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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.
Ahhh yes....Workbench....don't know what I thought Kickstart. 3.0 was what I used as it shipped on both the A1200 and the 4000. The mouse pointer was at a strange angle, the resolution was weird, and everything seemed oversized. I just didn't care for it. Loved the Video Toaster and was glad to never have to use Amiga OS....except to install the Toaster with its million floppies that always seemed to have one corrupt around the 50 mark.
 
I think this is my favorite MacRumors article in the last year. Fond memories of a wonderful computer. No one spewed any hate about it. I miss the Amiga days. I wish Amiga could make another comeback with a modernized version that has all the modern standards and pushes the technology another 5 years ahead of anyone else.
 
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.
Sorry for having been imprecise: I was referring to C= (only). IIRC e.g. in Germany the C64 was sold at 2-3 times the price they asked in the US. And the C64 was present in what felt like every second household back then.
 
I think this is my favorite MacRumors article in the last year. Fond memories of a wonderful computer. No one spewed any hate about it. I miss the Amiga days. I wish Amiga could make another comeback with a modernized version that has all the modern standards and pushes the technology another 5 years ahead of anyone else.

http://www.amigaos.net/
http://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware

The hardware isn't cheap, but you can still run the latest Amiga OS
 
I suspect the Amiga was either 16 or 32 bit
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The Amiga was fully 32-bits. There was just some confusion because of the way PCs co-opted that definition from the width of the ALUs and Registers to the number of physical bits in the address bus, or to some extent, the number of bits in the data bus. By modern PC terminology, the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 would have been "16-bit" computers instead of "8-bit" computers. The first Amigas used 68000s which had a 24-bit physical address mode (limited to "only" 16 megabytes DRAM*, and a lot of Amiga owners maxed it out), and a 16-bit data bus (but with a true 32-bit processor) but later models could go all the way to 4 GB, at a time when DOS machines were limited to 640KB. For comparison, no one thought the future 386 SX was a 16-bit computer just because it has a 16-bit data bus.

The main point is the CPU - the 68000 had 16 32-bit registers with full 32-bit operations at a time when the PC only had 8 16-bit registers and could only do 16-bit operations. That makes a huge difference in performance. :) Kinda like when PCs finally jumper from 8 32-bit registers to 16 64-bit registers, we saw a real world performance boost of 3x on software on the same machine (compiled to 64-bit mode).

Wish Amiga made it long enough to adopt the 64-bit DEC Alpha CPU as they planned. That's be another first way ahead of the curve. But to put Amiga's demise in perspective, Apple dumped an unfathomable amount of money into advertising, while Commodore didn't, yet still back then Apple was a niche player, possibly with a slightly lower percentage share than right now. But what Apple got right is that price wasn't what sold computers - similar to an Apple store, even back then, the computers that literally cost 10x more outsold the affordable ones.

* People who weren't using computers at this time can't fathom what it meant to be 10 years ahead of competitors. Almost a decade later (1993), I finally owned a personal computer (an Atari Falcon) with 16MB DRAM, and that was more DRAM than any of my friends with PCs had. In fact, I still remember the wave of fear because Windows 95 demanded 8 MEGABYTES of RAM, and so the whole PC world would have to upgrade, :)
It would be like coming out with the 2013 Retina Macbook Pro back in 2003 (when Panther was out)
 
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No one spewed any hate about it.

No hate? You have rose-coloured memories, friend!

Plebs had Sinclair Spectrums. Snotty posh kids had BBC Micros or C64s.

I mean, come on - have you seen how long it takes the Amoeba to display a directory listing? What sort of idiot pays that much money to watch a giant beachball bounce around the screen in fake 3D when Zarch on the Archimedes is doing real 3D. Who needs preemptive multi-tasking on a personal computer? 68000? Stupid attempt to put a VAX on a chip: RISC is the future - just like the 6502 was always better than the Z80. Nyah, nyah, games machine!

...but then we were young and stupid at the time and had just about grown out of going round the VIC20s/C64s at Dixons and typing:
10 PRINT "Commodore is rubbish - buy a [insert brand of choice]!":GOTO 10
(Or setting it to display white text on a white background...)

Teenagers.

Even the bosses of the computer makers were getting chucked out of pubs for fighting: http://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/113527/Battle-of-the-Boffins
(The TV docudrama "Micro Men" is recommended if you want a UK-themed 80s computing nostalgia trip).

The Amoeba even had an Easter egg with an embedded F-bomb: http://www.eeggs.com/items/1039.html

Hah. Kids these days don't know real computer-brand hate when they see it.

Sorry for having been imprecise: I was referring to C= (only). IIRC e.g. in Germany the C64 was sold at 2-3 times the price they asked in the US. And the C64 was present in what felt like every second household back then.

Ah, gotcha.
2-3 times the price was going rate for US-made computer stuff, though. I guess the C64 got away with it because it was cheap to start with. That said, the exchange rate was never a reflection of how much things actually cost - when I first visited the US most of the prices on goods looked like they'd just replaced '£' with '$'. Of course - now, with the exchange rate ~ $1.20 and most UK prices including VAT at 20% that's about right...
 
1. 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.
Seeing how it was their low cost models like the 500 and 1200 that really brought in the dough it's pretty clear that the low cost machines ran at a revenue surplus rather than a deficit. Thus if they didn't have the money coming from them they would have had even less money to spend on the higher end models and let's not forget that enhancements made in them like the "fat" Agnus did filter over to the higher end models.

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.
You act as if piracy didn't happen on competing platforms when it very much did. Only difference is that businesses are more averse to piracy as they can get into much more trouble for it than individual users. Individual home users however widely pirated software no matter which platform they were on.

As for what kind of software was available, nothing was going to beat the PC in office type software as IBM and compatibles more or less had a lock on that market as soon as IBM released the original PC back in 1981. The only reason Apple had some early success in this was because they got in on this market before IBM did. However as soon as they did, Apple's business machine, the Apple III, was more or less doomed. On the Amiga there was plenty of graphics software, but that too was also somewhat hampered by Apple getting in earlier and getting the support of companies like Adobe pushing out software and hardware capable of WYSIWYG when it was still new to the masses.

What killed the Amiga really was just corporate mismanagement on the part of Commodore. They started off with a really powerful machine, then sabotaged early efforts to do any major overhauls and when they finally got around to do them it was simply too little, too late. Just look at what happened to the Ranger and AAA chipsets.
 
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Seeing how it was their low cost models like the 500 and 1200 that really brought in the dough it's pretty clear that the low cost machines ran at a revenue surplus rather than a deficit. Thus if they didn't have the money coming from them they would have had even less money to spend on the higher end models and let's not forget that enhancements made in them like the "fat" Agnus did filter over to the higher end models.
If only they would have spent the revenue surplus in Amiga development, no matter whether bread-and-butter models or big box! But for whatever reason they figured it'd be cool to invest a huge part of the Amiga-related income to compete in the business area and developed their own PCs, even though the Amiga clearly was what kept them alive.

You act as if piracy didn't happen on competing platforms when it very much did. Only difference is that businesses are more averse to piracy as they can get into much more trouble for it than individual users. Individual home users however widely pirated software no matter which platform they were on.
Huh? Where did you read that into my text? What I said is that by focusing too much on marketing (and developing) the C64 and later the Amiga as gaming platform, Commodore eventually starved 3rd parties that would make money from "professional" hard- and software. As you rightly said, professional users usually tend to be less into pirated software because of the possible implications, so they would pay quite a huge part of the total income on a platform.

Also, "professional" software usually is more likely to use official API's, thus making development of the platform easier, if not possible in the first place.

At least back then, Games tended to avoid official API's for speed and memory reasons, so any development breaking compatibility would be much more hazardous for that sector than for "professional" software. And as the target customers back then were largely kids, you could not expect them to upgrade their computer every other year, thus cementing the smallest common denominator, which - in the case of the Amiga - was the stock A500. And the Amiga's design (both as a system and as keyboard computer for the A500/A1200) prevented to upgrade only parts (e.g. graphics chip / graphic card), which would have been much more feasible from a financial point of view.

As for what kind of software was available, nothing was going to beat the PC in office type software as IBM and compatibles more or less had a lock on that market as soon as IBM released the original PC back in 1981.
Exactly that's the problem! Why on earth did Mehdi Ali & Co decide to try to compete on that already lost battlefield and even use the money earned with the Amiga, thus starving Amiga R&D? Incomprehensible!

What killed the Amiga really was just corporate mismanagement on the part of Commodore. They started off with a really powerful machine, then sabotaged early efforts to do any major overhauls and when they finally got around to do them it was simply too little, too late. Just look at what happened to the Ranger and AAA chipsets.
That's more or less what I said (or at least wanted to say ;)). I just tried to point out the (possible) internal reasoning for that kind of behaviour. At some point on time the demise was probably inevitable:
  • The installed machine base had reached a critical mass (gaming platform with certain standards) that would prevent development breaking backwards compatibility (a Rosetta-like trick would have been technologically impossible back then).
  • No focus in the product portfolio: C64, C128, C16, C116, C264/Plus4, various Amigas and on top (IBM-compatible) PC. And they were so desperate they stuck to the outdated 8bit platform and even developed the C65, while the Amiga was already a hit!
  • High subventions for the "me too" product PC (which didn't offer anything valuable over the competition), financed not by the product, but by the Amiga, which then lacked those resources. (Interestingly enough people complain that Apple is neglecting the Mac now in favor of the revenue-generating iOS devices instead of cross-financing - maybe they followed the C= downfall pretty closely).
Instead they should have consequently extended the Amiga platform and try to establish it as an alternative to the office PC, with the value-add that it could _also_ offer superb gaming and graphic and video features (seeing the omnipresence of graphical user interfaces today, the Amiga would have had a brilliant headstart there). That would have required to have "professional" software makers to properly support the platform widely (think of the AppStore's importance for the success of the iPhone). But those were scared off by not only the piracy, but also the image of the Amiga as pure gaming computer and the lack of support by Commodore for "professional" developers.
 
If only they would have spent the revenue surplus in Amiga development, no matter whether bread-and-butter models or big box! But for whatever reason they figured it'd be cool to invest a huge part of the Amiga-related income to compete in the business area and developed their own PCs, even though the Amiga clearly was what kept them alive.
In case you didn't know, the PC clones, produced by their German subsidiary who also took part in the development and of practically all Amiga models from the European model 1000 onward, were actually successful and like the low end Amigas brought in a cash surplus.

Also, "professional" software usually is more likely to use official API's, thus making development of the platform easier, if not possible in the first place.

At least back then, Games tended to avoid official API's for speed and memory reasons, so any development breaking compatibility would be much more hazardous for that sector than for "professional" software. And as the target customers back then were largely kids, you could not expect them to upgrade their computer every other year, thus cementing the smallest common denominator, which - in the case of the Amiga - was the stock A500. And the Amiga's design (both as a system and as keyboard computer for the A500/A1200) prevented to upgrade only parts (e.g. graphics chip / graphic card), which would have been much more feasible from a financial point of view.
The only problem with that is that Commodore broke compatibility between different Amiga models all the time and had plenty of features in the higher end machines that the lower end ones simply lacked. When they ran out of Amiga 500s for the Christmas season 1991 they just started shipping machines with 500 Plus boards (which were based on the newer ECS chipset) and new versions of Kickstart and Workbench badged as regular 500s even thou they knew this would break a bunch of games. This broke a whole bunch of games and created a market for third party ROM switching boards for allowing users to switch between versions of Kickstart along with software implementations for achieving same thing.

The AAA board, had it ever been used in an Amiga machine brought to market, would have broken an absolutely enormous amount of software and relied very heavily on software for backwards compatibility.

Exactly that's the problem! Why on earth did Mehdi Ali & Co decide to try to compete on that already lost battlefield and even use the money earned with the Amiga, thus starving Amiga R&D? Incomprehensible!
You do know that Ali was brought in from the financial sector, right? He didn't have any real experience in running a business that did actual product development and obviously wasn't guaranteed to have the slightest clue about how to even run a business like Commodore. We're talking about someone brought in by Irving Gould, an investor and the biggest owner of the company, to turn a profit for the shareholders, not to turn the company around like his predecessor Thomas Rattigan did.

The state in which Commodore kept it's product portfolio (i.e an absolute mess) also makes at least some sense when you think about it from a business perspective. Why kill off the C64 and derivatives of it when they're providing you a positive cash flow for little or no added investment? When your #1 concern is what the balance sheet looks like then endless rehashing of the C64 actually makes perfect sense. Even more so when their "next gen" machine, the Amiga, wouldn't really take off until the 500 and 2000 came out.

Gould had once saved the company at great personal expense so I guess you can't fault him too much for bringing in someone who he thought was going to let him reap the rewards of this to the fullest extent. Apple also very much went in for the "let's make as much money as we can" approach after they kicked Jobs out and let the Macintosh languish with nothing but iterative improvement before they were rudely awakened and fumbled what was supposed to be their big comeback product (the new MacOS version codenamed Copland).
 
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.
.

You seem very knowledgable on the topic. Why do you think a startup could offer something so much more powerful yet for a lower price, given they are not as powerful or backed with enough money like Apple and IBM at the time?
 
On the C64 you could enter Machine code programs from magazines. Compute had a system called MLX to make it easier and had error correction. I used to enter lots of these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLX_(software)
Interesting - I had monochrome screen VIC 20 in the late 80s and only remember entering BASIC.
The step between the VIC-20 and my friend's Amiga 500 was just astounding.

My impression of back in the 80s-90s the market was split as follows:
PC: business / office
Mac: DTP (remember that word!?)
Amiga: Video
Atari ST: Audio / Music
Cray: Simulation / datacrunching
 
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You seem very knowledgable on the topic. Why do you think a startup could offer something so much more powerful yet for a lower price, given they are not as powerful or backed with enough money like Apple and IBM at the time?

How do the disruptive disrupt against the rich & powerful established players? It's not always who has the most money or even who is already well established. Sometimes it IS about innovation, even poor people with big ideas. One guy is credited with the coprocessor architecture that mostly defined the differences of Amiga. Another guy (one guy) is credited with much of the OS users could see & use. Etc. Put a small group of focused people like that together and you can get an Amiga.

Where did Tesla come from against the established car companies?

Where did Netflix come from against the near total dominance of Blockbuster?

Amazon vs. Sears & Montgomery Ward?

Facebook? Google? There's lots of big names today that did not exist when there was an Amiga. Many of them rose against established, better-funded competition. Sometimes a good idea and a little funding can go a long way.

Amiga was made by a bunch of passionate people with hardly any money. They quickly had to sell to survive... and Commodore was the buyer (savior) in that case. In the waning days of the real Amiga, a final potential savior showed up with pockets deep enough to potentially revive the platform. Who? Of all entities- Gateway computer. Remember them? Remember the PC boxes with cow patch artwork? They bought Amiga for the patent portfolio (Commodore owned the patent for the 2-button mouse) but then got large amounts of mail asking if they were going to revive the platform. There was a short window of time when an executive within Gateway seemed to be convincing the company that being a PC clone maker was a dead-end business but Amiga gave them a brand new, proprietary platform to compete against Wintels and the near-dead Macintosh. I forget his name but he seemed to have great passion about the whole concept of a Gateway Inc. Amiga relaunch.

For a good while, it looked like it really might happen but then Gateway apparently chickened out. I think the executive most associated with that rebirth left- voluntarily or involuntarily- soon thereafter. In my head, that was basically the final chance for something akin to the original Amiga to come back to the market.

It's spirit has lived on but upon basically PC hardware. It would have been interesting to see what might have happened if even Gateway had made a good effort with the platform. In hindsight, I lump it in with innovations like The Tucker car... ahead of it's time in many, obvious ways but crushed by some mis-management and constrained finances.

Lastly and this is just my own opinion: what I observe about the rich & powerful is that there seems to come some point where they shift from pushing innovation (offense) to protecting what they have (defense). In other words, they seem to shift their energies for maintaining the status quo instead of continuing to be disruptive. They spend the money to buy up patents & inventions that threaten the old & established within their companies. They spend fortunes in court trying to sue upstarts that might eat some of their share... or to stall for time... or to burn up the upstart's working cash. The mantra might be "protect the cash cow" instead of striving to develop new ones. And I suspect that is why the Blockbusters & Sears & Montgomery Wards, etc. eventually atrophy and fall- clinging too hard to old ways instead of embracing new ones. I think that's also what gives a group like the original Amiga team a chance to develop something so far ahead of it's time and actually get it to market.
 
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When I was a kid growing up we had a Commodore C64, but I LUSTED after an Amiga. Seriously, in my entire life I have never wanted anything so bad as that. Sadly, my parents just couldn't afford one. I would spend hours reading reviews of games in computer magazines and staring at adverts for Amiga bundles, trying to persuade my mum and dad that I'd have it for my next 3 birthday and Christmas presents combined.

I never got one.

Once a year or so I have a hunt around Ebay in case someone is selling one dirt cheap local to me, but never actually buy one - mainly because I've not really got anywhere to put it and my wife would not be too impressed!
 
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Ahhh yes....Workbench....don't know what I thought Kickstart. 3.0 was what I used as it shipped on both the A1200 and the 4000. The mouse pointer was at a strange angle, the resolution was weird, and everything seemed oversized. I just didn't care for it. Loved the Video Toaster and was glad to never have to use Amiga OS....except to install the Toaster with its million floppies that always seemed to have one corrupt around the 50 mark.
The mouse pointer wasn't at a weird angle, it was just different. A lot of people ran workbench in highres which made things horizontally condensed, so things looked wack.. to make the pixels square you had to use highres+interlace (which needed a fancy monitor or you had horrible flickering). I grew up with that mouse pointer and it never seemed weird. :D (we also had Acorns, Atari STs, windows machines around.) the Amiga was always my favourite.

I ran my a1200 workbench at 640x480 / AGA 256 colours and it was pretty beautiful compared to what my friends were up to on other platforms.

-----/

This thread is a bit depressing. Too much nostalgia. I would have loved for the Amiga to continue it's momentum and be running modern software on that platform instead. I still occasionally run DPaint in UAE. :/
 
How do the disruptive disrupt against the rich & powerful established players? It's not always who has the most money or even who is already well established. Sometimes it IS about innovation, even poor people with big ideas. One guy is credited with the coprocessor architecture that mostly defined the differences of Amiga. Another guy (one guy) is credited with much of the OS users could see & use. Etc. Put a small group of focused people like that together and you can get an Amiga.

Where did Tesla come from against the established car companies?

Where did Netflix come from against the near total dominance of Blockbuster?

Amazon vs. Sears & Montgomery Ward?
.

What you say is true, but what other thing you say is true too. A small guy would star to compete, but the big businesses will sue them and bully them or just start their copying machines totally killing the innovator. Just reading this makes me think what could we get if a new competitor come on board against Windows and OS X. Is it possible we are running on archaic software we just don't know it?
 
I guess this is not going to be a popular opinion, but I would love to have a NICE laptop (i.e. not plastic Chromebook) running Android full-screen. Not Chrome OS with Android support, full Android. I got a large Samsung (I KNOW) tablet and if it had a keyboard and a tapered shape a la rMB it would be great.

We went from a time in the 80s where there were like 20 computing platforms to, essentially, three – Win, Mac, Linux (which doesn't have any of the main applications I use except OpenOffice). So really it's two. I'd love to see a competitor, but it would be extremely difficult for a new – say – Amiga 2017 to burst into the scene with hardly any software available. Android has thousands of apps, including MS Office. If they could get Adobe on board, I'd seriously consider it.
 
I don't think this is possible any more... Beos was a really good candidate as an Amiga successor, at least in terms of operating system. I remember having a Beos demo on one floppy disk, which was full GUI interface with integrated web browser and email client... it played music and movies so smooth, multitasking and general feel of the OS was very Amiga OS like, but it just couldn't compete with the big players... and Linux... that was very promising in the beginning, but due to the complicated setup and huge fragmentation and incompatibility among different distributions never really took off as a desktop operating system...
[doublepost=1485380999][/doublepost]Btw. did anyone used magic workbench? It looked so much better than stock Workbench, I loved it.


Btw., Amiga OS booted in approx. 20 seconds from really slow hard drive compared to the nowdays tech, with all the GUI pimping included...
 
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In an era where computers/computing were cool Amiga was supercool.

Later (years after Amiga was proclaimed dead) Gateway bought Amiga but them being just a lame company of PC clones didn't have a real plan. Jim Collas might have had a plan but there was too much dark side in the company. A poor man's Dell.

It was the late 90s, just before the Enron fiasco (aka Dot-com bubble) many companies would consider going different but they were hit hard and again the conservative/established ones survived. It felt like Gateway was just half-heartily putting up something to nag Microsoft or Intel so that they can strike a better deal with them later for their unspectacular wintel clones. Ironically at the end Gigabyte went bust exactly because they remained loyal to the wintel platform

Nevertheless, QNX/Linux would have been a good idea for a next generation OS/machine/platform, BeOS (earlier) an even better one (the ties with AmigaOS were obvious).

Unfortunately there have been as many lost chances for a resurrection, filled with buzzwords (Transmeta), scam (iWin), WTFs (VisCorp), vaporware (Amiga Boxer), etc, as bad decisions during the Commodore era.

Amiga is a legend in computer history, it can't die. It will return in some form. We will be waiting.
 
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