![]() He was bringing us the TED series of 8-bit computers rather than the Amiga, but he illustrates well the chaos and ineptitude reigning in the upper levels. Incredibly, you only see a glimpse of the computer at the very end, and they don’t show you any of what it can do.Ī very illuminating read as a former Amiga user came from our Hackaday colleague Bil Herd, in Back into the storm, his autobiographical account of working for Commodore in the mid-1980s. The Amiga 1000 launch advert is a minute long. ![]() For us it was streets ahead of everything else and was sure to have a promising future. It was a commentary from surviving members of the Amiga development team on Commodore’s dismal management and marketing, but we tech-obsessed youths drinking the Amiga Kool-Aid a a few years later were naive and ignorant of such matters. The above phrase was a legend back in 1990 when I had my first A500, a message buried in the version 1.2 Kickstart ROM. Mine got me through an electronic engineering undergraduate course: it compiled C programs, edited audio for student radio, played marathon overnight Lemmings sessions, and even once spent more than a day rendering the obligatory ray traced mirror ball over a checkerboard surface. There was of course nothing special about a 68000 running at 7.16 MHz, the key was in the Amiga’s ROM-based OS and those extra-special custom chips that meant that the 68k could compute rather than waste its time on graphics and waiting more than necessary for disk drives. By my final year as a student, people were buying 386sx-25 PCs with Windows 3.1, and even those supposed powerhouses felt sluggish and cumbersome compared to the Amiga. The Amiga by comparison was affordable, had amazing graphics for the day, had good audio, had a slick GUI over a proper multitasking OS, and felt fast due to its custom coprocessor chips. Of the other platforms, the Atari had MIDI but the TOS/GEM operating system and desktop was clunky, the PC was what everyone told you was the thing to have but was slow with no sound and awful graphics, the Archimedes was cool and very quick indeed but a bit weird, and the Mac was awesome but unaffordable. In the early 90s being able to do this was a big deal. The Apple IIgs wasn’t big for Brits, and though the Texas Instruments home computers were 16-bit they had been competitors for the 8-bit era. If you didn’t have an Amiga you might have had an Atari ST, if your parents chose the computer for you then you had an Amstrad PC-XT clone, if your school had used them you could have had an Acorn Archimedes, and if your parents were very rich you might have had an all-in-one Mac. This is a view from the UK so your market may have had some other players, but for us there were probably five main contenders. ![]() If we had been so convinced by the promise of the Amiga platform to the extent of not seeing the shaky foundations upon which it had been built, just what was it that had seduced us? Perhaps at this point it’s worth taking a quick look at the competition in the world of 16-bit or above computers, to see what else we could have had in our dorm rooms. That machine was a Commodore Amiga, and this is part love letter, part wistful musing about what could have been, and part rant about what went wrong for the best desktop computer platform ever made. It no longer graces my bench, but this was the computer against which all subsequent machines I have owned would be measured, the one which I wish had not been taken from me before its time, and with which I wish I could have grown old together. ![]() That little computer remains the only one of the huge number that I have owned over the years about which I can truly say that I understood its workings completely while I know how the i7 laptop on which this is being written works I can only say so in a loose way as it is an immensely complex device.Ĭomputing allegiance is fickle, and while I never lost an affection for the little Sinclair I would meet my true electronic soulmate around eight years later as an electronic engineering student. It was 1982, and I had saved up to buy a Sinclair ZX81. ![]()
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