Olin Wread writes for ExtremeTech the story of Amiga, from the very beginning.
Amiga: Live Another Day
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Also read:
http://www.geocities.com/mslgeo/JayMinere.html
http://amiga.emugaming.com/jayminerinterview.html
http://members.tripod.com/~TheMission/JayMinerLinks.html
Rest in peace Mr. Miner.
Imagine a PC, being the best in sound and graphics for years. Revolutionary, superior than any of its competitors. It wasn’t PC complaint or anything, but it was just the best,its still a lovely nostalgie to hear its name recalled;)
I do have absolutely no idea about computer architectures or anything like that, but i still do wonder.. what happens if ROM returns back or a hybrid of it, PC’s with ROMs, specially designed chipsets etc.. would it make them faster or stable as Amiga was once..
Most of us have PC’s home for internet(chat, browse net), read and write docs,spreadsheets, play games, music etc.
Wish there was a possibility, or a company like Commodore to release a new breed Amiga
have a nice day all ,
Nice story, but a few points:
<<Linux holds a dedicated user base that most closely resembles that of Amiga’s>>
It does? How.
<<Perhaps even more important than support of older Amiga applications is the support of PPC Linux. Linux users who were previously unwilling to buy an Apple because of the proprietary nature of the platform now have a machine on which they can leave the X86 architecture without going to a pricey workstation.>>
I can’t imagine anyone in this scenario. PPC is a pricey workstation
<< Apple has chosen to market itself as the video editing leader with built-in Firewire, Final Cut Pro software and the speed of the G4. >>
Speed of the g4? ;D
<<More likely the Amiga will continue to be a geek toy treasured by hard-core users. >>
Got that right.
<<With sufficient market presence and continued public resentment towards Microsoft and avoidance of Apple, the platform may live another day.>>
Define live
<<Linux holds a dedicated user base that most closely resembles that of Amiga’s>>
It does? How.
I’m guessing he means in the zealot form. Amiga users were some of the biggest zealots around back in the day. Now that role is being filled by the Linux crowd. Very vocal about their OS.
>> Linux holds a dedicated user base that most closely
>> resembles that of Amiga’s
> It does? How.
During the heydays of the Amiga platform, there was a strong community of people helping eachother and writing tons of free software. Well over 40,000 software titles were written for the Amiga, with a large part of these being Public Domain, Shareware, Freeware, etc titles. Many of such freely distributable software titles can still be found on Aminet.
http://www.aminet.net/
The platform’s heydays were at a time when Linux did not even exist till before the first stable Linux v1.0 kernel was finished. As OS architecture the AmigaOS platform had very little in common with the Linux kernel (i.e. with AmigaOS using a fast pre-emptive multitasking microkernel). But quite a few Amigans did switch to Linux and open source development, much of the Linux environment we see today, like Window mangager functions and utilities were inspired by the large scala of software available for AmigaOS.
“I’m guessing he means in the zealot form. Amiga users were some of the biggest zealots around back in the day. Now that role is being filled by the Linux crowd. Very vocal about their OS.”
Unlike the Windows zealots, os x zealots, beos zealots which are all to be found in spades.
“Because they are both the cheapest users I have ever seen. They will buy hardware, but thought all software should be free, even commercial softwarte. Biggest bunch of pirates in the world”
My vote for the moronic post of the day goes to you. Congrats.
I remember the Amiga500 it was amazing to go round my friends house, we’d play for hours!!! Robocop, IK+, Shadow Warriors, bootleg games were just too easy and damn cheap, we picked up 200 disks for £15!!
I don’t remember that much marketing for it as PC, but definitely as a games machine!! It was next stage up from an NES.
The first time I heard a human voice sample in a game, that actually sounded real!.
There are several small mistakes and there is some unclearness to some points within this article. I will shortly point out the pieces wich I believe are among the most important ones, it should be noted that Amiga is currently an independent company, since the year 2000 and onwards, the brand, sources codes and Amiga IP (excluding patents, but including full licenses for utilizing all Amiga related patents) were bought from Gateway for roughly 4.5 million dollars.
For quite some time the focus of Amiga Inc has been on the development of a high performance, small memory footprint platform indepedent technology, the AmigaDE and derivatives (investors). This technology is being targeted at all “computing” devices, including smartphones, PDA, STBs, etc.
Some recent interviews with some pioneer AmigaDE software developers:
ZeoNeo:
http://www.amigafuture.de/englisch/eng_interactive/eng_zeoneo2.php
http://www.getboinged.org/gbnews.asp?A=194
John Harris
http://glames.online.fr/infos/itw_jharris.html
Pagan Games
http://www.getboinged.org/gbnews.asp?A=37
Kaliko
http://www.getboinged.org/roundup.asp?A=112
Recent interviews with Amiga’s CTO:
http://www.templeoftech.com/articles.cfm?ArticleID=58&PageID=1
http://net.cciinter.net/users/amigasource/interview/int2.htm
Also there is no clear commitment from Escena, with regard to ever deliving their originally planned PCI based AGA solution. Also there are quite a few PPC targeted software titles planned for AmigaOS4.
And finally should be noted that this new AmigaOS platform is not only targeted at current users, nostalgia freaks and geeks, but also at certain embedded markets and some other niche markets where a high performance, efficient, responsive and fast booting OS could make a difference.
oGALAXYo, nice links.
Mike Bouma & the rest, thanks.
Yes, I had an Amiga 500 back in the day, and it was an amazing machine. Some of my best memories on that thing. The things it did at the time were just so far ahead that it was hard to imagine a future without it. I really don’t see anything special happening now, but I could be wrong. I have little more than a passing interest in current Amiga happenings.
I see Linux & the rest as so different to the Amiga, so I guess that is why I asked about similarities between the two communities. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart and warm memories of the Amiga, though.
Reading up on its history & development is fascinating stuff.
@ al pettit
Please don’t generalize people. You are referring to the Amiga gaming scene. Yes, the mass piracy was shameful and sadly quite popular during the platform’s heydays due to the quality and ease of copying pirated games compared to other platforms.
Many of such people own a PSX/PS2 today. But also many of the current people within the Amiga community are actually quite active with regard to supporting their platform. I believe that this is the main reason why software is still being developed for the Amiga market.
Note that PPC Amiga games (+/- only 10.000 PPC classic Amiga expansion boards out there!), including Shogo, Heretic2 and Freespace have outsold their Linux counterparts. Not for nothing did Loki bankrupt and is the commercial Linux gaming market almost non-existent…
Look.. I had an Amiga 1000 then a 500 then a 2000.
While I bought stuff everyone I knew D/Led stuff
I went to Commodore shows in DC and NYC
I loved the Amiga. I just hated everyone around me.
Everyones justification for pirating was “I would have not bought it anyway” Or that there was more piracy on the PC.
There was a Bronx Commodore User Group that should have just called themselves the Bronx Swap meet. Yea they loved their Amigas, but wouldn’t support it.
When the toaster came out, I figured. Cool, now we will break into the video market. But it didn’t happen. They even cracked the software so it would work without the card. I was in a store one time when a guy came in trying to buy the manuals since he already had the software.
The Amiga was the true multimedia machine. It was way ahead of it’s time, but other than GVP and Newtek many software developers didn’t do well and left because of the users.
Yeah what Al Pettit said. Its so true, piracy was rampant on the Amiga, back in the day. Luckily for the few of us left, the big cracking groups like Fairlight moved onto greener pastures, and are now wreaking havoc in PC land. Altho it may take forever before piracy kills the windows platform. Of course as long as M$ keep making money from OS sales, they could care less what software gets pirated.
Software piracy is still rampant tho, probably moreso than before. Hell you need only open a session in DALNET and EFNET to see that everyone is still getting free software. Probably the same fools that killed the Amiga platform the first time round. One thing is for sure, I weeped like a little schoolgirl after reading all those Amiga history weblinks by Mike Bouma. Thanks for showing me why I loved my miggy so much.
Well, there was the C64. It was famous, and to no small part due to the amount of pirated games available.
Then came the Amiga. Same story.
Then came the Windows PC. Same story.
That is not to say I endorse piracy, but it remains a fact that being able to get games etc. for free is a huge selling factor for a platform – until the point comes where the market collapses due to a new, better contender, at which point piracy serves to bring the “old champion” down all the faster.
Now, the difference between the PC and it’s famous predecessors? Easy: Microsoft was able to position itself in such a way that there cannot *be* a new, better contender.
One, presence in the offices. Neither the C64 nor the Amiga ever penetrated there; the C64 was not up to the task, the Amiga, while capable, was not pushed into that direction by Commodore. (Which frustrated Jay Miner to no small extend.)
Two, open hardware and price / performance. Commodore was unable to keep up with the IBM compatible industry in chip development. Despite *several* requests to produce Amiga hardware under license (e.g. the A3000UX with Amiga Unix, reputedly one of the best Unixes of that time), they declined. PC’s became more powerful and cheaper by the week…
Three, marketing. Most people set Amiga <=> A500. So many fondly remembering the Amiga never even saw the Workbench. When the A500 craze was already a thing of the past, the Amiga was still a very capable working tool, long before Win95 appeared. No-one knew.
Software piracy is still rampant tho, probably moreso than before. Hell you need only open a session in DALNET and EFNET to see that everyone is still getting free software. Probably the same fools that killed the Amiga platform the first time round.
Piracy is not what killed the Amiga. Dave Haynie has written quite a few Usenet posts detailing what did. Google for them.
@ Solar
I do believe piracy has hurt the Amiga platform more than the c64 and Win32 platforms. The c64 had an userbase with 15 million identically specced computers, and Win32 has a userbase well over 100 times the size, the Amiga platform ever had. At a same percentage of piracy, c64 and Win32 software developers do/did not hurt as much as compared to on the Amiga platform. The remaining userbase is/was large enough to support these platforms.
IMO the userbase is currently so small that every user who pirates software today and in the near future on the new Amiga platform, is literally slamming a nail into the platform’s coffin.
>never even saw the Workbench
Although a small minority, there were some. I still remember a late-nineties quote from a young boy talking to his father at an Amiga usergroup meeting. While looking a an old A3000 booting into Workbench 2.0 (1990) from a harddrive, he said to his dad: “Look dad! People have created something like Windows for the Amiga!”…
So one of the platform’s huge benefits was also a relatively less important weakness. The ability to boot straight into software stored on diskettes or CDs was a huge user-friendly benefit (important parts of the OS were stored on a ROM chip), but also made AmigaOS more invisible to the general public.
Note that many of the ex-commercial software being distributed among the Amiga community is currently legal, with permission from the original copyright owners.
The central website for legal Amiga abandonware is the “Back to the Roots” website:
http://www.back2roots.org/
@ samb
The Amiga platform and its developer/userbase never completely died. Also the platform was still *very* much in demand at the time when Commodore bankrupted (especially A1200 model computers in Europe).
In fact at the end of C= days, the company management hoped that the Amiga platform would save their entire company. Sadly they could not produce enough machines to meet consumer demands.
Simplicity …
It was the first platform I programmed using the OS calls not the hardware directly. The system was well designed. A small fast-message exchange kernel (and not a microkernel !), pre-emptive scheduler were unique in such a micro-computer. No virtual memory made the system fast. And if you wanted you could easily ask the OS that you wanted to program the hardware directly and let you do the job.
Everything is this computer (OS and hardware) was built to make the programmer life easier.
> (and not a microkernel !)
The definition of a microkernel differ, just as much as the definitions with regard to “Realtime Operating Systems” or “Home Computers”.
According to Carl Sassenrath, the software engineer who designed the Exec kernel, Exec (1985) offered one of the first microkernel designs. The “microkernel” philosophy developed around the mid-late-eighties. I believe you should see the term “microkernel”, mainly as a design philosophy similar to i.e. RISC processor designs philosophies. A problem with Amigas was that it did so many things before the terms were even introduced. For example all Amigas were true multimedia computers, however the term “multimedia computer” wasn’t introduced yet and only a decade later this term became popular.
The best known microkernel examples today, are the Mach and QNX Neutrino kernels.
I had a good old Amiga 500 that was only really used as a games machine. I never really considered an Amiga when I was looking for a general purpose computer. Looking back, there were some really nice features in the Amiga OS and they were wonderful computers. But what advantages do they still have today when compared with Windows and Mac OS X? What’s the state of business, design and internet software available for the Amiga?
“I had a good old Amiga 500 that was only really used as a games machine. I never really considered an
Amiga when I was looking for a general purpose computer. Looking back, there were some really nice
features in the Amiga OS and they were wonderful computers. But what advantages do they still have today
when compared with Windows and Mac OS X? What’s the state of business, design and internet software
available for the Amiga?”
I wonder why you didn’t consider an Amiga for general use at the time?
There was a great deal of software available for it ten or twelve
years ago, and it was fully competitive with that available for other
platforms.
Nowadays, there are far fewer programs, but this includes some good
ones. Pagestream is a good DTP program. Draw Studio is a nice simple
drawing package. SFX is a very good sound sample editor/processor. And
so on.
It does seem likely that the new Amigas, when they finally arrive,
will re-awaken interest among programmers, because as somebody already
mentioned, it is a good platform to program on, so long as you don’t
expect to make a living from it.
I think most people would find it easier and more fun to write a
program for AmigaOS than for Linux.
An AROS developer I know says that AmigaOS doesn’t use a microkernel. That’s not to say it uses a macrokernel. There are other paths, and Exec is one such path. AmigaOS doesn’t use the kernel-server model in academic microkernel designs.
Exec was always considered to be a microkernel by the orginal Amiga team.
The kernel supports basic services like tasks, memory, semaphores, messages, signals, generalized lists, interrupts, traps, etc.
File systems, device drivers, shared libraries, etc. run as separate user-mode tasks or subroutines.
The main difference compared to most modern microkernel designs, is that these use separate protected address spaces, a feature which is planned to be optional for future AmigaOS releases.
@ JK
> But what advantages do they still have today when compared with Windows and Mac OS X?
Of course MacOS X and WinXP have come a long way over the years. But in many areas the AmigaOS team think they can do much better. Compared to MacOS X and WinXP, AmigaOS4.x is designed to be far more compact, fast and efficient. Booting into a fully featured GUI should almost become instant, just as well turning off the machine should be done immediately when pressing the off button. In addition AmigaOS should be very modular and give an advanced user a very high degree of freedom and powerful customization options. Also many Amiga users appreciate its structure, advanced CLI and overall transparent design.
> What’s the state of business, design and internet software available for the Amiga?
Many of the currently available PPC/68k software titles should be usable through integrated emulation. For most uses there are excellent software titles available, many of them are even freely downloadable from the internet. Sadly most of such software isn’t by modern means state-of-the-art anymore, but still extremely useful as a starting point.
The Amiga software partners are focussing on all of your mentioned software categories, with an addition of entertainment and multimedia software. Their philosofy is that you don’t need 10 different office packages, 10 different rendering packages, 10 different browser, etc. They will initially focuss on providing high quality software targeted at all these uses, but the emphasis will initially lie with quality instead of quantity.
$7500 Video Toaster still works?
A1000
A500 x 2 (3?)
A2000
A2500
CDTV
CD32
I didn’t touch a PC until 95/96. And even then, my tricked out GVP/A500 RIPped prints to the Primera printer faster than my 486/66 did. That shouldn’t have been true, but it somehow was. I have a bunch of PCs now. Fairly soulless beasts. I swear the Amiga used to sometimes anticipate what I wanted to do next…
And then I fell for BeOS… I think a case can be made for Microsoft killing both systems.
Maybe I’ll just go live in a cave somewhere.
Hi everyone, I just stumbled on this collection of comments several days after my article went up. This was pretty interesting to me, I really appreciated the good feedback. Also, it is great to read Amiga users experience from times past. I’ve also felt like my PC was a “soul less beast.” But allas, if Amiga becomes the OS of my cell phone when will I ever see it again? We can all just recall, fondly, that deeply buried in the software of our hand held devices lies the remains of what is left of Amiga. That just kind of makes me sad, I really wish there would be a revival of Amiga. It remains to be seen of how much it can make a comeback. I hoped to end the article on an upbeat note, but found it very difficult with current circumstances. I found the comments about the ease of programming the Amiga interesting too, so I certainly learned something reading all of these comments. Word of mouth and media coverage can certianly not hurt the platform.
Peace,
Olin