Jimmy Maher, author of The future was here, is currently publishing an incredibly interesting series of articles titled The 68000 wars. Part 1 and part 2 have been published so far, and they’re definitely worth a read.
I do have one tiny niggle with part 1 – it’s a very tiny niggle that in no way detracts from the pleasure of reading these articles, but my heritage demands I point it out.
The Amiga was stuck in the past way of doing things, thus marking the end of an era as well as the beginning of one. It was the punctuation mark at the end of the wild-and-wooly first decade of the American PC, the last time an American company would dare to release a brand new machine that was completely incompatible with what had come before.
No.
I don’t think Be was “completely incompatible with what had come before” to the degree that Amiga was, but if you’re going to count Be, why not NeXT?
Because NeXT’s first computer predated Be’s
NeXT is also a contender, definitely, but NeXT WAS UNIX-based and used an existing kernel (Mach). I’m not sure how much of that is actually true – I’m no NEXT expert – but Be was entirely new.
NeXT had it both ways.
BSD code used and shared the familiar toolset at the lowest levels. For the GUI side of things, Display Postscript and associated development tools were all proprietary.
The new capabilities overshadowed the cost of breaking with the past for me. I was glad to make the jump and was extremely productive in the research environment I was in.
Granted is was not affordable for general casual use, and somewhat underpowered. I called it a Mac on steroids with Unix under the covers. Very glad to see the heritage still under the covers of my MacBook Pro.
The BeBox used existing hardware – PowerPC cpus, existing PCI graphics cards. It was just the software that was novel.
The Amiga, on the other hand, was all custom chip designs that didn’t show up anywhere prior or since (With exception of the primary CPU, of course).
Yes and no.
The original prototype BeBoxen used two Hobbit CPUs – completely unique. These were the only machines to use this processor. In addition, they had three DSPs as well.
The BeBoxen sold used PowerPC.
And even then they were custom PPC computers… not re-badged whatever Mac clones etc…
The one using the Hobbit was never released, and the part you quoted specifically mentions Amiga as the last US company to release such a machine.
Exactly. They keyword being “sold”. Since the only BeBoxen released to the public used PPC the article is completely accurate.
Sorry Thom. As much as I loved my BeBox, the design was pretty much a bunch of off the shelf technologies cobbled together in an expert way to create something slightly different. Joseph Palmer threw away the previous design, and use something a lot more practical. PCI, IDE, SCSI, Serial, Parallel ports, off the shelf chips and controllers and expansion cards – nothing really custom.
The only clever stuff:
1) The Geek port – ADC, DAC, fun!
2) The way they rigged non-SMP capable PowerPC 603’s together using their caches and then wrote clever software on top to make it function.
Just FYI, the prototype BeBox wasn’t the only un-released machine to use the AT&T Hobbit – early prototypes of the Apple Newton used it too.
The AT&T Hobbit did actually get used in a commercial product – the AT&T EO Personal Communicator. In a curious twist of fate, a predecessor/prototype for that device, made by the Active Book Company before they got bought by AT&T, was based around an ARM CPU.
You can read much more about the EO and GO Corporation in Jerry Kaplan’s fine book, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure.
Apollo, Masscomp, Sun (pre sparc),… I think there were 20+
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I would have guessed OSX Apples.
Edited 2015-04-07 02:26 UTC
I am an Amiga Fan but I thought the Atari ST came out after the Amiga.
a little before IIRC
“marking the end of an era” Yes, probably.
“stuck in the past way of doing things”? Only if you think that the Mac and PC were pre-destined to take over the market and therefore nobody ever had a chance to compete.
That would be an incredible piece of revisionism, worthy of Apple themselves. Commodore were more than capable of taking Apple’s position had its management made different decisions. The company was big enough and the Amiga was good enough (an understatement).
I’m sure that isn’t the author’s real opinion since he wrote a book about it and obviously has real love for the system, but that sentence was a bit misjudged…
Chris
ami architecture, tightly coupled chips & OS, limited progress; made it slower and more expensive