If you subscribed to cable television in the ’90s, you most likely saw Video Toaster in action on the cable dial. But the most notable use of the Amiga in cable television didn’t actually rely on Video Toaster at all.
That was the Prevue Guide, which may not have gotten the attention of the MTV, TBS, or Nickelodeon in those days, but served an important purpose: It was the channel you watched to see what was on those channels.
The Amiga was used in a number of projects that required on-screen graphics on TV.
And people say the Amiga was only a gaming machine!!!
“People” may say, but it was largely true. Yes, used in video production and some professional capacity. Yes, used as a general purpose PC (I wrote a few papers on WP for Amiga). But if you look at the retro community today, very few view it as anything other than a games platform. My impression is that is how many remember it, often as one of their first computers as a child/young adult.
Atari ST as a music machine then ?
I used MSX at the time (Yamaha CX5m) – And I’m in the USA, so probably the only one. 🙂
The Amiga is an Enigma. Babylon 5 used Video Toasters. Far more significant then cable dials, whatever they are. More recently I heard that Doom killed the Amiga because you had to have a PC to run the game and everybody wanted to. I wonder if Amiga got to grow up would it have been just as complained about as the other grown up corporates. They were all cute as babies, except maybe not Redmond.
Iapx432,
That’s an interesting idea, but I think the truth is far simpler. Here in the US they had little exposure. Stores that sold IBM PC & compatibles had cropped up everywhere long before Doom even existed. Macs were popular through very extensive school outreach programs. Even Tandys were more accessible through Radio Shacks. I was very interested in computers as a child and in retrospect I think the Amiga would have been awesome, I love their demo scene, but at the time I had no idea they even existed. There were no Amiga stores in my area.
I’m sure the answer would be “yes”, but I’m not sure they would have played the monopoly card quite like microsoft did. It’s something I ask myself often enough though: does market dominating success always result in a shift towards abusive corporate tactics such as vendor locking?
I was with a group of friends who were in the demo scene, and it was loads of fun to work on it.
However. Amiga was an evolutionary dead end.
What killed the Amiga was the PC getting VGA and sound. There was zero value proposition for Amiga afterwards.
Technically what killed Amiga wasn’t just VGA and sound. Really what killed Amiga was Commodore mismanagement and single-source availability. Macs survived but really they were as much a niche as Amiga at the time, and very expensive. There is no reason Amiga could not have evolved as the PC did – RTG was an example of that, too late. By then it was perceived as a game machine, which automatically put it out of the business consideration. The best thing Commodore could have done was spin off Amiga as a separate business entity with branding distinct from Commodore. A lot of reluctance I saw was a) It’s a game machine because Commodore, b) it’s a toy because A500. A500 was necessary to keep Commodore afloat, but a disaster for business sales.
I disagree. The Amiga really was an architectural dead end.
Mac survived because Apple was able to find a killer app for it (DTP). The closest the Amiga got to a killer app was the video toaster, but the market for that was tiny.
Commodore could only get critical mass of developers from game developers, which back then was a more “cottage” industry, which attracted the types of self-motivated developers that were undeterred by the poor development ecosystem, and who were willing to “get” what the machine was capable of.
So the perception wasn’t wrong; The Amiga really was a game machine that could do some business and graphics stuff on the side. Whereas the PC was a business machine that could do some gaming on the side.