The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.
This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.
As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.
Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.
When it arrived you could basically build your whole app around it as a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration.
NeXTpple never properly integrated it into Cocoa, and eventually they wanted a more user-friendly GUI scripting system and put their NIH syndrome to work and made Automator, which never took off because it was too simple. They they built Shortcuts off an acquihire and now Shortcuts introduces NSUserActivity as the new way to... build your whole app around a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. Except now we have all this weird magic templating going on.
Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)
E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool) to change the pixel format, scale and filter, then piping the resulting output image into a custom tool to convert into an engine specific texture format, all the while updating some asset database files, and IIRC also creating an icon file in the process.
Most of this can also be achieved with a pure cmdline workflow today via Python or Node (by glueing together tools like ImageMagick, ffmpeg, various asset pipeline tools), but the special sauce on the Amiga was that most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.
The 'plugin architecture' was mostly about datatypes (globally available file format encoders/decoders), BOOPSI UI components and 'Commodities' (IIRC small background tools that could intercept and manipulate system events).
It lacks a usable browser for todays websites. Maybe someone gets into the vibe of agentically coding one.
While being at it, the foundations could use heavy fuzzing, lift them up to Open/NetBSD at least. A few looks into Genode for technical inspiration wouldn't be wrong, maybe a port of Aros atop seL4/Genode could be supreme. Same as Haiku.
At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.
The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos
The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.
The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.
And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.
The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.
Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.
It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties
the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.
thank you commodore, thank you dad.
and thanks for this time traveling post!
The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.
What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.
It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.
Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.
Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.
Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.
That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...
Amiga 4 Ever! :D
AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)
But:
>"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable.
But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue."
Not true!
Well, not entirely true...
Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding...
I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience!
Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's.
The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc.
Any program could crash any of those.
So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...)
If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day...
Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it!
So, to the Author, I say "well done!"
An excellent article overall!
That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!
One minor example of the usability was that the ReadArgs() call was fairly extensively used within a year or two after it was introduced and meant that the "?" command line option for help worked "everywhere" and would give a machine parseable, semi-typed options list (annotations like "/T" for toggle, "/N" for number etc.)
MS were trying a huge NT push into the DTP industry that basically hit that wall and aborted.
Possibly Art Department Professional (aka ADPro)?
I was registered in Commodore's developer program and was porting one of our statistical apps when Commodore imploded. I had a nice A3000, running pre-release versions of Amiga DOS 3.1. It was a cool platform and I enjoyed it.
You are right about graphics.
Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.
And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.
In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.
In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.
VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.
Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.
You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.
But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.
Or 6K (1.5K used in 92/93) for a well-specced 386 that can actually run UNIX, multiple DOS versions (including preemptive multitaskers), OS/2, Windows (3.x/NT). And that's just the surface of the mainstream.
> But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, [...].
You confuse "software" for your specific preferences in GUIs. And software? The PC software catalog in DOS alone towers over Amigas, with a couple of notable outliers (the odd exclusive here and there, especially in cost-effective video production).
> The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486).
Yeah, like 2D platformer Stormlord (VGA version released in 1989) or Red Baron (1990). Played the latter first in VGA on a 286. Ran smooth. Amiga 500? Stutterfest. The game that allegedly sold more 386 machines than any other? Wing Commander. 1990. The late OCS port was technically inferior. Yeah, yeah, I know. 2.5D only counts when one invokes Doom.
Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).
The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).
I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.
The FULL experience of Wintel was definitely 10 years behind the full experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.
In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.
Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.
The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.
The flawless refresh rate comes from the fact the update is executed as part of a level 3 priority CPU interrupt triggered by the vblank refresh. Interrupt code reads the hardware register of a dedicated chip that has been measuring the mouse's potentiometers this whole time, to see how much they've moved. The mouse itself is a passive device.
It then sends a input event to Intuition, whose priority 20 input.device task (the highest priority task in any normal Amiga system) processes the event and updates the hardware sprite coordinates, but could equally write it onto the bitmap. It has the time to do that because everything else in the system waits for it.
Compared to a modern PC, which also uses a hardware cursor... the mouse is an active device and sends its own potentiometer readings as USB input events, which arrive to be processed by an independent USB subsystem in the kernel and is bundled with all the other USB traffic from devices attached on the same bus. A vblank interrupt couldn't get the mouse coordinates even if it wanted to.
https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/
(previous discussion)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972
The Amiga feels fast because its slowness is predictable. Modern systems have unexpected slowness, and unexpected things are always more noticeable.
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-e3w7Hh9eU
Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.
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Even a powerful PC, such as running WinNT or Linux on my 9800x3d, doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does.
It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).
It had a very simple static absolute priority scheduler and very little that could cause long pauses (like virtual memory), which made it much more predictable in scheduling than more sophisticated schedulers like in Windows, Linux, and MacOS. At one point I had an A1200 and a Linux Pentium 300-ish, and CD-writer on both systems. I could trust the Amiga to write CDs without creating a coaster every time, where the Linux box would succeed only 2/3 the time due to the unpredictable scheduling and it running the buffer dry.
So it wasn't a real RTOS, but it definitely behaved more like one that what we have now.
Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').
Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked.
What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions
AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.
Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.
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Apple's haptic technology is some deep black magic
The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?
What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.
This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.
One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.
Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.
The problem was that the Win16 part ran all in one address space, and the separation support was mainly used to handle DOS windows.
Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases.
I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that it would be possible to retrofit at least limited memory protection onto AmigaOS, but it's decidedly not something that'd be simple to do, and most likely you'd need to basically sandbox old apps and create new API's for new apps to do it properly.
In place of Irving Gould Acorn ended up with some clown called Stan Boland who decided it was better to change the name, stop making workstations and refocus on TV set top boxes. The company was dead six months later.
1. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/29468/Acorn-MEMC-Dat...
2. Not sure whatever happened to the Acorn Risc Machine but I'm sure it'll turn up again. :P
At least when the Amiga crashed it got to do some meditation. :)
In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.
That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.
In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.
Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.
Different times...
Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!
Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.
DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.
I remember the Mac emulator running Mac software faster than a classic Mac. Too bad the drive was not compatible so you had to convert disks for them to be readable.
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I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.
There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:
My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).
My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.
My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.
I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.
I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.
I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.
(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/
Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9
I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing.
Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit.
I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations I'm unaware of that we've largely forgotten about.
Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background.
And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music.
I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.
As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.
However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.
Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.
> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.
Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.
> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).
GenXer signing off.
P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then)
Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.
By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.
Personally, I just love the sound of it. Modules were awesome and games continued using them until ~2001.
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The X68000 was basically arcade-class hardware in a PC form factor, with a price to match. There are reasons why Capcom used X68000s as their dev machines for CPS1 games.
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It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.
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I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga.
Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!
Nice article about it: https://www.markwrobel.dk/post/amiga-machine-code-letter11/
It also estimates that, if the hardware counters are sampled every vblank, it's accurate (no missed wraparound) for the mouse moving at up to 3km/h! But it's still possible to whip the mouse around faster than that, so action games might like to sample the mouse more often than once per frame.
Apple loved doing things in software, ever since Woz wrote the Apple II disk routines in software so their floppy drives didn't need their own controller (the Commodore machines had a whole second CPU running an operating system in theirs). This is also why the one thing that WOULD lag the cursor on a classic Mac was formatting a floppy disk, since it required interrupt-level timing.
Even to this day Apple loves running things in software - the speakers on modern Mac laptops are driven in software - macOS has a daemon that runs and adjusts the speaker volume, tracking the sound pressure sent to them to keep them from being blown out. When Asahi Linux added speaker support, they had to reimplement this from scratch.
But I agree that predictable slowness is a thing. One only need to discuss traffic jams vs a 20 minute car trip without them.
This is, by the way, equivalent to SCHED_FIFO on Linux.
There are very legitimate reasons a hard realtime task may need to be non-interruptable.
The API is already there! AllocMem(, MEMF_PUBLIC) allocates shared memory, otherwise you get private memory.
You can then enforce memory protection around that, but obviously the entire OS is still built on message-passing between tasks where the message itself remains at exactly the same (public) address and isn't copied between private memory spaces, and there's a gentlemens' agreement as to who currently owns it (PutMsg/ReplyMsg)
Software like Enforcer and MuGuardianAngel already checked this, and dinged your program for accessing non-allocated memory.
I still think it's possible but doing it to a meaningful extent would be a long tedious effort, at least for my definition of meaningful.
You have Janus-UAE which sandboxes/emulates M68k apps for AROS "rootlessly" in that it bridges a number of structures etc. That mostly solves the problem on modern hardware for legacy apps, though it's a painful solution.
Then you could aggressively upgrade message formats for "native" apps to replace pointers with opaque handles.
If done at the time you could of course had relied on more of the developers of various apps still being active and willing to update their code and might have been able to avoid the Janus-UAE approach, but there was never a point at that time where anywhere close to a majority of users had MMU's,
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That's demonstratably false. But the A3000 was a ficker fixer.
This was unlike the "24-bit" 68000 where the hardware package actually only had 24 address lines, but its address registers and PC were 32-bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26-bit_computing#Early_ARM_pro...
The ARM3 resolved the situation by adding a separate 32-bit clean PC register and a separate status register, instead of the combined monstrosity. All software had to be rewritten to use the new registers if it wanted to be "32-bit clean", unlike 68000 software which either just worked fine, or revealed the programmer was an imbecile who thought they could get away with storing random data in the top 8 bits of addresses.
Bonus: the Archimedes memory map (00000000-03FFFFFF, i.e. 26 bits) https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/docs/ArcMem...
Case in point: Microsofts Amiga BASIC.
In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.
We Gen-Xers are used to being completely ignored as a generation. That is not new at all.
Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition, if the next computer or the SGI computer was around today with the technology advancements of today I definitely would be in the market for one, back in the day. I couldn’t afford one but today I can.
All things considered, no. It didn't. It had, for quite a while, a better bang-for-the-buck appeal, hardware- and software-wise, especially in the market niches it was designed to appeal to. But that headstart was over technically in late 1987 (386, VGA, AdLib, MT-32), and economically from ca. 1990/91 onwards, strongly dependent on market, of course, and not including the lowest margins, e. g. the home computers (based on their use cases, for a lot of people, used or new A500s, A600s or A1200s were still excellent deals even in 1993).
And philosophically? I say that was over before the first Amiga was even born. The adaptability speed and sheer potential of an open platform built around the relative stability/predictability of ever-evolving standards, as well as vendor diversity, ate you raw. It was just a matter of time.
The multitasking OS part is, I think, a quite overrated as well as romanticized retelling of history, written mostly by younger retro nerdlingers with roided-out (largely anachronistic) machines, on top of members of the Old Breed that sometimes still fight the Platform War. I can understand that. If Apple and Google won the hardware race by way of elimination with their to me rather miserable offerings, I'd most likely not be in the best of moods either, lol.
> Nothing beats a vertical computer company who has control of the operating system and the hardware that is the edge that Apple has over its competition [...]
Speed and overspecialization/overintegration are not everything. Especially old Amiganers should have learned that lesson by now...
Oddly enough, Apple made exactly one machine I really liked to use: the Newton MessagePad. The rest of their merchandise has been, through the bank, inferior given my specific preferences and use cases. The same goes for all iterations of their mainline operating systems. What remains is a bit of a soft spot for the Apple IIc. Just on account of its really lovely looks.
(eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv8WfmI4TiI - loading screen for Dizzy)
Outside of that I've also set up a dev environment consisting of a copy of the Pure-C compiler suite (basically Borland C for the ST), MicroEMACS for editing, Okami shell[1], and pcmake[2] for a very UNIX like development environment. Most people these days would set up a cross compiler on their PC, which is the sensible thing to do, but it's been great fun to do some retro coding with on period correct hardware.
[1] https://gitlab.com/wolframroesler/okami-shell [2] https://github.com/th-otto/pcmake/
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It's not "only" the message address space, as e.g. messages included pointers to a lot of other data structures that'd now either need to be copied or mapped into the receiving process, or the message formats reworked.
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(yes, the default AmigaOS look isn't anything impressive either, but "nobody" kept the default look so we're prone to very unfairly judging other systems against not what the default looks like but whatever we think a system should look like - I'm not claiming this was rational)