
How the Commodore Amiga Powered the Prevue Channel - doener
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-commodore-amiga-powered-your-cable-system-in-the-90s
======
yeureka
This is the machine were I learned about programming, graphics, sound, 3D
design, animation, video editing, Vjing, games development, operating systems,
multi-tasking, you name it, and all in the early 90's.

One of my first jobs before university was doing realtime cgi on an Amiga 3000
with a GenLock attached to an editing suite full of Betacam machines and
editing desks.

Fun times!

But I try to avoid reading the latest posts on the Amiga because I tend to
feel nostalgic and sad when I do.

It was painful when Commodore went bankrupt. I almost considered not going
into computer science.

~~~
baudehlo
I still to this day feel like I never got the full system slow downs that our
current OSs get on my Amiga. It may have had no memory protection and thus
crashes took down the whole system, but it sure was a joy to use. It's a great
story of how a fantastic system was doomed by the company that owned it.

------
erickhill
I cringe at the thought that the Amiga is partially responsible for what we
perceive today as Muzak. As sourced from the article:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/PrevueChannelMusic](https://www.youtube.com/user/PrevueChannelMusic)

~~~
Mithaldu
I hope you'll be happy to hear that Muzak is being kept alive even nowadays:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84iTur1-yww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84iTur1-yww)

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Surprisingly awesome.

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spdustin
Oh the Video Toaster. Kiki Stockhammer. Newtek was doing amazing things for
less money than anything else in its time. we had a Video Toaster in my HS TV
Productions class. Between that and OctaMED, I spent a lot of my extra time in
that class.

------
mhd
I definitely remember the Guru Meditation Errors on our local public TV
station...

~~~
anexprogrammer
Now you get billboards and news channels showing Win BSODs.

Did you know that you could plug in a serial terminal hit right mouse and drop
into a debug session (ROMWack) from a non-recoverable guru? Guru got a lot of
stick, but they were really useful for developing.

------
wallflower
I still want one.

[https://medium.com/people-gadgets/the-gadget-we-miss-the-
vid...](https://medium.com/people-gadgets/the-gadget-we-miss-the-video-
toaster-93509e978549)

[http://mentalfloss.com/article/49562/video-
toaster-4000](http://mentalfloss.com/article/49562/video-toaster-4000)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1OVWfmynPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1OVWfmynPw)

~~~
anexprogrammer
I just want someone to implement how Intuition did screens into any other
platform, ideally OSX or Linux. It often gets mentioned, yet no one ever has.
It can't be _that_ difficult. I can live without the copper trickery.

~~~
vidarh
Enlightenment provides draggable workspaces, or at least did (I haven't used
Enlightenment since about 1999) provide that. I used to use that. The
usefulness is substantially less today without having different video modes
and the copper trickery

(EDIT: For those who haven't used the Amiga, apart from providing multiple
workspaces, which was in itself a big deal for home computers at the time, it
was exceedingly useful because there was no "best" video mode those days - you
could have high resolution and few colours, or low resolution and "many"
colours - this made draggable screens very useful as you could e.g. have a
high resolution screen visible on part of the display, and a low resolution
screen on the rest if you wanted. E.g. some paint programs made use of that to
show their toolbars etc. in a fixed resolution, with the image itself on a
different screen)

Today there's always AROS, which can run hosted on Linux and runs a bunch of
Amiga apps, though there are still painful missing parts to AROS and it's not
an option to let you run Linux apps on Amiga-style screens.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Different resolutions in different windows? That's pretty cool. I looked into
the Amiga's and was most impressed by MorphOS. Had key features, was
beautiful, and supposedly faster than Linux.

~~~
vidarh
Different resolutions in different "screens". Each screen is pretty much a
separate workspace that takes up the full width and will hold one or more
windows, but can be dragged up and down so you can have multiple visible.

Here's an example [1]. DigiPaint used one screen for the toolbars, so it was
independent of the image you were working on (unlike e.g. DeluxePaint). Here's
a video showing screen dragging in AROS (which reimplements the Amiga API like
MorphOS, but also runs on everything from original Amigas - with some
limitatons - to Raspberry Pi or x86 PCs, both native and hosted under Linux)
[2]. On non-Amiga platforms the different screens can't have different
resolutions, though.

[1] [http://don64738.deviantart.com/art/DigiPaint-
Fashion-3371985...](http://don64738.deviantart.com/art/DigiPaint-
Fashion-337198511)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKCHZFYj9Kk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKCHZFYj9Kk)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Wow, that was an impressive demo. I was imagining how I'd react if someome did
it on Win3.1 or something. It would've been badass.

Now, other commenter gave excellent use case with low res text and high res
graphics. What other practical uses does something like in the demo have?
Virtual workspaces like in Linux cover most I can think of. What about
draggable screens?

~~~
anexprogrammer
See the second level comment I made for a couple of modern use cases where I'd
get benefit in current Windows.

Now consider virtual workspaces that you can move around and assign a z order
to. You can expose a small part of a screen at top, or bottom for copy pasting
to. Or work in a full size terminal session that you can only see 2 lines of.

Status windows/web pages can live on background screens and only get dragged
into visibility. It's really just a nice to have thing now we decent virtual
workspace setups, and huge resolutions, along with 3rd party stuff like
Ultramon, but I still would like the option. I get too messy with wndow
management.

OSX would benefit most as multi workspace and screen handling was very kludgy,
though I know they are meant to have improved that a lot in the last couple of
releases. Not had a mac since mavericks, so can't say for definite.

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esaym
I remember watching that channel at my grandmother's house. Every summer I
used to stay there for a month or so. I'd always hit the "channel scan" option
on the TV menu to see if they had any new channels that they didn't have from
the last time I was there. I remember this channel popping up on like channel
97 on Time Warner or something.

------
ktRolster
Also helped to make _Babylon 5_

~~~
Jaruzel
And early bits of Star Trek Voyager.

I am and always will be an Amiga fan; Got an Amiga 1200 with modern '040 CPU
board, and a DVI video out. Best home computer, ever.

~~~
ayuvar
I didn't know they had DVI cards yet, much less one with a flicker fixer built
in.

My 1200HD has a sketchy VGA adapter that came with it when I found it in a
Value Village; when I try to play games every LCD I have in the house refuses
to go to a low enough scanrate. A flicker fixer seems like just what I need.

~~~
Jaruzel
You've probably already found it, but this is the DVI kit I have fitted:

[http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php...](http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1148)

Works really well - you can get up 1280x1024 on it with a modified 'monitor'
file. I run mine at 1024x768, on a standard 15" LCD, and it pixel matches the
panel 100% with no borders. Demo discs and games that run PAL/NTSC get auto
scaled to your preferred native SVGA/XGA resolution as well, which is an added
bonus.

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aswanson
Funny thing is the cable UI for preview is pretty much identical to this
today.

~~~
Spooky23
It's far worse for me -- the scroll is about two lines high, and there's a
constant barrage of really bad advertising.

------
hoodoof
So many viruses.....

