MLAgazine has a detailed history of the Amiga, from its beginnings as the pipe dream of a frustrated Atari engineer to it’s beginnings as a revolutionary gaming console, through the mini-collapse of the gaming industry, and into the early days of the personal computer.
“Amiga was originally intended to be a 16 bit console for the masses, the Lorraine. It would later morph into the popular Amiga personal computer. ”
Could todays consoles be history repeating itself?
though m$ has more money and marketing presence than commodore. it is widely believed m$ entered the console business for exactly this reason
Another detailed history. I fear that we’re sadly working towards a stage were more hours are spend in writing about the history of the Amiga than in developing software for it. I still can’t work out how the Acorn community managed a Firefox port before the Amiga community.
“at one point, a 7 mhz A500+ cost more than a 33 mhz IBM clone”
I would have definitely preferred the Amiga. Those 7MHz certainly went a long way. Imagine a native 3GHz Amiga, lol.
archetecture…. I don’t think it would have gone much past 1.5GHz… but that would be like a 6GHz P4 or a 3GHz Athlon….
but it would have been HOT….. WAY too hot for production!
Not a single word about A1200 and A4000…
@ r2d2d3d4d5
> Another detailed history.
For interested people:
http://amiga.emugaming.com/amigahistory.html
> I fear that we’re sadly working towards a stage were more
> hours are spend in writing about the history of the Amiga
> than in developing software for it. I still can’t work out
> how the Acorn community managed a Firefox port before the
> Amiga community.
There are quite a few developers working on developing next generation Amiga software. For instance OS4Depot grows steadily:
http://www.os4depot.net/
Anyone interested feel free to contribute (even PC owners can help too!)
OpenOffice.org
http://www.amigaopenoffice.org/
FireFox/Mozilla:
http://www.discreetfx.com/AmiZilla.html
” at one point, a 7 mhz A500+ cost more than a 33 mhz IBM clone ”
I am getting really sick of clueless authors who use MHz as a measure of performance. Do automotive journalists judge car performance by revolutions per minute (RPM)? MHz is cycles per second. It is not a speed benchmark. It may give an indication of performance, but there’s much more to speed than that.
If the chips are different (and the Amiga chips were very different from PC ones), you can’t compare by MHz. Even in the x86 world, you can’t use MHz to compare Athlons with Pentiums. That’s why AMD use “performance rating” model numbers. Even Intel has stopped naming their chips by their clock speed.
“Andy Warhol, who had been a devoted Mac user since 1983”
Something’s not right here…
Is that supposed to be a detailed history of the Amiga?
It’s quite an UNdetailed history I would say, with not even a mention of Carl Sassenrath who did some important OS work.
And it mentions CDTV without mentioning the most important feature… namely that it had a CD unit builtin. An idea that was too early for its time, and unfortunately underpowered for what they wanted it to be.
I guess the submitter of this story simply don’t know much about Amiga history, but looking around a little should have been enough to see that this is not “detailed”.
Another detailed history. I fear that we’re sadly working towards a stage were more hours are spend in writing about the history of the Amiga than in developing software for it. I still can’t work out how the Acorn community managed a Firefox port before the Amiga community.
>
>
Basically because the Amiga “community” is basically composed of nothing but a bunch of lazy slobs who spend most of their time mouthing off at Free Software/Open Source users the much like the BE and Mac “communities” do over stupid UI issues whenever their concerns aren’t shared.
It wouldn’t have made any difference who bought Amiga because it’s time had come and gone.
Intel-based based PC’s had caught up to and surpassed the Amiga by the time Commodore went bankrupt in terms of both price and performance.
And the design of the Amiga didn’t help either in terms of upgrading the machine either.
The Amiga 500+ used a plain jane Motorola 68000. A 33mhz IBM clone would have used either a 386 or a 486, which were even per mhz faster than the 68000 (they competed with the Motorola 68020/68030/68040).
@mike bouma
The guy’s astonishment that Acorn has a Firefox port before Amiga did, is a valid astonishment. After several years of talk, Amizilla has yet to produce even a demonstration product.
One has to question the seriousness of a community where one of the questions on the FAQ is, Q: How come AmiZilla does not have a sexy female mascot like Spontaneous Combustion’s Hottie? The sad thing is, most Amiga forum discussions never rise above this level. This is not a level of maturity; this is a level of adolescence, and while adolescents love to dream, they don’t usually get much work accomplished.
Nearly all the talented (or even competent) Amiga developers who were still sane, left the Amiga scene for jobs doing Unix/Linux/Windows/Mac stuff. (Geek Gadgets, Final Writer, …) The remaining developers are either working at Hyperion, or insane (name of competing OS project omitted), or rebuilding the wheel by developing products that were innovative fifteen years ago (how many raytracing packages does the Amiga need, anyway?).
Apparently, this didn’t happen with Acorn: their talented developers remained with the platform, or else they managed to develop new developers.
Please prove me wrong. I would love to see a modern browser on the Amiga. But it won’t happen while the conversations in Amigaland remain at the puerile level of basking in the glory of a long-lost technical superiority.
@ Rick James
> And the design of the Amiga didn’t help either in terms of
> upgrading the machine either.
Basicly there were two types of Amiga models.
– The home computer versions weren’t meant to be much exandable out of the box (though you could add a modem, turbocards with better CPUs/more RAM and other accessories), which mainly served a market aimed a gamers (game console) and the post-C64/Spectrum/Amstrad home computer market.
– But there were also desktop models available next to these, which could be far more easily and heavily expanded than their PC/Mac counterparts available at the time of release (for instance the highly acclaimed Video Toaster, which has been heavily used for producing high quality movie, it was a plug-in card which allowed one to replace $100,000 worth of equipment with about $5,000 worth of equipment.).
However the A1200 from 1992 was such kind of entry-level homecomputer with “limited” expandability. However you can fit the motherboard into a Tower casing, add a PPC board, add graphic cards, etc. In fact it can even run the new AmigaOS4 when the product is finished!
@ Ex Amigan
> After several years of talk, Amizilla has yet to produce
> even a demonstration product.
But stay tuned here at OSNews. Progess is being made! 🙂
It was sold to Escom, not Gateway. Gateway got their hands on it after Escom went tit’s up in ’96.
Look at http://amiga.emugaming.com/amigahistory.html for an *accurate* history of the Amiga.
“I would have definitely preferred the Amiga. Those 7MHz certainly went a long way. Imagine a native 3GHz Amiga”
You don’t have to imagine it.
http://www.aros-max.co.uk/
This reads like a story relayed by “A friend of a friend”.
as for this part:
(at one point, a 7 mhz A500+ cost more than a 33 mhz IBM clone)
Bullhockeys! In 1989 I paid just under US $500 for a 512K 500. One year later I bought a Zeos 386SX 25MHz with 1M RAM for just under US $3000. By 1992, the year the 1200 came out, a 4M RAM Gateway 486DX/2 cost me US $2100. The 486SX (no FPU) 33MHz clones were still over US $1000. The 500+ was still less than half the price of a 33MHz PC clone.
The real detailed history of the Amiga can be found at the Amiga History Guide:
http://amiga.emugaming.com/
Even today, with all those hyper-processor running those wanna-be über-hyped OS can’t beat up an OS from 10 years ago!!!!! Go figure! In the end it’s all about “Software quality”.
Of course, you can check out the real detailed history of the Amiga at the Amiga History Guide if you feel so…
http://amiga.emugaming.com/
Peace,
Jay
But stay tuned here at OSNews. Progess is being made! 🙂
Hmm, given the conversion of Amiga years to human years, I’ll check in around 2008. 😉
j/k I’ll look for it.
This article is not really all that accurate in several respects. A 7MHz A500 cost more than a 33MHz PC, when? After advent of e-bay maybe.
I still marvel at the fact that the Custom Chips ran at twice the speed of the CPU. That’s like having a 3GHz P4 with a FSB running at 6GHz today.
That would be kewl. Amiga rulez! (Where’s my kilt!!!!)
Funny to see an Amiga article the same day I rescued an Amiga 4000 from going in the trash. It’s the first Amiga I’ve owned since having a A500 as a games machine when they first came out. Still a nice machine, but I think it’ll go on ebay after I’ve played with it a little.
I think Amiga’s were ahead of IBM PCs and even Macs back in their day, but I don’t see anything that special about the Amiga OS in the 21st Century. It’s fast and has quite impressive multitasking, but it’s hardly the most stable OS ever created. Limitations like not being able to move windows off the edge of the screen seem much more annoying today than when I first used an Amiga. Even back in the early 90s I thought Amiga OS was inferior to RISC OS(on Acorn hardware), NeXTSTEP and OS/2.
Judging by how well they’ve kept their value, Amigas still seem to have their fans. An Amiga 4000/040 like the one I’ve picked up sells for more than a full Athlon 2600+ system.
Just compare the kind of machine that sells for <£150 on ebay all the time:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=51123&item…
With a recently auctioned Amiga:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=98930&item…
Completely crazy when you consider the speed difference between the systems. It’s hard to believe that anyone would rather use such an old system than a modern PC.
I was thinking of trying to network the Amiga and get it online, maybe download some old Amiga games for some nostalgic fun. But looking at the price of Amiga ethernet cards I think I’ll stick with emulation. Old Acorn and Atari hardware is a fraction the price, who are the people still willing to pay so much for Amiga hardware?
@ JK
> It’s fast and has quite impressive multitasking, but it’s
> hardly the most stable OS ever created.
Do note that that the current AmigaOS4 pre-release offers a far stable environment and includes the Grim Reaper which prevents the system from crashing completely when something goes wrong in most cases. The final version can run on PPC equiped A4000 systems as well.
> Limitations like not being able to move windows off the
> edge of the screen seem much more annoying today than when
> I first used an Amiga.
AmigaOS4 includes this feature.
> An Amiga 4000/040 like the one I’ve picked up sells for
> more than a full Athlon 2600+ system.
Your Athlon would be an excellent system to give WinUAE a try:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/index.php?op=r&cat_id=4&rev_…
Very incomplete. There are far better articles with much more information already out there, in the Wikipedia for example.
I don’t really understand why anyone thought it worth posting on OSNews.
This article reminds me of that fat (uhm, i don’t know any english synonyms so sorry for beeing straight) microsoft guy in that movie clip, “developers developers developers”
, don’t know his name, is it Balmer?
Anyway, many repeats of beeing easy to develop for
, beyond that it’s probably good, I don’t think I read thru it all, later… 
Basicly there were two types of Amiga models.
– The home computer versions weren’t meant to be much exandable out of the box (though you could add a modem, turbocards with better CPUs/more RAM and other accessories), which mainly served a market aimed a gamers (game console) and the post-C64/Spectrum/Amstrad home computer market.
– But there were also desktop models available next to these, which could be far more easily and heavily expanded than their PC/Mac counterparts available at the time of release (for instance the highly acclaimed Video Toaster, which has been heavily used for producing high quality movie, it was a plug-in card which allowed one to replace $100,000 worth of equipment with about $5,000 worth of equipment.).
>
>
The Video Toaster is also pretty much what sank the Amiga as a viable computer. Sure if you were into video production work (which people aren’t) it was a reason to buy an Amiga, but if you *DIDN’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT IT* it was a major reason *TO STAY AWAY OR RUN SCREAMING FROM THE AMIGA MARKET*
I know. I own an Amiga 500 and have friends who bought 2000’s and 3000’s, and despite what you say the Amiga desktop systems were nowhere near as expandable as the PC’s of the era. A lot of the add-on cards and other PC hardware quite simply would not work with an Amiga.
A real drawback if you didn’t give a hoot about the Video market.
“Amiga was originally intended to be a 16 bit console for the masses, the Lorraine. It would later morph into the popular Amiga personal computer. ”
Could todays consoles be history repeating itself?
>
>
No.
“at one point, a 7 mhz A500+ cost more than a 33 mhz IBM clone”
Where did they come up with that? when I got my first Amiga (parents bought it), it was $1500 in 1988/89, came with a kickstart rom upgrade to 1.3, and it included a screen and a library full of books, ranging from programming to scripting.
I don’t know where the hell the author got the idea that IBMs were cheaper, because I can assure him, circa 1988/89 in Australia, IBM’s were still overpriced, and underperforming compared to Atari and Amiga.
What expansions weren’t available for Amiga? Not in terms of brand name, but functionality?
Memory: yes
CPU: yes
SCSI: yes
IDE: yes
Video: yes
Modem: yes
Serial ports: yes
Ethernet: yes
Scanner: yes
Audio: yes
MIDI: yes
Mouse: built in
Joystick: built in
I just don’t get the validity of that comment unless you are looking for a Creative Labs Soundblaster and not simply a similar functionality.
Don’t forget that a CPU upgrade required a new motherboard and RAM on a PC. Mouse, sound and joystick were addons too.
Once you bought an Amiga, you could keep it for YEARS and still be up to date. That expansion capability probably hurt Commodore in the long run.
At one point the Amiga 500 did cost more than 33Mhz PC. But this was only in America where a savage price war had sent the cost of a new 486 clone right through the floor. In Europe and elsewhere PCs remained more expensive.
Again, at no time did a 500 cost more than a 33MHz PC. Not unless you’re talking a -used- PC. The 500 was produced from 1987 to 1991. It was replaced in 1991 by the 500+ which was replaced 6 months later by the 600. The 500 and the 500+ were both priced about US $500. The 600 was somewhat cheaper (IIRC, about $350).
In 1991, most new PCs were 33MHz 386s that cost between US $1200 (for full systems, not DIY) and $2500, depending on brand. At the same time, new 486 systems were coming out in 33, 40, and 50MHz. These cost substantially -more- than their 386 cousins. OTOH, there -were- 16 and 20MHz 386s that were closer in price to the 500, but the argument is about the 33MHz versions.
The “savage price war” didn’t occur until -after- the 500 was replaced, first by the 600, then by the 14MHz, 68020-powered 1200.
I was -pricing- PCs at the time with intent to buy. The low price of the 500 was one of the reasons the Amiga was seen as a “toy” computer.
>> Limitations like not being able to move windows off the
>> edge of the screen seem much more annoying today than when
>> I first used an Amiga.
>AmigaOS4 includes this feature.
Better late than never I suppose. But I’ll never understand why it took 20 years to fix this when more primitive systems like Windows didn’t have the problem. I remember reading one of the old Amiga newsgroups in college in 1988/89, people were complaining about this back then and hoping that it would be fixed in Workbench 1.4.
>> An Amiga 4000/040 like the one I’ve picked up sells for
>> more than a full Athlon 2600+ system.
>Your Athlon would be an excellent system to give WinUAE a try:
That’s what makes the price of old Amiga hardware so ridiculous. It seems stange to pay more for a computer than for a system that can emulate it faster than native speed. Especially when the Amiga 4000 isn’t rare enough to be collectable like some classic computers.
In comparison you can pick up old Acorn hardware very cheaply, RISC PCs (much faster than the 040 Amiga) for <£20 and addons like ethernet cards for <£5. While a A4000 can sell for £200+ and ethernet cards for £50+. Not that I’m complaining, I didn’t pay anything for mine so it’s nice to see that it’s worth something. But I really can’t understand why Amiga hardware would be 10x as expensive.
archetecture…. I don’t think it would have gone much past 1.5GHz… but that would be like a 6GHz P4 or a 3GHz Athlon….
You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. In particular, you haven’t grasped the difference between a processor architecture and a particular implementation of that architecture.
E.g. the 68060 used very similar implementation techniques to the original Pentium, but due to its cleaner and less legacy-encumbered architecture it actually beat it clock-for-clock.
There’s no reason why the 68k architecture in later versions could not have been implemented in a similar way to the GHz-mad P4 or the more reasonable Athlon and Pentium M.
Besides, there is no 3 GHz Athlon (yet).
Some of us don’t think it’s broken. I HATE windows that drag off the screen. I don’t want to see part of a window, I want to see the whole thing. I’ve seen people LOSE windows dragging them offscreen.
Second, making it an optional feature for those who wanted it would have been done long ago except for one small problem: Amiga wasn’t a functioning company for almost ten years. Kinda hard to fix a ‘problem’ when there is no development staff. The Amiga was pretty much frozen in time for a decade.
@ Ex Amigan
>> But stay tuned here at OSNews. Progess is being made! 🙂
> Hmm, given the conversion of Amiga years to human years,
> I’ll check in around 2008. 😉
Alternatively check out the progress report right now:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2386