Happy anniversary, Amiga!

[Dave Farquhar]

Just in case you missed it (I sure did), yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga 1000 launch. Unbelievable. Unbelievable that it's been that long, that is, and that it took so long for the rest of the world to catch up.

I upgraded from a Commodore 128 to an Amiga 2000 in 1991, when Commodore was running one of its power-up promotions. Basically they'd give you a big discount on an Amiga if you showed the dealer your manual from another Commodore computer. I got that big box home, set it up, and had no idea what to do with it, though I learned. And it definitely changed the way I thought about computers. Amigas had that effect on people. Good multitasking years before Windows 3.1 (which had multitasking, but it still wasn't very good), good sound years before Ad Lib (let alone Soundblaster), Autoconfig years before Plug 'n Play, multimedia years before Microsoft and Apple.... Looking back, I still see why.

 

[barythrin]

I wish I remembered this better. My boss at my first job at AMD worked on one of the first chipsets. All I remember was him saying that I think Intel or someone fabbed the chips or maybe helped with some of the research. It's a hazy memory these days unfortunately. In any event it was certainly a marvel in technology versus the current hardware that was out. Dedicated processing chips for sound and video, true multitasking. I was young but I still remembering seeing them do things I couldn't believe. The Amiga 2000 was awesome too with it's built in speech synthesizer, another thing I was young enough to have a great time messing around with. The games were insanely awesome. Almost like an arcade in a computer. I loved my PC but at the time the games couldn't compete at all not until the 486 when things started to catch up and there were better sounds and graphic quality emerging. Took me what seemed like forever to get my first Amiga systems after I first worked with them but they were amazing once I did.

 

[lotonah]

I loved the Amiga. I hated the Amiga. Its funny how that works.

Couldn't wait to get one, but I was too young (15 in 1985). The day I got my first credit card (1988, and yes, I had a good job), my best friend and I drove to Calgary and bought an Amiga 500 with the 512Kb card, and the RF modulator (couldn't afford a monitor).

Because I had learned Pascal in High School, I bought Lightspeed Pascal. Let me tell you, programming the Amiga with one floppy drive was a true pain in the ass. HATED IT. It ended up as a gaming machine, and I think my programming career has suffered because of that lull.

A year and a half later I traded the whole thing in on an Atari 520ST with a second floppy and a monochrome monitor, straight across. Of course, within a few months the price of Amiga floppy drives plummeted. Grrr.

Of course, nowadays its different. I have an Amiga 500 again, and two Amiga 2000HDs. I also run the emulators quite a bit, although I don't do programming on it.

 

[Dave Farquhar]

Yep, a single-floppy Amiga wasn't easy to use for much of anything except some gaming. Even some games really wanted that second drive.

 

[geoffm3]

I have fond memories of the Amiga, but it's not without its own warts...

On the downside, I remember it destroying floppies on a regular basis...
Mouse buttons crapping out
Frequent crashes

Still, it was a fun machine.

 

[barythrin]

I forgot about that, I'm still not 100% sure why or if it was true (seemed to be) about not removing a floppy while the Amiga was reading the disk otherwise it could wipe it out. I'm pretty sure I loaned my workbench floppies to a friend who unfortunately was an on the spot loan and while I warned him a few times about that I kinda knew in my heart I'd get back a set of blanks. I still don't understand really why that's the case though, maybe I didn't use enough systems like that but it strikes me the Wintel PCs I've owned never had that problem.

 

[geoffm3]

IIRC, KS2.x and above were significantly better. I think the trackdisk.device library was buggy and was subsequently fixed in later revs of KS... but then of course you ran the gauntlet of certain older games not working.

Speaking of which, I had an A3000/040 at one point. Some games would refuse to run on it. Seems like if games were your thing, then it was best to stick to a 500/2000 system.

 

[Dave Farquhar]

Yep, for games compatibility a lot of people would get a ROM switcher. Then they could boot into 1.3 for the games that needed it, and into 2.x for everything else. And you're right that 2.x was much better. When I moved from my Amiga running KS/WB 2.1 to a PC running Windows 3.1, I wondered what was wrong with the PC. On my Amiga, I routinely kept several applications running at a time, and if I tried to run more than a couple of things under Windows 3.1 at once, stuff crashed a lot.

And yes, game compatibility with the 68040 could be dicey, at least partly because of the caches. But there were issues even with the 68020 and 030. Most accelerators for the 68K Amigas had a socket so you could switch them back to the 68000 for game compatibility. I remember the selling point on the accelerators that were just straight fast 68000s was that they had better compatibility than the ones that used newer CPUs.

Games were a rough spot with compatibility, but that wasn't just unique to Amiga. There were certain DOS games that wouldn't run under Windows 95. Crusader No Regret comes to mind. And I remember an editorial in Compute in 1989 or 1990 complaining that some of his favorite games acted goofy on 386 and 486 systems, but ran fine on any XT or 286 he tried them on. That problem seemed to solve itself as the industry consolidated around a couple of BIOS makers and a small number of chipset makers.

Games had a tendency to break rules in order to get better performance. I don't hear about that as often anymore, but that may be because I don't play a lot of games anymore either. And I guess you can't really hit the hardware directly anymore because Windows won't let you these days, and video cards change too fast so what works this year won't work next year anyway.

 

[tingo]

First I had an Amiga 500, then an Amiga 4000. Both machines received major upgrades. The A500 had more memory, and an external hard drive. I think I had an external floppy for it as well. The A4000 got a SCSI card (Fastlane Z3), a graphics card, and a PowerPC cpu upgrade gard. I still have the 4000, and a few years back it got a ethernet card. I have fond memories from my time with both machines. IMHO, the best thing about the Amiga was that every program had an ARexx port, scripting something was very easy.