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iTunes Documentary 'Viva Amiga' Charts the History of the Upstart Apple Rival That Had Steve Jobs Worried
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I was an Atari ST guy, so never used an Amiga. I loved reading about it, though.
This is the opening paragraph of Compute! Magazine's 1985 review of the Amiga:
http://atarimagazines.com/compute/issue64/amiga.php
This is the opening paragraph of Compute! Magazine's 1985 review of the Amiga:
"Commodore's Amiga is much more than just another new computer. It's a pivotal machine that may well shatter the traditional boundaries and prejudices which for years have divided the microcomputer marketplace. It defies classification as simply a home computer, game computer, business computer, or hacker's computer. In fact, the Amiga's power, versatility, and ease of use may qualify it as the first true personal computer."
http://atarimagazines.com/compute/issue64/amiga.php
Nice post. However, strictly speaking, Amiga is still around, just not in the form you'd expect. :-}
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amigaos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000
Oh this! I've seen this before, it's really good! The Amiga was incredibly important to me growing up, I owe everything I have now to that system and a friend who got me into them. I've spoken on loads of podcasts about them because I always mention them in interviews.
I have loads of game soundtracks in my iTunes library, and their genres are the consoles they were on, works great with smart playlists. I've got a "5* Amiga" and "Best of Amiga" that get played every time I'm working.
I should probably stop talking and crack on. I could spend hours just writing a mega Amiga love letter here.
I have loads of game soundtracks in my iTunes library, and their genres are the consoles they were on, works great with smart playlists. I've got a "5* Amiga" and "Best of Amiga" that get played every time I'm working.
I should probably stop talking and crack on. I could spend hours just writing a mega Amiga love letter here.
I bought an Amiga 500 in 1988 moving up from a Commodore-64 system. I worked at television station and the company offered employees an interest-free loan up to $3,000 if we wanted to buy a home computer. I spent my $3,000 on an A-500, 3.5" external drive, 5.25" floppy drive, A1084S monitor, a Star NX-1000C colour printer, Sculpt-Animate 4D, Deluxe Paint III, WordPerfect, a whole bunch of fonts, and some other pretty pricey software.
A year later at a Toronto World of Commodore show I saw an Amiga 2000 souped-up with a GVP A-3001+ board and I had to have one. the A-3001+ was a card that replaced the stock MC68000 @ 8MHz with a MC68030 @ 25MHz. Plus it had room for an astounding 8MB of RAM. I wrote a check for around $6,000 that day. When I brought my system home it even had an 80MB hard drive. SA4D absolutely flew on that system in comparison to the A-500; it would do a ray-traced render in maybe 30 minutes instead of 6 hours. Shortly after I bought my 25MHz system GVP bumped the speed up to 28MHz and then 33MHz but that's the risk of being an early adopter.
When Deluxe Paint IV came out I couldn't get enough of it. As I worked in TV I was able to pawn my services off to some commercial production companies and I did several title animation contracts that helped pay for the system. Then ca. 1993 I purchased an Amiga-only software package called SignEngine and a Roland CAMM-1 vinyl cutter and opened a home-based sign & banner -making shop. I used a structured drawing package called ProDraw to create the designs, which SignEngine then scaled to size and cut out of vinyl rolls. My Amiga was my only source of income for nearly a decade, and a secondary source for several more years after that. All hard drives eventually crash, however, and mine lasted until around 2007 when it finally gave-up the ghost after 15 years of daily use. At which point I sold my business and got another job doing something else. I kept my Amigas, though -- happy that they paid for themselves many times over, and gave me a successful foray into graphic design & small business proprietorship that I would never have enjoyed otherwise. And to this day I still smile when I see signs created on my Amiga all over town.
A year later at a Toronto World of Commodore show I saw an Amiga 2000 souped-up with a GVP A-3001+ board and I had to have one. the A-3001+ was a card that replaced the stock MC68000 @ 8MHz with a MC68030 @ 25MHz. Plus it had room for an astounding 8MB of RAM. I wrote a check for around $6,000 that day. When I brought my system home it even had an 80MB hard drive. SA4D absolutely flew on that system in comparison to the A-500; it would do a ray-traced render in maybe 30 minutes instead of 6 hours. Shortly after I bought my 25MHz system GVP bumped the speed up to 28MHz and then 33MHz but that's the risk of being an early adopter.
When Deluxe Paint IV came out I couldn't get enough of it. As I worked in TV I was able to pawn my services off to some commercial production companies and I did several title animation contracts that helped pay for the system. Then ca. 1993 I purchased an Amiga-only software package called SignEngine and a Roland CAMM-1 vinyl cutter and opened a home-based sign & banner -making shop. I used a structured drawing package called ProDraw to create the designs, which SignEngine then scaled to size and cut out of vinyl rolls. My Amiga was my only source of income for nearly a decade, and a secondary source for several more years after that. All hard drives eventually crash, however, and mine lasted until around 2007 when it finally gave-up the ghost after 15 years of daily use. At which point I sold my business and got another job doing something else. I kept my Amigas, though -- happy that they paid for themselves many times over, and gave me a successful foray into graphic design & small business proprietorship that I would never have enjoyed otherwise. And to this day I still smile when I see signs created on my Amiga all over town.
Let's not forget the Amiga demo scene. Okay, plenty of it appeared on cracked games and was, ahem, legally dubious, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it was host to a whole new generation of graphical prowess, superior sound and impressive coding.
There were years when an intro demo to a game was akin to a next-gen movie trailer and cooler than the game itself, so impressive was the talent...
There were years when an intro demo to a game was akin to a next-gen movie trailer and cooler than the game itself, so impressive was the talent...
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The Atari 800XL, the Amiga 500, and finally the Amiga 1200 turned me into a programmer, and got me to change my career path while in college from electrical engineer to software engineer. Best decision I ever made. The Amiga gave me the courage to innovate software instead of just writing to someone else's specs (which were sometimes terrible). When the iPhone emerged, I immediately got on board writing personal software, and ending up with three really big hits. One of my hits (Official Rubik's Cube) even made it into an Apple TV commercial (for the interested, I've since removed it from the store due unethical business practices out of my control, and unfortunately the one on the store now is a real piece of crap). I could have never had such success as an electrical engineer. Thank you Amiga.
I had a Commodore64 (a very early one, before they showed up in big box type stores). I had to go to a computer shop in an industrial park. I remember a waiting room, kind of like a dentist's office, with a reception desk. No showroom at all. Someone went into the back to the warehouse to fetch my new computer and the cassette recorder that allowed me to save programs. This was 1982.
My next two computers were the Amiga 1000 and the Amiga 3000. I got the 1000 at a business that was half computer store and half photocopy/offset printing. I got the expansion memory that bumped to to 512K.
One of my favorite things (that hasn't yet been mentioned here, I think) was the ability to have multiple "screens" at one time. This was similar to the desktops you can have in Mac OS. You could set programs up to run on their own screen if you preferred. You could switch between the screens, but also (and this was way cool) you could grab an empty spot on the menu bar and drag the current screen down, revealing the screen behind it! No only that, the two screens could be different color depths, and different resolutions. There was a narrow black bar between the two screens where the behavior of the raster beam of the CRT was being modified!
[doublepost=1485143256][/doublepost]I'm just going to throw some names out (maybe they're in the documentary, maybe not) that should trigger some memories with fellow Amiga users.
Kiki Stockhammer
Ken Nordine
Newtek
Video Toaster
Babylon 5
My next two computers were the Amiga 1000 and the Amiga 3000. I got the 1000 at a business that was half computer store and half photocopy/offset printing. I got the expansion memory that bumped to to 512K.
One of my favorite things (that hasn't yet been mentioned here, I think) was the ability to have multiple "screens" at one time. This was similar to the desktops you can have in Mac OS. You could set programs up to run on their own screen if you preferred. You could switch between the screens, but also (and this was way cool) you could grab an empty spot on the menu bar and drag the current screen down, revealing the screen behind it! No only that, the two screens could be different color depths, and different resolutions. There was a narrow black bar between the two screens where the behavior of the raster beam of the CRT was being modified!
[doublepost=1485143256][/doublepost]I'm just going to throw some names out (maybe they're in the documentary, maybe not) that should trigger some memories with fellow Amiga users.
Kiki Stockhammer
Ken Nordine
Newtek
Video Toaster
Babylon 5
I worked in a computer store that sold PC, Apple, Atari and Commodore. The Video Toaster was the rage. Todd Rundgren made a music video with it and every Video guy wanted one. Then the real crazy thing was the A300UX. I think its the first PC to run Unix. We sold a number of them. Must have been around 1990. This is WELL before the Mac used Unix as the basis of OS X. Probably somewhere around Apple System 6. Pretty revolutionary.
We had, at one time, three Amigas in the house (a 1000, a 500 with the GVP "sidecar" hard drive enclosure and a 2000 with the 68030 accelerator card in it. The 1000 and 2000 are still here, though neither has been booted up in a very long time. *sigh*
I remember getting my first real exposure to OSX (my first personal Mac was a 12 inch PowerBook with the G4 processor) and thinking that it was as close to the Amiga experience as I'd had in years. I'd had Macs at work up through the beginnings of System 7 before they took 'em away and replaced them with Windoze boxes, and we had PCs (and 8-bit Commodores running GEOS) at home. I think the A2000 would still be usable if networking it and getting it to play nice with printers hadn't been so hard.
I need to check this film out.
I remember getting my first real exposure to OSX (my first personal Mac was a 12 inch PowerBook with the G4 processor) and thinking that it was as close to the Amiga experience as I'd had in years. I'd had Macs at work up through the beginnings of System 7 before they took 'em away and replaced them with Windoze boxes, and we had PCs (and 8-bit Commodores running GEOS) at home. I think the A2000 would still be usable if networking it and getting it to play nice with printers hadn't been so hard.
I need to check this film out.
Remember the Public Domain software you could buy? I spent many hours trawling through the Amiga magazines like Amiga Format... wouldn't it be great if a new computer system was to come out and challenge OSX and Windows
I loved my Amigas. Still have an A1200. I used Amigas as my main machines until the late 90s It's a real shame what happened, I miss a lot about how they worked and still occasionally find myself trying to do things like drag the screen down by the menu bar, lol.
Somewhat hilariously my first experiences of The Mac were in an emulator called ShapeShifter(?) which ran Mac OS faster than a lot of macs did.. I used it to play Doom on my Amiga 1200 before there was a real Amiga port.
The Amiga in its day was much, much bigger than the Mac was in UK. Not sure about the rest of Europe, but Amigas (and to some extent Atari STs) were everywhere.
[doublepost=1485164877][/doublepost]
Somewhat hilariously my first experiences of The Mac were in an emulator called ShapeShifter(?) which ran Mac OS faster than a lot of macs did.. I used it to play Doom on my Amiga 1200 before there was a real Amiga port.
The Amiga in its day was much, much bigger than the Mac was in UK. Not sure about the rest of Europe, but Amigas (and to some extent Atari STs) were everywhere.
[doublepost=1485164877][/doublepost]
Anyone who hates B5 is incomprehensibly wrongheaded. :/
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*sigh* Those were the days.
After starting on a C64, I got an Amiga 500, which I then massively updated over the years, with a 1 MB Fast RAM extension, new Kickstart ROMs, and finally a GVP A530 with a 50 MHz 68030 CPU, 68882 FPU, full 8 MB RAM, and a gigantic 83 MB SCSI hard drive… it was a beast – for its time.
Late on, I then upgraded to a 68040 Amiga 4000T, for which I later even got a Blizzard CyberStorm PPC.
It was also on the Amiga that I got into the Macintosh, by running System 7.5.3 with ShapeShifter. (Both my brother and my father had actual Macs at that time, though, so I also had experiences with the "real deal".)
I still think AmigaOS was far ahead of its time, not only with multitasking and what later was called multimedia support, but also with things like internationalisation (it was one of the first end-user operating systems which featured multi-language support) and extensibility: I'm still puzzled that something like the "DataType" concept for instance never was copied by other operating systems.
After starting on a C64, I got an Amiga 500, which I then massively updated over the years, with a 1 MB Fast RAM extension, new Kickstart ROMs, and finally a GVP A530 with a 50 MHz 68030 CPU, 68882 FPU, full 8 MB RAM, and a gigantic 83 MB SCSI hard drive… it was a beast – for its time.
Late on, I then upgraded to a 68040 Amiga 4000T, for which I later even got a Blizzard CyberStorm PPC.
It was also on the Amiga that I got into the Macintosh, by running System 7.5.3 with ShapeShifter. (Both my brother and my father had actual Macs at that time, though, so I also had experiences with the "real deal".)
I still think AmigaOS was far ahead of its time, not only with multitasking and what later was called multimedia support, but also with things like internationalisation (it was one of the first end-user operating systems which featured multi-language support) and extensibility: I'm still puzzled that something like the "DataType" concept for instance never was copied by other operating systems.
Technically already the A1000 was a bit more than only 16bit. The internally 32bit wide registers on the MC68000 CPU helped with speed/coding, even though the system around it was only 16bit.
On the other hand, despite being 32bit in general, the later big-box Amigas you mentioned were limited to 8bit audio (pseudo-14bit with some code magic using channel merging), unless you plugged in some dedicated sound card and installed 3rd party software. IIRC PAULA (the audio chip in the Amiga) stayed the same (functionally) over the whole lifetime of the Amiga series of computers.
Rumors have it that the blueprints and/or source code (of PAULA) got lost, so C= could never develop it further without risking to break compatibility. Unlike today, back in the Amiga times it was usual to bang the hardware directly instead of using official API's for speed reasons.
That made games and demos look good on early machines, but eventually was a nail in the coffin, as lots of development was guided by that "compatibility mandatory" mantra enforced by C= management, which ruled out significant improvements to the hardware that could keep up with the competition left and right.
But without officially supported(!) better hardware, software developers did not see the need to make use of what was available (be it the smaller steps from C= itself or the various 3rd-party approaches). And without more demanding software, why develop the hardware further ...
At least in this respect Apple does better than Commodore: If a new hardware breaks compatibility for good (agreed: debatable) reasons, Apple is not shy to enforce it onto the customers. Even if it feels a year early to the customer. Maybe they eventually learned something from the history of the Amiga!
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Same with me. Very big part of it was the design language of OSX with the Aqua theme. Definitely different from the rather uniform Windows approach and feeling like an advanced bigger brother of the Amiga UI. Very sad to see the Mac (and iOS, for that matter) going back to flat, symbolic icons (often monochromic) and other UI elements, that scream "boring" instead of "fun" :-(
US-made computer stuff was ridiculously expensive in the UK back in the day - even in the early 80s, when the pound was running at >>$2 and UK/EU sales tax wasn't typically included in prices, stuff from the US was often priced at $1 = £1. I almost fainted when I first got my hands on an issue of the US magazine Byte and saw the same prices but with '$' on the front. Don't know if this was greed, protective import duties or the need to make custom versions with 240V/50Hz power and tweaked video circuitry to support PAL frequencies (since people were plugging into TVs or 50Hz/625 line displays).
Anyway, although "classic" US 8-bit computers like the Apple II and TRS-80 weren't unknown (I had a far-east TRS-80 knockoff for a while), they never took off quite the way they did in the US - despite the UK having one of the highest rates of home computer ownership at the time. Instead we had really strong UK competition from the likes of Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad. The Apple 2 "niche" in the UK was filled by the Acorn BBC micro and the low end was taken by the Sinclair Spectrum. I'd say that Commodore were about the only US brand that bucked the trend, with PETs in the early days and the C64 mainly competing with the Sinclair Spectrum.
Things got more messy with the move to 16/32 bit and the arrival of PC clones. I didn't go for the Amiga, I went from an Acorn BBC Micro to an Atari ST until Acorn got their ducks in a line and produced the Archimedes - featuring a new CPU that Acorn had knocked together themselves and called "ARM". People may have heard of it - they might not know that, on release, it was a super-fast desktop chip.
Ugh... It always annoys me how people talk about things as if only the U.S ever mattered or if any other part of the world simply didn't exist.
Over here in Europe the Amiga was much more popular than the Macintosh back in the day and in many regards held a position similar to Apple in the U.S with it's superior graphics capabilities. To put the European success into scale Commodore didn't just sell about twice as many Amigas in just the U.K market than in the U.S market, they also did the same thing in Germany. All this despite the U.K having about a 5th of the population and Germany having less than a 3rd of the population of the U.S. When Commodore went bust the European arm of the company was still profitable and almost ended up buying up the company (thou the company still got bought up by a European company).
Over in the U.S they primarily tried to sell the damn thing into the IBM and Apple dominated markers of office and publishing while their European division went very heavily for the games market with great success. When kids in the U.S were getting NES bundles like the Zapper one for Christmas kids over here in Europe were getting Amiga 500 bundles.
It's not just the Amiga that's got it's perception warped because of a U.S centric view on things. To us here in Europe the "video game crash of 1983" is that happened elsewhere as consoles hadn't even taken off and right around the same time the home computer game market pretty much exploded.
Over here in Europe the Amiga was much more popular than the Macintosh back in the day and in many regards held a position similar to Apple in the U.S with it's superior graphics capabilities. To put the European success into scale Commodore didn't just sell about twice as many Amigas in just the U.K market than in the U.S market, they also did the same thing in Germany. All this despite the U.K having about a 5th of the population and Germany having less than a 3rd of the population of the U.S. When Commodore went bust the European arm of the company was still profitable and almost ended up buying up the company (thou the company still got bought up by a European company).
Over in the U.S they primarily tried to sell the damn thing into the IBM and Apple dominated markers of office and publishing while their European division went very heavily for the games market with great success. When kids in the U.S were getting NES bundles like the Zapper one for Christmas kids over here in Europe were getting Amiga 500 bundles.
It's not just the Amiga that's got it's perception warped because of a U.S centric view on things. To us here in Europe the "video game crash of 1983" is that happened elsewhere as consoles hadn't even taken off and right around the same time the home computer game market pretty much exploded.
Thanx for the link!
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Remember the Public Domain software you could buy? I spent many hours trawling through the Amiga magazines like Amiga Format... wouldn't it be great if a new computer system was to come out and challenge OSX and Windows
Ah! Amiga Format! I have kept the cover disk containing Imagine, my first real raytracer which started it all for me in the 3D and animation design business. Before Imagine I used to design by text-based retracers. Anyone remembers those?
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I agree, the Amiga was bigger in Europe, definitely here in the U.K. I remember several of my school friends getting the Cartoon Classics A500 pack for Christmas:
And my own machine had this gold plaque attached above the keyboard:
I can't remember the year though!
Ah yes... I had the Screen Gems A500 bundle, available between September 1990 and July 1991. It included Night Breed, Back to the Future 2, Days of Thunder and Shadow of the Beast 2. Also Kickstart 1.3, 512k Chip RAM and 512k Fast RAM.
And this was the TV commercial that was doing the rounds at the time:
And my own machine had this gold plaque attached above the keyboard:
I can't remember the year though!
Ah yes... I had the Screen Gems A500 bundle, available between September 1990 and July 1991. It included Night Breed, Back to the Future 2, Days of Thunder and Shadow of the Beast 2. Also Kickstart 1.3, 512k Chip RAM and 512k Fast RAM.
And this was the TV commercial that was doing the rounds at the time:
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I too was an Atari ST guy. In fact, I still have a 520ST, a 1040ST, a Mega 2, and a Falcon030. So I guess I am still an Atari ST guy
Yes, this was a true game machine back in the day.
There's a second good documentary with a focus on the Amiga (U.K.) game development scene:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4603210/
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/amiga