products (MS-Office, etc.).
to be an Amigan, is a decision by heart, not by mind….Amiga is passion, something inside you, that’s why the community still remains so strong together. That’s why we are still here. To have an Amiga can’t be explained rationally. It’s pure pleasure to have it, to switch it on, to work with it, to use it the creative way, to play with it…It’s not just another platform among Mac, Linux, Windows or Andriod…It’s a kind of living attitude…Amiga is driven by heart, by compassion…that might be amazing, or extraordinary…..but it is the truth…:-)
Well….
I saw the first Amiga in 1988, wich was an Amiga 500. I remember spending the first good part of an hour, just looking at the machine it self. The design was fresh, and new, something from outher space. Then I saw some demo’s, and I was shown protracker or was it some other tracker program. Then finally I saw the games. Each and every single time, I was blown away, yet again and to an even larger extend. Yeah… I fell completely in love with this wonder from the future. I did not get one at that point, yet I used the good part of the next 5 years, gaming on Amiga’s at friends. And at the same time following the rise of pc’s. Managed to buy a pc in 1993. My very first computer….
Fast forward to 2002, when I got my first Amiga. It was a nice Amiga600 that I bought for cheap, an 1200 followed next, then another 1200, then another 600 and finally yet another 1200. And then I sold them all in 2006, when I split up with the girl that was my girlfriend at that time. I needed the money to move.
Then followed more years… And then last year, I finally got an Amiga again. This is an Amiga600, that I have upgraded to kick 2.x (37.350) and 4gb CF card. And this year I have bought an Amiga500. It is one of the last non-plus models, having revision 8a.1 board, kick 1.3 and full ECS chipset. Somewhat a 500+ with only 512kb and kick 1.3…
So…
Back in bussiness…. Yet again a proud owner of a wonderfull machine. Though I keep to Linux for modern tasks. Amiga’s and C64’s (have one too) is part of my vintage collection, wich have pc’s as well. (4 x 486’s and more) Yet the Amiga holds a true and close place in my heart. A true marble of a wonderfull machine.
Hm? It looks basically like any other home computer of the era… (A1000, that one has nice design)