
We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) - pmoriarty
https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-amiga-they-fucked-it-up/
======
ChuckMcM
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times :-)

I really really liked the Amiga (and was a fairly regular contributor to the
comp.sys.amiga newsgroup), I also interviewed for a job at Commodore HQ in
Frankfurt (the actual headquarters of the tax shelter known as Commodore :-)).
And one of the things that became painfully obvious was the Commodore was not
set up to make Amiga successful, they didn't have the correct organizational
structure nor the core corporate values that would make them successful.

At the time I was working at Sun, had joined as a reasonably early engineer,
and watched how Sun had grown from a scrappy "start up with great pretensions"
to something DEC and IBM started actually losing market share too. I saw the
market for Amiga as coming up as a low priced workstation, not the bargain
basement home PC. But it could be both, and for a while that path was making
progress with the A500 and the A2000.

It was hard to do though, the workstation market really needed a "high
resolution" flicker free display, the home market needed to look good on TVs.
The architecture didn't have the display bifurcation line that was built into
the PC or other workstations.

With out executive air cover to make the investments they needed to make in
engineering, Commodore reverted to its roots of making things as cheaply as
possible to add margin that way. "High end" systems that would have small
markets were shelved, and even the commercial systems they were selling into
the video post production market were starting to get a reputation for being
cheaply made.

It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the future
slip away.

~~~
bane
> It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the
> future slip away.

I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of
loss. Among retrocomputing enthusiasts, Amiga users are an extra odd bunch --
often making and _selling_ commercial shrink wrapped software for years.

While it's not entirely unusual for people to put effort into a special game
or whatnot for their favorite retrocomputer, and charge people for a special
nostalgia filled limited run, Amiga users seem strangely tied to trying to
make creating Amiga stuff a viable commercial venture [1][2][3] it's as quaint
as it is bizarre these days.

1 - [https://www.amigaos.net/](https://www.amigaos.net/)

2 - [http://entwickler-x.de/emotion](http://entwickler-x.de/emotion)

3-
[http://www.pagestream.org/?action=Store](http://www.pagestream.org/?action=Store)

~~~
romwell
> it's as quaint as it is bizarre these days.

You wouldn't say that about an aftermarket for, say, vintage car parts, would
you?

To be specific, if you buy yourself an original VW bus, you won't be on your
own when you try to service it.

Amiga just might be the VW bus of retro computers (probably Commodore deserves
this title better, but the analogy works the same way). It'll be alive for as
long as the feelings associated with it are understood.

~~~
_jal
Exactly.

Some niche products have such a following that they are recreated after the
original producer stops making them:

[http://polaroidoriginals.com/](http://polaroidoriginals.com/)

History, if you're not familiar:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Originals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Originals)

~~~
romwell
Here, though, I'd say it was not exactly a niche product: Fuji Instax has been
on an upwards curve the whole time Polaroid was messing around with its
product line.

But yup, I agree with your point.

~~~
jdietrich
Fuji Instax is still pretty niche and survived largely because of Fujifilm's
extremely diverse portfolio. Polaroid didn't so much "mess around with its
product line" as "go bankrupt twice in a decade". The revival of Polaroid
instant film was difficult, painful and wouldn't have happened at all if it
weren't for the fanatical devotion of a number of key players outside of
Polaroid Corporation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation#Bankruptc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation#Bankruptcy_and_the_%22new%22_Polaroid_Corporation)

~~~
romwell
Polaroid arguably discontinued their instant film business because they bet on
Zink[1]

Zink _is_ a Polaroid technology that powers many instant cameras. I own a
Polaroid-branded one (Polaroid SNAP), and it's awesome: it never ceases to
amaze people. And when I tell them that yes, they can keep it, and it's also a
sticker, their eyes light up!

I've made friends with this new digital iteration of the technology. But when
the Impossible Project was started, that tech was still very far from being
mature; and many people still prefer the look and feel of the instant film.
They are different products.

Still, it wouldn't be fair to say that Polaroid didn't _try_ to stay relevant
in instant photography. Ultimately, Zink is a success - although it's a
separate company now.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zink_(technology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zink_\(technology\))

------
technothrasher
I know this article was about how commodore screwed up there marketing on the
Amiga, but all those references to software, publications, and developers just
took me on a nostalgia trip back to my 15 year old self pining for an Amiga as
I worked in a farmer's fields all summer long to be able to buy one, and after
I finally got one I spent many late nights teaching myself to code up some
Homebrew bbs software for it.

~~~
ecpottinger
I built hardware mods on my Amiga 1000 and 500, and for members of my local
Amiga club

What got me was how easy it was to do, yet a large company like Commodore was
not doing that I did at home.

500KB original memory and 1.5 MB of memory piggy-back to the chip memory, 1.8
of high speed static memory, designed myself and install a CPU speed doubler,
a gray composite (used analog colour signals) to drive a high persistence
monochrome monitor, a Zorro bus to IBM ISA bus adapter, external triple floppy
drive array.

All this was very easy to make, I don't know why Commodore could not do the
same things.

~~~
Annatar
Commodore was on the verge of bankruptcy, that's why, but the engineers
designed the Amiga to be expandable so that people like you could do exactly
what you have done: works as designed!

~~~
rasz
Commodore was still making good revenue up to 1993 despite peddling 7 year old
designs. Firing all good engineers, cutting costs to the bone and selling
outdated, but cheap to manufacture technology was a fantastic short term
strategy. Surprisingly 1991 was the second best year by revenue, Commodore was
already a walking corpse by then.

[https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial-
history-1978-19...](https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial-
history-1978-1994/)

~~~
icedchai
I was an Amiga user from 1988 to 1994 or so. 1991 felt like the peak of the
Amiga. AmigaOS 2.0 was finally released, which was a _huge_ upgrade. The A3000
was out... their first "professional" Amiga. There were lots of 3rd party
vendors supporting it.

------
tombert
I'm a bit sad that the Amiga never caught on much in the US...at least not in
the home market. Looking back at computer history, it's almost surreal to see
how much _better_ it was than virtually all the competition (with the possible
exception of NeXT), and still managing to lose the war to Windows.

I've played with the Amiga a lot via emulation, and it's still impressive to
me; a _home_ operating system with preemptive multitasking in the 80's?! With
something like that, whomever was in charge had to work pretty hard to ruin
it.

~~~
cromwellian
The Amiga in 1985 had amazing custom graphics and sound chips, a preemptive
multitasking OS, double the RAM of the Mac 128k at 1/2 the price (Mac 128 MSRP
is $6000 in 2018 dollars)

It’s really sad how much public hagiography is made over the Mac when almost
no middle class family I knew of could afford it, certainly not with a
LaserWriter.

The Commodore 64 was way more affordable and got a legion of kids interested
in computing and coding, who later went on to adopt Amigas.

Even today if you look at the home brew, hacker, and demo scenes, Commodore
dominates. Hardly anyone is doing stuff on old Apple 2s or Macs.

Commodore gets the short shrift in the Twitterati retelling of the personal
computer evolution, and today’s millennials completely fixated on Jobs and
Apple and ignore most of what was really happening in the 80s with home users.

~~~
derefr
> how much public hagiography is made over the Mac when almost no middle class
> family I knew of could afford it,

Part of the late '80s/early '90s revenue strategy for Apple was to sell into
the educational market. The people who fondly remember the Apple computers of
this period do so not because they had one at home, but because many of them
were young children at this time, playing games on those Apples in school
computer labs.

~~~
brokenmachine
We had an Apple II in the classroom, we were allowed to play with it in pairs
for maybe an hour every fortnight.

Our teacher had almost no idea how it worked and there was no manual or
instructions, so basically we sat in front of that green screen confused. I
managed to make a star in logo, that was about it.

I still loved playing with it anyway, this machine that you had control of
through arcane commands. It felt like you could make it do anything if you
only knew the magic command.

------
flurdy
A lot of history of the Amiga I was not aware of. I did not know they
struggled so much in the US with the 500. I thought it was a success, and the
struggles only came later after the 600, 1200, 4000, etc lost out to generic
PCs.

Where I grew up in Norway, around 1990, everyone had or wanted an Amiga 500.
Most of my mates had an Amiga, a few had a Nintendo NES. I did not know anyone
who had an Atari ST. Nor a Spectrum which I think was more popular in the UK.

Ah the memories of "acquiring" a bunch of games, go to a mates house and
hammer through them. The Secret of Monkey Island, Kick-Off 2 and its ilk was
my early teenage years.

Later on, I progressed to the Amiga 1200 and started to use it more as a
desktop, my first real ventures into programming and messing around with
BBSes. Before I defected to a 486 PC...

Without the Amiga, I would not be the computer person I am today. With happy
childhood memories.

~~~
erikstarck
“Without the Amiga, I would not be the computer person i am today.”

Then this book is for you:
[https://fandrake.com/produkt/generation-500/](https://fandrake.com/produkt/generation-500/)
It tells the story of the Amiga and the people using it and how it shaped
them. In Swedish but lots of Norwegians interviewed.

~~~
openplatypus
I wish this was available in English :(

~~~
erikstarck
There is an English version of Generation 64, about the C64 and people who
used it: [http://generation64.com/](http://generation64.com/)

------
melling
It wasn't all marketing. The Amiga was expensive for the day. I had a C64 and
wanted one badly, but as a poor college student I could only upgrade to the
C128. The Amiga also competed against the cheaper Atari ST.

Businesses buy computers for the software and the Amiga did not have Lotus
123, MS Word, Multiplan, or Excel.

Microsoft after a certain point stopped supporting niche platforms. I had
Flight Simulator and Multiplan on the C64, for example. The Amiga did not have
either.

The Amiga did eventually find a niche where it was known to be the best
solution but it wasn't a large enough market.

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-
ami...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-amiga-
part-9-the-video-toaster/)

~~~
pmoriarty
The original Amiga 1000 was certainly expensive. The later Amiga 500 was a lot
more affordable, and that's what my parents got for me when I somehow managed
to convince them it was the best choice.

My own impression for why the Amiga and every other machine of the era lost
out to the IBM PC was that the PC was what virtually everyone used at work, so
that's what they got at home.

Apple managed to grab the art/music creation and education markets, so managed
to stay alive that way, while the rest of those early computers never really
found their niche outside of games, for which the Amiga was arguably best
suited to. The Amiga was an early power gaming machine and had the potential
to grab the art/music making market from Apple, but few people other than
techies really appreciated it or would make their computer purchasing
decisions purely on that.

~~~
ASalazarMX
> My own impression for why the Amiga and every other machine of the era lost
> out to the IBM PC was that the PC was what virtually everyone used at work,
> so that's what they got at home.

And it was also what you were taught on at school. Even if the IBM PC advanced
the standardization of personal computers, I feel it also set them back by a
decade.

Well, a decade is exaggeration, but the design choices of the IBM PC shaped
personal computing, and those choices were made by people who thought personal
computers were for serious business.

~~~
jacobush
No exaggeration. Smooth scrolling, stereo sound and nice colours. Yep a
decade. PC could not compete until 1995 against 1985 Amiga.

------
gavanwoolery
Every time an Amiga article comes up, I say the same thing. I want to put
together a dream team and reboot it. :D Imagine if the Ferrari brand died and
nobody used it ever again...that is how I feel about the Amiga.

[Edit: to be clear, I am aware of the existing stuff...what I would like to
see is the Amiga used to reimagine what a computer is - new hardware, new OS,
new "web browser" (that ditches current conventions) ... I am aware this is a
pipe dream :) ]

~~~
richardjdare
Ah, I think about this often. Although I moved from the Amiga to PC in 1996,
I've never felt at home on other platforms. I consider myself an Amiga exile
:) So far, I've settled on a few principles for my new Amiga:

\- No x86. The x86 platform is like a boring, ugly dude who has taken steroids
and growth hormone for 20 years. He's bigger and stronger than everyone else,
but he's still boring and ugly. The new Amiga should be as fun to code in asm
as the 68000 was.

\- Multimedia as first class citizen. None of this '70s character-mode
fetishism you get in the Unix world :) On the Amiga, everything knew you had a
graphics chip, hardware sprites and stereo sound.

\- Good hardware integration. Imagine that your GPU was as accessible as your
CPU, that you didn't need to install a ton of crap from Nvidia just to program
it. I used to experiment with the Amiga gfx hardware in assembly language,
from Basic, in a couple of pages of code. I miss how accessible the full power
of my computer was.

I'd have to spend some more time thinking about the OS. On one hand, it would
need modernization with regard to security, networking, Unicode, USB etc. On
the other hand it was a lot more ergonomic than Linux, with hardly any
historical cruft, and I'd never want to lose that.

The closest thing I've found to the "Amiga feeling" was when I was
experimenting with a Playstation 2 emulator, and spent some time reading the
hardware docs. It had a similar setup of exotic graphics chips hanging off a
fat DMA system. However, the Amiga was far more than a straight games console,
and its custom hardware was more abstract and flexible than you'd find in most
consoles. (Compare the Amiga to the supremely powerful, but rigid Sharp X68000
for example)

~~~
gavanwoolery
I share your thoughts on this. :)

------
neuro
One of Carl's other project - She is frozen in time, what a beauty she is. The
clones of her are nothing close. Carl Sassenrath is an outstanding figure in
tech, unknown to many.

[http://www.rebol.com/downloads.html](http://www.rebol.com/downloads.html)

~~~
steve19
I remember really enjoying paying around with rebol back in the day. Sadly I
think it was open open sourced after development ceased. The bug tracker that
was set up looks abandoned with nobody assigning tickets.

~~~
rpeden
I think most people who were interested in Rebol have moved over to Red.

It's very similar to Rebol and is under active development. If you like Rebol
and haven't tried Red, it's worth taking a look:

[https://github.com/red/red](https://github.com/red/red)

~~~
Volt
Does it have a garbage collector yet?

~~~
greggirwin
Yes.

------
smallstepforman
Amiga’s greatest flaw was not having a deinterlaced video mode out of the box,
prohibiting serious use by professionals (can you imagine spending all day
looking at a flickering monitor). Skimping out of a MMU in the A2000 was also
a disaster.

Note, owned a A500, A1200, even AmigaAnywhere in 2001

~~~
vardump
> Amiga’s greatest flaw was not having a deinterlaced video mode out of the
> box

It just didn't have the bandwidth nor did it have Denise silicon area left.
Uninterlaced 640x480 would have required 35 ns pixels, and even two bitplanes
would have mercilessly bogged it down.

Of course later ECS added 35 ns pixels.

> Skimping out of a MMU in the A2000 was also a disaster.

Certainly you mean A1200? A2000 used 68000, so you would have needed an
external MMU. Not to mention 68000 MOVE SR bug, so moving to at least 68010
would have been advisable.

~~~
zik
There was also the A2500 which had a 68020 processor with an MMU.

------
alberth
If you enjoyed Amiga, check out
[https://www.dragonflybsd.org/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/)

DragonflyBSD founder is Matt Dillon of Amiga fame. He took many concepts from
his Amiga developer days and built a modern BSD using those concepts. Like
it’s innovative approach to message handling and SMP.

~~~
Flow
I think the implementation of signaling and message passing in exec.library is
my favorite thing in AmigaOS.

------
bdd
AmigaOS Workbench 1.2 had an easter egg displaying the title of this post in
the menubar. Turns out engineers from Los Gatos office were pissed and
included this in the release.

I've long forgotten the key combination and actions to trigger but luckily
Amiga History Guide is still up
[http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/messages.html](http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/messages.html)

Here's the demo of the easter egg on YouTube
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMOuyTLmyg&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMOuyTLmyg&feature=youtu.be&start=68)

------
mastazi
Having enjoyed both the Amiga 500 and the Atari 520ST back in the day, I'm
left wondering: how come that there never was a comeback of that form factor?
Mechanical keyboards and small-factor computers (Mini ITX, NUC etc) are both
popular, if someone launched a mechanical keyboard with integrated PC case on
the back I think it may have a shot at being successful.

There are cases made in this style and they are compatible either with "Amiga
Reloaded" and similar Amiga-compatible motherboards, or with SBCs like the
Raspberry PI [1][2][3], but I couldn't find a similar product that can use
standard PC components (except for the Kickstarter mentioned below);

There was one case with integrated keyboard made by a designer in UK and
launched on Kickstarter a few years ago, this one could accept PC components
but it had laptop-style chicklet keys, rather than mechanical switches [4].

Later, the same designer tried to launch a similar case, this time with
mechanical keys, but the kickstarter unfortunately did not reach its goal [5]

[1] [http://amigablogs.net/feed/2016/04/amiga-ultimate-retro-
styl...](http://amigablogs.net/feed/2016/04/amiga-ultimate-retro-style-
computer-case)

[2] [https://amigastore.eu/en/468-brand-new-amiga-1200-cases-
from...](https://amigastore.eu/en/468-brand-new-amiga-1200-cases-from-new-
molds.html)

[3] [https://www.a1200.net/new-amiga-1200-cases/](https://www.a1200.net/new-
amiga-1200-cases/)

[4]
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/505470364/the-x500-plus...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/505470364/the-x500-plus-
computer-case)

[5]
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/505470364/the-x500-pro-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/505470364/the-x500-pro-
computer-case)

Edit: if anyone knows of a case like that last one, please send me a link!

Edit II: I have added the 2 Kickstarter links

------
mvexel
I still hear the intro music of 'Defender of the Crown' in my dreams
sometimes.

That series of articles is amazing and I am happy to see it re-appear here.
They have a Patreon and some e-books but I'd buy an illustrated hard copy of
the 68000 articles.

~~~
mvexel
Oh wow, I didn't know that the composer of that intro (Richard Joseph) also
composed the in-game music for Chaos Engine, and the title music for Sensible
Soccer and Speedball 2, all of which are in my top 5 favorite Amiga games.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Joseph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Joseph)

------
sys_64738
I think what really helped kill the Amiga was DOOM. By then you realized the
custom graphics chips were creaking. The CD32 had Akiko but it was too late by
then.

~~~
vardump
Akiko wasn't that fast. Should have been direct chunky support, not a
conversion chip. Oh, and faster CPU with plenty of Fast RAM.

Or perhaps a blitter capable of rasterizing triangles with affine texture
mapping. A bit like PS1. Low silicon requirements as just addition is
required. Nothing complicated like multiplication or divides needed. Of course
the price is loss of perspective correctness.

~~~
vidarh
Akiko was effectively kludge to try to patch things over until the next
chipset.

Even AGA was a kludge - planning was started once they realised their "real"
next gen chipset was going to take way too long.

~~~
vardump
At least AGA had 4x bandwidth compared to original chipset and ECS.

Bus width went from 16 bit to 32 bit and fast page mode provided another bw
doubling.

~~~
vidarh
Absolutely. But it was started way too late because it was a rushed stopgap
rather than the original plan. Both AGA and Akiko were basically results of
Commodores multi-year failure to manage engineering properly and aim for
manageable iterations. AGA would have been great if it'd come a couple of
years earlier. Instead lots of resources were put into next gen chips that
never surfaces because they were way too ambitious.

------
outworlder
Command + F "Video Toaster". No matches.

What?

The Amiga was used even by some TV networks solely due to the availability of
the Video Toaster, as comparable hardware costs were way higher. That was
usually paired with Lightwave 3D.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
If nothing else, I appreciate the Amiga for its role in helping Babylon 5 get
made.

------
keithnz
One of the weird things that happened for Atari ST and E was the inbuilt MIDI
interface. It got really popular in the music world for quite sometime.

But no matter what, the component architecture of the PC was bulldozing its
way to kill ataris and amigas. Only Apple really survived that challenge, I
think mainly because it had the education market somewhat cornered, but even
then would have likely died if it wasn't for the ipod.

Both Commodore and Atari might ( especially Atari ) have had a good chance in
the home market of game consoles.... but no.

------
GoofballJones
I was a major fan of the Amiga. It was a great community of users too. I
remember meeting at a local user group that met twice a month at at library.
Fred Fish disks exchanged, art projects shown, music played.

But the overall feeling was that Commodore was pretty much ignoring their
fans, and not promoting the computer at all. Even at an Amiga World show in
Chicago, Commodore was a no-show. WTF?

~~~
aedron
The Amiga was made by a Silicon Valley startup, bought by stodgy old Commodore
out of Pennsylvania. Commodore simply milked the magic but was not able to
support and develop the franchise.

------
taurath
I consider it a highlight of my career to have worked with a few of these
folks - they were making stuff more advanced than I am now, before I was born.
Makes me want to consider a career change :P

------
karcass
Small world. RJ and Dale are friends of mine. I never did get to meet Jay
though. I know of Carl through Rebol.

~~~
vidarh
I have Commodore: The Final Years right next to me right now,as vacation
reading, and Dale Lucks attempts at getting the Commodore board to listen to
criticism from engineering is an important thread in it. I wish he'd succeeded
in getting more influence.

------
pjmlp
Loved them, I was the only member of our computer gang with a 386sx instead of
an Amiga 50, cause "future proof".

Sadly my parents were right.

However we did spend endless weekends playing games, doing ProTracker
sessions, watching swapped Demoscene intros and naturally trying to do our own
as well.

For a while I thought, GNU/Linux might evolve into such multimedia OS,
specially with WM like Enlightenment.

I was wrong, Windows, macOS took it.

------
martyvis
That black tie launch
[https://youtu.be/o3x00Pbs2K8](https://youtu.be/o3x00Pbs2K8)

------
eterps
I am enjoying the nostalgia in this thread. I also wonder what people have
moved to right now, I see that Linux has been the most common case.

I also created a subreddit for this:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga_refugees/](https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga_refugees/)

~~~
Annatar
"I also wonder what people have moved to right now,"

macOS on various intel Apple systems, SmartOS on intel PC bucket, 19" rack
mountable servers.

There really isn't much of anything else out there affordable / mainstream
like the Amiga was in Europe.

------
rongenre
As of 2015, one was still running:
[https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-
old-computer-runs-school-heat/)

~~~
amiga-workbench
An awful lot of them are still running, like the one on my desk.

~~~
scarygliders
I still have my A1200, with a VGA adapter - I can connect it to my LED monitor
- a 68040 accellerator card, a pcmcia network card, and a collection of
internal IDE spinning rust HDD's I could fit into it if one of them works.
Powered by an adapted ATX PC psu.

Haven't powered it up for a few years, and the internal floppy drive, which
was an upgrade to a PC format (and I can't remember the make or model of the
upgrade), is busted.

Still, I have the AmigaOS 3.9 CD, I might get the old girl running again
sometime.

------
lern_too_spel
"For him it was the Great White Hope for an industry suffering through its
first real downturn ever and struggling to understand just what had gone
wrong."

How does "Great White Hope" fit here? That phrase, especially when capitalized
as a proper name, has a particular meaning.
[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128245...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128245468)

------
Razengan
The Amiga will always be an unfulfilled fantasy for me. Growing up, I lusted
after its screenshots and specs in magazines, the forbidden fruit we could not
afford, until something entirely different, and arguably better, came along
(the PC.)

Although I can get a taste of it through emulators, I still wish I could have
lived the experience of unboxing an Amiga when it was the hottest thing
around. :)

------
Dansvidania
Design wise, I am amazed by how modern it looks. Was it the first home
computer to have the keyboard not embedded in the chassis?

~~~
boomlinde
Far from it. At just commodore you had their PC line and the C128D. These
desktop cases do look great!

------
ilaksh
Was curious about 68k today. Found this compact flash computer thing that is
not 68k exactly but is very similar:

[http://www.cdatas.com/index1.html](http://www.cdatas.com/index1.html)

~~~
0xcde4c3db
As far as I know, Freescale/NXP still makes "real" 68K chips in the form of
MC68SEC000 (3.3v-capable static CMOS version). Those will probably be
discontinued within the next few years since they've been "not recommended for
new designs" for a while. The full-fat 68HC000 (with vectored interrupts and
6800 bus compatibility, needed for compatibility with a few older systems) was
discontinued in 2012 because Freescale shut down the only fab that still made
it.

------
malkia
That bouncing ball, is from GLBoing.c (can be found in glfw), like here:
[https://github.com/g-truc/ogl-
samples/blob/master/external/g...](https://github.com/g-truc/ogl-
samples/blob/master/external/glfw-3.1.1/examples/boing.c)

or luajit version:

[https://github.com/malkia/ufo/blob/master/samples/glfw/boing...](https://github.com/malkia/ufo/blob/master/samples/glfw/boing.lua)

    
    
        git clone https://github.com/malkia/ufo
        cd ufo
        luajit samples/glfw/boing.lua
    

(should work on Windows, may still work on Linux/OSX)

~~~
egypturnash
The bouncing ball is from the "Boing" demo, written in 1985 by two of the
people who wrote much of the Amiga's OS. GLBoing is a clone of it from much
later - at _least_ 1992, what with that being the year the first version of
OpenGL game out.

The first 28 lines of your first link are a comment block saying just that.

~~~
malkia
Must've forgotten about it really. Thanks! The commercial just reminded me
when I was porting it to lua ages ago. (Never owned Amiga myself, but Apple
][)

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359156)

------
andrewstuart
I can't help thinking Amiga should have been primarily a console from day one.
Essentially something like the AmigaCD32.

I still have a Commodore Amiga 1000 in a box somewhere.....

~~~
mprev
That feels a bit like saying that the Tesla Roadster should have been a
British style electric milk float. They both have electric power trains but it
misses the point of what made the Roadster so interesting.

~~~
boomlinde
As far as I understand it, the chipset was originally designed to support a
game console and they only pivoted because of the video game crash.

In a sense it's more like saying that what was originally designed to be an
electric milk float should have been an electric milk float. That's also not
an entirely fair because I agree that the Amiga makes more sense as a
computer. As a game machine it was soon beaten by more specialized hardware
that did exactly what action games at the time demanded really well and
nothing else.

------
Fr0styMatt88
Such great memories!

I owned an A2000 growing up, great machine.

The real beginning of the end for me came when I started seeing what the
Sierra adventures looked like on the PC in magazines.

Then Wolfenstein 3D.

Then Doom.

~~~
silon42
My friends switched for Ultima and especially Wing Commander.

------
empath75
I had an Amiga, I thought it was great, but it seems like they designed it
without a clear focus on who their customers were and what they wanted.

~~~
mprev
Doesn’t that go for just most 1980s computing platforms? The Mac is kind of an
aberration in surviving and the PC survived through early cloning.

------
ginglis13
TIL commodore's HQ was in West Chester PA

------
emmelaich
I bought an Amiga and spent far too much on accessories.

Pros for Amiga

\- the obvious

Cons

\- hideous and slow ui \- slow floppy \- lack of cheap C compiler \-
complexity

The last, complexity, is the cause of the success and rapid demise.

Soonish after the Amiga was released, there were IBM compatibles with a huge
community of hardware (graphics cards, hard disks), software (unix and unix-
likes, gcc).

The main reason I bought an Amiga was for it's multitasking capabilities.
However I could see that it's custom hardware would make the desired
transition to an m68k process with MMU a big problem.

------
acd
Walked into my home towns local book store. Played marble madness on the Amiga
until they almost threw me out of the store. Was sold on the Amiga and got
one.also sold on deluxe paint and the computer image of Tutankhamon.

Side story John Draper legendary phone phreaker mentioned in the article known
as captain crunch. Draper found that if you covered a hole in the included toy
whistle in included in the package of captain crunch cereals it would produce
2600hz. Hence the nick name Captain crunch. 2600 hertz was the phone signaling
used by telecom companies to tell that the phone call was hang up and billing
should stop. Thus one could call for free by emitting 2600hz by a building a
device callled blue box when long distance calls was very expensive.

Other famous uses of Blueboxes which sales founded another computer company
founded by phreakers Apple. Steve Jobs and Wozniak made the first money for
building apple computers by selling blue boxes. Or at least so the legend
goes.

