History of Amiga

[thilanliyan]

http://arstechnica.com/article...iga-history-part-6.ars

There's 6 parts to it so far...it's such an interesting read. And holy crap they were so advanced for their time.

 

[sandorski]

The Amiga was awesome.

 

[toadeater]

I had an Amiga 2000. Back then, up until Win95 and 3D games, the Amiga ruled multimedia and gaming. The PC was a fossil in comparison. The Mac wasn't much better, but it had Postscript support, so everyone was using them for DTP. Coincidentally, there was a semi-legal Mac emulator for the Amiga, which was possible because both ran on the same Motorola CPU.

The Amiga just never got the software and peripheral support that PCs and Macs did, and eventually it couldn't keep up.

There was even a Unix Amiga released shortly before Commodore's demise:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix

 

[wanderer27]

Yeah, the Amiga was truely way ahead of it's time. Too bad it never got the support it truely deserved.

I still my A1000 (memory expansion, extra Disk drive) boxed up in my garage, plus tons of software for it. Hmm, I'm even sure the last time I used it.

Tried to sell it all on Craigslist once but never heard anything . . .


Some good memories in there too.

 

[imported_Scoop]

Amiga 500 was the shit back then.

 

[MmmSkyscraper]

Amiga 500 FTW!

 

[M1A]

OH ya I started with a Commodore and then Amiga then win95 with a Pent 100. That was the good old days. I paid $275 for a Commodore HD oh my what a beast. Had tons of software all went to the trash on a move.

 

[imported_Yooshaw]

Wow - great read, didn't know the back story, thanks!

 

[bradley]

Till this day I miss my Amiga 2000 and A1200. Amiga users had such an unprecidented advantage over other computer users, like has never been seen before since in computing history. The Atari ST was a distant second, and every other system was a mere toy.

 

[thilanliyan]

Originally posted by: Yooshaw
Wow - great read, didn't know the back story, thanks!

Exactly...I had no idea they were that advanced at the time. What they had in the 80s looks like what I was getting with a 486 DX/66 and 512k video card back in 1992.

I wonder what the computer industry would be like had they survived.??

 

[nerp]

I remember thinking my 286 was amazing and then meeting up with this dude we knew as Hagbard Celine from the local BBSs and after a crazy ride in his Pontiac Fiero, he showed me and my buddy isaac his amazing Amiga 500. I remember the unbelievable sounds (up to that point I thought the Adlib was incredible) and *GASP* video in a window that you could _MOVE AROUND_. I also was impressed that the whole thing was GUI and he had a mouse and hard drive and other goodies that just seemed so far away and out of reach for me, a budding PC user.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: nerp
I remember thinking my 286 was amazing and then meeting up with this dude we knew as Hagbard Celine from the local BBSs and after a crazy ride in his Pontiac Fiero, he showed me and my buddy isaac his amazing Amiga 500. I remember the unbelievable sounds (up to that point I thought the Adlib was incredible) and *GASP* video in a window that you could _MOVE AROUND_. I also was impressed that the whole thing was GUI and he had a mouse and hard drive and other goodies that just seemed so far away and out of reach for me, a budding PC user.

Yup. Also unique to the Amiga(Atari may have had it too, possibly the Mac, but certainly not the IBM PC) was Multitasking. That in itself was a huge leap. Back in '87 I worked as an Office Manager(aka secretary/Data Processor) for a Commercial/Fine Artist who had an Amiga 2000. Other than the regular Guru Meditation(essentially Blue screen of death ), the 2000 was amazingly better than the PC I learned on. Some of the tasks I did involved huge Print Batches of Mail labels from a Database app(Superbase---which included a rotating ball mouse pointer when busy). While the system was processing which labels to print then printing them, I'd go about entering Data into a Spreadsheet or typing out a letter in a Wordprocessor without a hiccup. If I had nothing else to do I could fire up Deluxe Paint 3 and goof around with that.

 

[Pheran]

Yup - at various different times I owned an Amiga 1000, an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 2000 (with 68020 board and flickerfixer!). They were awesome machines, and the multitasking GUI OS was way ahead of its time. I still remember doing a chipset upgrade on the A500 where I had to cut a trace on the motherboard and solder a couple of pads together. Those were the days. After the writing was on the wall, I finally moved over to Intel with a Dell P90 and Windows 95, but the Amigas are probably still the "coolest" computers I ever owned.

 

[alkemyst]

My brother was running FreeBSD on a 3000 back in the late 80's early 90's. Video Toasting was used a LONG time after they stopped production. There was some rumor of a new Amiga coming out, but I think the plans were squashed.

 

[toadeater]

Originally posted by: alkemyst
There was some rumor of a new Amiga coming out, but I think the plans were squashed.

That hardware was ready to be released, here's a review of it:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/amigaos4.ars

The reason it didn't go anywhere was because there's a dispute over who owns the Amiga OS. There are now two Amiga OSes. Amiga Inc. has a version that is a platform independent virtual machine of some kind or something. They call it Amiga Anywhere.

http://www.amiga.com/about/history/?t=os

Meanwhile, Hyperion makes Amiga OS 4, which is an update of the classic Amiga OS. Not sure what that status of it is right now except that Amiga Inc. is suing Hyperion.

http://os4.hyperion-entertainm...iew&id=16&Itemid=.html

If Amiga OS ever goes open source things could get interesting.