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
Booo, get out of here
Actually, for MIDI software the Atari was unsurpassed.
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Booo, get out of here
Actually, for MIDI software the Atari was unsurpassed.
At 6 years old I had a 48K ZX Spectrum (1982) then eventually bought a second-hand A500 in my teens (1990 ish).
Both were used exclusively as hobby/games machines.
Incredibly - considering how ubiquitous computers are to my (our) lives now - I did not buy another home computer until getting a 15 inch G4 Powerbook: bought in October 2005.
Thanks for this post: It's been a great trip down memory lane!
Both were used exclusively as hobby/games machines.
Incredibly - considering how ubiquitous computers are to my (our) lives now - I did not buy another home computer until getting a 15 inch G4 Powerbook: bought in October 2005.
Thanks for this post: It's been a great trip down memory lane!
Booo, get out of here
Ahh yes, the famous "Jackintosh" - annoying Amiga owners and Apple lawyers since 1985.
No Amiga (that was a lot more sophisticated under the hood), but an awful lot of bangs-per-buck: a 68000 processor and the 1040ST had a whole megabyte of RAM (that was, like, 32GB in 1985 money) for under £1000 (that was, like, £2800 in 2016 money)!
The (cheap) high-res (what was it? 640x400? That's like 5k in 1985 money!) mono monitor probably helped as well. It ran the GEM GUI over what was, effectively CP/M 68k. ISTR that GEM got sued by Apple which forced them to knobble the PC version, but the Atari ST retained the original, so-like-the-Mac-it-hurts UI design (totally unlike MacOS under the hood, but superficially...).
All I remember is that the BASIC interpreter was awful & slow beyond belief (my 8-bit BBC Micro was faster) and didn't do the 68k justice, that although the mono display was really nice it was strictly black & white (no greyscale) and you simply couldn't run most games and colour graphics software on it without plugging in a standard def colour monitor instead (in which case it had 256 colours - that's like, wow, P3 high-dynamic range in 1985 money!)
...including a MIDI interface as standard will do that for a machine.
More politely you could name it "they took what the market allowed". I don't know anymore from which source I read it (could have been Brian Bagnalls insightful book "Commodore: A company on the edge"), but the european prices had been set very deliberately, because C= sold their machines like hotcakes in Europe - despite pricing, despite poor marketing and despite several other shortcomings. After all, a company is no welfare organization *shrug*.
Amongst the hardcore nerds the Archy was well known, not least for it's impressive "Zarch" game. But the Amiga had a much broader software base and was significantly cheaper, so the ARM machine stayed a dream for most.
You just mentioned two main factors for Commodore's demise:
- Cross-subventions of Amiga revenues into a PC line for a hopeless battle. That money was painfully missing for a better/faster development of the Amiga platform.
- Focusing on gaming in Europe. This meant targetting a "poor" target group (computer gaming was primarily for kids back then) and also demanded backward compatibility. Focusing on gaming pushed sales of the C= hardware, because the kids could get the software as "decentralized safety backups" free of cost
But 3rd party developers (both software and hardware) struggled, because kids don't need professional software (much less if they have to pay for it) and additional/better hardware is not needed that badly as long as the games are tailor-made for stock machines already a couple of years old.
Worked great for the C64, when the computer market was in it's childhood, but eventually helped in killing the Amiga.
When Jack left C= and poached Shiraz Shivji (of C64 development fame) to create the ST in a very short time in an attempt to compete with the upcoming Amiga, both Jack and Shiraz tried to repeat the C64 success: Slap together a couple of nice specs, make the whole package cheap and try to sell by volume (Hmm - why do I have to think of an Android looking through some Windows right now?
).The ST was merely a successor to the C64 with recent technology and without backwards compatibility. But Jack & Shiraz would have never been able to come up with such an elegant, thoroughly concepted system like the Amiga.
While the ST was fine as a budget solution and appreciated as an able tool in it's MIDI and DTP/word processing niche, it could never influence the IT world as significantly or win the hearts of the users as the C64 and especially the Amiga did (Sorry ST fans
).[doublepost=1485187685][/doublepost]
And not to be forgotten: Marble Madness!
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Amiga was a spectacular computer in it's day.
It crushed monochrome DOS-based PCs and was priced well below "expensive" Macintosh's that were still mostly viewed as monochrome (and tiny screens) too. The local computer store carried all 3 platforms and it appeared to be so far ahead with color graphics, sound and animation.
With both PCs and Macs monochrome, Amiga was like color TV for lower cost rolling out to compete with Black & White TVs. Just the variable of "color" was enough to be the "killer app" when comparing it to the more established players at the time... but the Amiga was so much more than PC-DOS (no Windows yet) or the Mac OS in color.
The "bouncing ball" demo amazed...
The (32-color) King Tut image from Deluxe Paint was a mesmorizing, digital Mona Lisa at that time. Not only could one create such graphics IN COLOR, but the palette was big enough to offer this crazy thing called painting in color GRADIENTS...
At the time, one might see spot color in print, such as adding one shade of red to a B&W print ad. On Amiga, you could make that same ad and if red was all you needed, you could use 30 (THIRTY!) variants of red. Crrrrrrrazy.
Then, this thing called "halfbrite" mode (I think) upped that to 64 colors, and then "hold & modify" mode opened up 4096 colors. At school, PC screens were still generally green or amber (insert Ford paraphrase: "you can have any color on a PC as long as it is green or amber"). The Mac labs had tiny-screened Macs with only shades of gray... superior to PCs for at least having a range of colors... but they were colorless.
I remember the same King Tut image being recreated on a Mac... in grayscale... and while it looked great on a Mac too, grayscale vs. color was a "what's the point?" moment for anyone looking to buy a computer at that time.
Amiga's "hold & modify" mode could be used for animations too. When exploited, it whammed anyone interested in color graphic animation from a computer with the ray-traced "Juggler" demo in 4096 colors (a mind-blower at the time). Looking back at it now...
...it doesn't look so special but back then it was basically showing a computer could create a new world, what appeared to be 3D characters in that world (that even cast shadows) and have them moving around with sampled sound choreographed with on-screen actions. Juggler begged for concepts like Ray tracing and similar to come to the masses in apps and several good ones quickly followed. Could the inspiration and then implementation of a Pixar be very far behind?
It had a voice long before the others had much of anything that way. It could speak and with a voice one could understand. Every time I hear the Steven Hawking "voice" (even today) I recognize that as one of the voices of Amiga. I suspect that's where HE got it (but don't know that for sure).
It had standardized file formats so that one could share files between apps made by many different companies. The explosion of creative arts software to take advantage of Amiga was really helped along by being able to do some stuff in one app and then move the project into any number of other apps. It all "just worked."
Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Music Construction Set were very early killer apps. I remember taking an elective "arts" course in college and bringing in some original music I had created on an Amiga. DMCS let you compose in music notation and then print the music. I remember the music teacher being shocked when he found out I couldn't play a musical instrument but had written some original music anyway. "You wrote this on a computer?" By the end of that semester, I still couldn't play any instrument but got an "A" anyway on the strength of that (and probably lingering shock).
Games rivaled arcade machines at the time. I think some Amiga games made it into Arcade machines. And game developers really pushed that hardware to stand out from rivals. Arcade translations tended to look & sound just like the arcade games without compromises (except the insatiable hunger for quarters). Those games typically (& entirely) fit into 880K (yes "K") or less. They were tiny files but funnnnnnnnnnn games that looked & sounded great. One didn't have to spend hours or days (or dollars) building a character/car/plane/etc- we just ran the game and played it. Fun. Uncomplicated. Classic arcade without quarters.
If one wanted to learn to code, the native language with Amiga was C (I think well before the other platforms got there). The OS was loaded with callable routines to do relatively complex stuff in graphics, sound, animation, etc without having to know physics or calculus. Stock code libraries were a treasure trove for anyone wanting to code something interesting themselves.
Hardware offloaded complex tasks in graphics, sound & animation to coprocessors well before the others were doing that.
It had a terrific, real multitasking, icon/windows/mouse-based OS that entirely fit in 256K (later 512K) Yes that's "K." The whole OS was so compact that it was built into ROM and thus offered "instant on."
Early computer animators, graphic designers, etc could simply do much more with an Amiga than the other platforms at the time. For gamers, there was pretty much nothing better. Atari ST tried to be a poor man's Amiga and they all competed for gamers against platforms like Atari 5200 and Colecovision. Friends were always impressed with Amiga games and then soon owned an Amiga themselves.
Personally, I wish it could have made it. I'd love to see what a 2017 Amiga would be like.
I feel like I watched the documentary already
Awesome post!
http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ Read from the bottom. Parts don't have "Next" link so open in separate windows from this page. Fascinating.
Bagnall's "Commodore: The Amiga Years" is coming and I am already salivating. I live for this stuff.
In Poland, where I come from, it was Spectrum first. Then kids divided into C64 and 800XL fans pretty much. My first was 65XE with a tape recorder. (What was it? 600 BYTES per second?) Macs were considered – largely because of the impossibly high prices – pro-only designer machines. Nobody in Poland but successful designers could afford a Mac. Amiga just swept everything when it arrived, especially the 500 model.
Of course, I wanted an Atari ST, because my technical bets are ALWAYS incorrect. But also because AmigaOS used to corrupt diskettes for quite a while. Instead I ended up with a PC with glorious VGA graphics, mono screen and agonised on whether to choose a colour screen or upgrade my HDD from 180 to 250 MB. Went with the bigger HDD. Once brought Discworld game home on, I think, 18 3.5" diskettes...
And now I get pissed off because I have to wait TWO MINUTES for a game to download from Electronic Arts website.
Bagnall's "Commodore: The Amiga Years" is coming and I am already salivating. I live for this stuff.
In Poland, where I come from, it was Spectrum first. Then kids divided into C64 and 800XL fans pretty much. My first was 65XE with a tape recorder. (What was it? 600 BYTES per second?) Macs were considered – largely because of the impossibly high prices – pro-only designer machines. Nobody in Poland but successful designers could afford a Mac. Amiga just swept everything when it arrived, especially the 500 model.
Of course, I wanted an Atari ST, because my technical bets are ALWAYS incorrect.
But also because AmigaOS used to corrupt diskettes for quite a while. Instead I ended up with a PC with glorious VGA graphics, mono screen and agonised on whether to choose a colour screen or upgrade my HDD from 180 to 250 MB. Went with the bigger HDD. Once brought Discworld game home on, I think, 18 3.5" diskettes...And now I get pissed off because I have to wait TWO MINUTES for a game to download from Electronic Arts website.
I only ever met one owner of Amstrad in Poland and it was an old man (i.e. about 30 I suppose, I was a kid). None of the other kids had one, and if they did, they kept it a secret
Except they didn't, because the UK/EU market largely didn't allow it and went for the better value local options (or Commodore) instead. The UK in the early 80s was way ahead of the field in personal/home computer uptake, but the Apple 2 was always an expensive (and, post about 1981, technically outclassed). OK, so the BBC micro got a rather unfair boost from the BBC and government micros-in-school schemes*, but the Apple 2 was niche even before that happened.
(* but as a result, the UK ended up with ARM... or rather did, until it became the first indirect casualty of Brexit...)
Before the heady days of the Amiga 500, I actually owned a Commodore 16 with a tape deck and 16KB of RAM. I've no idea how prevalent the C16 was, but there were tons of games for it, I remember that.
Just ripped this off Wikipedia:
The C16 was a flop in the US and was discontinued within a year, but it sold reasonably well in Europe as a low-end game machine (over 90% of all C16 software was produced by European developers) and in Mexico as well.
The C16's failure in the US market was likely due to a lack of software support, incompatibility with the C64, and lack of importance to Commodore after its competitors withdrew from the market.
By the way, here's the trailer of the Amiga games documentary that derbladerunner posted earlier:
And a clip from the film about early games:
Just ripped this off Wikipedia:
The C16 was a flop in the US and was discontinued within a year, but it sold reasonably well in Europe as a low-end game machine (over 90% of all C16 software was produced by European developers) and in Mexico as well.
The C16's failure in the US market was likely due to a lack of software support, incompatibility with the C64, and lack of importance to Commodore after its competitors withdrew from the market.
By the way, here's the trailer of the Amiga games documentary that derbladerunner posted earlier:
And a clip from the film about early games:
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Oh yes, that King Tut image. Any of you New Yorkers here probably know J&R Music World. I worked as a bike messenger in the building right next to the basement computer section at J&R. I would often go downstairs and play with and drool on that Amiga, printed many copies of that King Tut image there lol. I eventually saved up enough to buy a 500, then saved up some more and upgraded to the 1000. Constantly flipping through Computer Shoppers looking at upgrades. I remember phone ordering individual DRAM chips to upgrade the 1000. Later adding a 10MB hard drive and I was in heaven! Social networking back then meant actually meeting others in person lol.Amiga was a spectacular computer in it's day.
It crushed monochrome DOS-based PCs and was priced well below "expensive" Macintosh's that were still mostly viewed as monochrome (and tiny screens) too. The local computer store carried all 3 platforms and it appeared to be so far ahead with color graphics, sound and animation.
With both PCs and Macs monochrome, Amiga was like color TV for lower cost rolling out to compete with Black & White TVs. Just the variable of "color" was enough to be the "killer app" when comparing it to the more established players at the time... but the Amiga was so much more than PC-DOS (no Windows yet) or the Mac OS in color.
The "bouncing ball" demo amazed...
The (32-color) King Tut image from Deluxe Paint was a mesmorizing, digital Mona Lisa at that time. Not only could one create such graphics IN COLOR, but the palette was big enough to offer this crazy thing called painting in color GRADIENTS...
At the time, one might see spot color in print, such as adding one shade of red to a B&W print ad. On Amiga, you could make that same ad and if red was all you needed, you could use 30 (THIRTY!) variants of red. Crrrrrrrazy.
Then, this thing called "halfbrite" mode (I think) upped that to 64 colors, and then "hold & modify" mode opened up 4096 colors. At school, PC screens were still generally green or amber (insert Ford paraphrase: "you can have any color on a PC as long as it is green or amber"). The Mac labs had tiny-screened Macs with only shades of gray... superior to PCs for at least having a range of colors... but they were colorless.
I remember the same King Tut image being recreated on a Mac... in grayscale... and while it looked great on a Mac too, grayscale vs. color was a "what's the point?" moment for anyone looking to buy a computer at that time.
Amiga's "hold & modify" mode could be used for animations too. When exploited, it whammed anyone interested in color graphic animation from a computer with the ray-traced "Juggler" demo in 4096 colors (a mind-blower at the time). Looking back at it now...
...it doesn't look so special but back then it was basically showing a computer could create a new world, what appeared to be 3D characters in that world (that even cast shadows) and have them moving around with sampled sound choreographed with on-screen actions. Juggler begged for concepts like Ray tracing and similar to come to the masses in apps and several good ones quickly followed. Could the inspiration and then implementation of a Pixar be very far behind?
It had a voice long before the others had much of anything that way. It could speak and with a voice one could understand. Every time I hear the Steven Hawking "voice" (even today) I recognize that as one of the voices of Amiga. I suspect that's where HE got it (but don't know that for sure).
It had standardized file formats so that one could share files between apps made by many different companies. The explosion of creative arts software to take advantage of Amiga was really helped along by being able to do some stuff in one app and then move the project into any number of other apps. It all "just worked."
Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Music Construction Set were very early killer apps. I remember taking an elective "arts" course in college and bringing in some original music I had created on an Amiga. DMCS let you compose in music notation and then print the music. I remember the music teacher being shocked when he found out I couldn't play a musical instrument but had written some original music anyway. "You wrote this on a computer?" By the end of that semester, I still couldn't play any instrument but got an "A" anyway on the strength of that (and probably lingering shock).
Games rivaled arcade machines at the time. I think some Amiga games made it into Arcade machines. And game developers really pushed that hardware to stand out from rivals. Arcade translations tended to look & sound just like the arcade games without compromises (except the insatiable hunger for quarters). Those games typically (& entirely) fit into 880K (yes "K") or less. They were tiny files but funnnnnnnnnnn games that looked & sounded great. One didn't have to spend hours or days (or dollars) building a character/car/plane/etc- we just ran the game and played it. Fun. Uncomplicated. Classic arcade without quarters.
If one wanted to learn to code, the native language with Amiga was C (I think well before the other platforms got there). The OS was loaded with callable routines to do relatively complex stuff in graphics, sound, animation, etc without having to know physics or calculus. Stock code libraries were a treasure trove for anyone wanting to code something interesting themselves.
Hardware offloaded complex tasks in graphics, sound & animation to coprocessors well before the others were doing that.
It had a terrific, real multitasking, icon/windows/mouse-based OS that entirely fit in 256K (later 512K) Yes that's "K." The whole OS was so compact that it was built into ROM and thus offered "instant on."
Early computer animators, graphic designers, etc could simply do much more with an Amiga than the other platforms at the time. For gamers, there was pretty much nothing better. Atari ST tried to be a poor man's Amiga and they all competed for gamers against platforms like Atari 5200 and Colecovision. Friends were always impressed with Amiga games and then soon owned an Amiga themselves.
Personally, I wish it could have made it. I'd love to see what a 2017 Amiga would be like.
I still vividly remember talking to (more like getting scoffed at actually lol) the PC/mainframe guy when I worked at a bank, telling him how the Amiga was out of this world compared to the PC terminals. All he said was that "Commodore thing" was a toy for kids lol.
Lots of memories..
Amiga was a spectacular computer in it's day.
It crushed monochrome DOS-based PCs and was priced well below the "expensive" Macintosh that were still mostly viewed as monochrome (and tiny screens) too. The local computer store carried all 3 platforms and it appeared to be so far ahead with color graphics, sound and animation.
With both PCs and Macs monochrome, Amiga was like color TV for lower cost rolling out to compete with Black & White TVs. Just the variable of "color" was enough to be the "killer app" when comparing it to the more established players at the time... but the Amiga was so much more than PC-DOS (no Windows yet) or the Mac OS in color.
The "bouncing ball" demo amazed...
The (32-color) King Tut image from Deluxe Paint was a mesmorizing, digital Mona Lisa at that time. Not only could one create such graphics IN COLOR, but the palette was big enough to offer this crazy thing called painting in color GRADIENTS...
At the time, one might see spot color in print, such as adding one shade of red to a B&W print ad. On Amiga, you could make that same ad and if red was all you needed, you could use 30 (THIRTY!) variants of red. Crrrrrrrazy.
Then, this thing called "halfbrite" mode (I think) upped that to 64 colors, and then "hold & modify" mode opened up 4096 colors. At school, PC screens were still generally green or amber (insert Ford paraphrase: "you can have any color on a PC as long as it is green or amber"). The Mac labs had tiny-screened Macs with only shades of gray... superior to PCs for at least having a range of colors... but they were colorless.
I remember the same King Tut image being recreated on a Mac... in grayscale... and while it looked great on a Mac too, grayscale vs. color was a "what's the point?" moment for anyone looking to buy a computer at that time.
Amiga's "hold & modify" mode could be used for animations too. When exploited, it whammed anyone interested in color graphic animation from a computer with the ray-traced "Juggler" demo in 4096 colors (a mind-blower at the time). Looking back at it now...
...it doesn't look so special but back then it was basically showing a computer could create a new world, what appeared to be 3D characters in that world (that even cast shadows) and have them moving around with sampled sound choreographed with on-screen actions. Juggler begged for concepts like Ray tracing and similar to come to the masses in apps and several good ones quickly followed. Could the inspiration and then implementation of a Pixar be very far behind?
It had a voice long before the others had much of anything that way. It could speak and with a voice one could understand. Every time I hear the Steven Hawking "voice" (even today) I recognize that as one of the voices of Amiga. I suspect that's where HE got it (but don't know that for sure).
It had standardized file formats so that one could share files between apps made by many different companies. The explosion of creative arts software to take advantage of Amiga was really helped along by being able to do some stuff in one app and then move the project into any number of other apps. It all "just worked."
Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Music Construction Set were very early killer apps. I remember taking an elective "arts" course in college and bringing in some original music I had created on an Amiga. DMCS let you compose in music notation and then print the music. I remember the music teacher being shocked when he found out I couldn't play a musical instrument but had written some original music anyway. "You wrote this on a computer?" By the end of that semester, I still couldn't play any instrument but got an "A" anyway on the strength of that (and probably lingering shock).
Games rivaled arcade machines at the time. I think some Amiga games made it into Arcade machines. And game developers really pushed that hardware to stand out from rivals. Arcade translations tended to look & sound just like the arcade games without compromises (except the insatiable hunger for quarters). Those games typically (& entirely) fit into 880K (yes "K") or less. They were tiny files but funnnnnnnnnnn games that looked & sounded great. One didn't have to spend hours or days (or dollars) building a character/car/plane/etc- we just ran the game and played it. Fun. Uncomplicated. Classic arcade without quarters.
If one wanted to learn to code, the native language with Amiga was C (I think well before the other platforms got there). The OS was loaded with callable routines to do relatively complex stuff in graphics, sound, animation, etc without having to know physics or calculus. Stock code libraries were a treasure trove for anyone wanting to code something interesting themselves.
Hardware offloaded complex tasks in graphics, sound & animation to coprocessors well before the others were doing that.
It had a terrific, real multitasking, icon/windows/mouse-based OS that entirely fit in 256K (later 512K) Yes that's "K." The whole OS was so compact that it was built into ROM and thus offered "instant on."
Early computer animators, graphic designers, etc could simply do much more with an Amiga than the other platforms at the time. For gamers, there was pretty much nothing better. Atari ST tried to be a poor man's Amiga and they all competed for gamers against platforms like Atari 5200 and Colecovision. Friends were always impressed with Amiga games and then soon owned an Amiga themselves.
Personally, I wish it could have made it. I'd love to see what a 2017 Amiga would be like.
I owned an Amiga 1000, 2000 and 3000. These computers, though not the first ones I owned, were my favorite. You could start virtual machines with different boot settings and if there was a crash you only lost that one VM. And that virtual ability was built in, you didn't need to buy it. Color, multi-tasking separate sound and video processors, the Amiga was 15 years ahead of Mac and PC's. But it was dismissed as a "game machine", which today implies speed and computing power but back then buyers thought it was a toy.
I worked with A1200's for Scala MM 300 and the 4000's for the Video Toaster and Broadcast Titler in the 90's. The documentary was more like an hour long trailer. Nothing that we didn't already know was presented. I was hoping to hear the technical reason for the superiority and more details on how the video toasters hardware hack really worked. Maybe even some good stories for people. The doc was a bit lite or real substance. And for the record....Andy Worrall used a Macintosh before he used an Amiga. That is historic fact. The Kickstart OS was very primitive compared to the Macintosh at the time. Sure it had color and could do more...but it was very clunky to use and unrefined. I always hated having to use that for anything. It felt more like trying to use Mario Paint than a computer. Thank God the Toaster launched itself! It was not very good OS in terms of interface.
I have so much love for these machines. Way ahead of anything else. i came from coding C64 demos in machine code and hardware bashing the SID and VIC chips, to the Amiga, which was like instantly stepping into a Ferrari. On the Amiga I learnt how to code C, built my first 3d game engine, music tracker and countless developer tools. Such a lovely, open environment to work in. Ah, Fond Memories.
Kickstart was the ROM, the OS was Workbench. Did you only use Workbench 1.3? That was very clunky but Workbench 2.1 and 3.0 on a hard disk were a delight to use.
Wow ... where in Toronto was this event held at, Toronto Metro Convention Centre?
I must've been far too young back then.
All I recall is meeting one of Toronto's earliest house DJ's and he was creating music on an Amiga cause he had direct Midi connections on a board plugged into it. maybe I have that wrong since it was such a vague memory.
