
A history of the Amiga, part 9: The Video Toaster - robin_reala
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/03/history-of-the-amiga-video-toaster/
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throwaway_xx9
For those who think the rave comments are just fanboys talking, I was working
at a government lab when the Amiga came out.

We had multi-million imaging systems built by defence contractors like Harris
and MD, yet we were blown away by the Amiga. The Amiga was 1000x cheaper and
100x better.

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i336_
What did this government lab do (roughly) from a technical standpoint? The
context here sounds potentially interesting.

Also, can I read about these imaging systems online anywhere?

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cha-cho
My first serious bit of computing was on an Amiga2500 with a Video Toaster
card. At the time Windows for WorkGroups was getting a lot of attention so I
started playing around with PCs and eventually bought a Windows notebook. I
was shocked to learn that with Windows I could not seamlessly download a file
in the background and continue other work. I eventually installed OS/2 and ran
Windows in its own space just so I could multitask like I was accustom to
doing on an Amiga. Amiga users were (and some still are) a fanatical bunch for
good reason.

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Jupe
The Amiga was a beautiful machine, and had a beautiful OS in many regards. No
memory protection, but the concepts were just wonderful compared to PC stuff
at the time: flat memory model, everything was a linked list (there were very
few hard limits, except physical ones), true multi-tasking, ARexx later on,
what great stuff.

I miss it; nothing today matches the freedom, flexibility and simplicity of
that platform (IMHO).

~~~
icedchai
Yep. I loved the Amiga. I started with a 500, then upgraded to a 3000. I
taught myself C on that platform, when I was 14 or 15.

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Keyframe
Kiki Stockhammer.. I haven't heard that name in a long time! Video Toaster
basically opened up a possibility to go where you could go with, at least, 10x
as expensive SGI+Software at the time. Well, at least 60% of where you could
go with an SGI, which was very good at the time. It was disruptive in every
sense you could imagine. PCs and Mac were still a distant dream away from
video.

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tjr
I never had a Video Toaster, but started using an Amiga fully expecting to
continue learning the computer programming I had begun on an Apple II, and
ended up doing 3D animation and video production for a few years instead
before finding my way back to software development.

There was something almost magical about the Amiga... the hardware, the
software, the community... I don't think I've ever had such sheer fun with
computers as I did then, and I'm not sure if anything will ever be quite like
it again.

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dreamcompiler
I was working with Brad at the time (on other projects) and got to watch the
design of the Toaster take shape. I was very skeptical at first, but Brad and
Tim pulled it off. It was an amazing product that changed several industries.

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gdubs
When I was in middle school, I got really interested in 3D graphics, which led
to Lightwave3D. My parents drove us several hours to B&H Photo in NYC so I
could look at a video toaster. It was in a box on a shelf and they simply said
"Amiga is dying you don't want one of these." Later I got to see one in person
at a local computer fair. Not only was the toaster revolutionary for video,
Lightwave had a brilliant future as a standalone application. I never owned
one (though I'd later own lightwave on Windows), but I subscribed to the
magazines and watched tons of demo videos. What a fun time to get into
computers.

~~~
Keyframe
Interesting thing about Amiga and Lightwave. Even though there was Lightwave
for SGI, when Lightwave came about on Windows NT (4 was coming out at the
time) and when we had to use that for on of our works - I knew then and there
Amiga is dead. I vividly remember that moment when I fired it up on an NT
machine. Same thing happened with SGI when I fired up Softimage|3D (as it
would be called later) and first beta of Maya on NT. I knew machines were
toast.

~~~
gdubs
I have good memories of NT -- which was the last Windows I used before fully
switching over to Apple. Same experience for me -- fired up those apps
(Softimage, maya) and could see the writing on the wall.

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egb
Anybody want to buy one? Let me know :-)

(edit) To clarify, my Dad still has one, and with all the VHS decks and
monitors and mixers and such it's kinda like a mainframe and takes up a huge
amount of space. But could be fun for the right, uh, museum? :-)

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agumonkey
I wish I had experienced that era. What a legendary platform.

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JunkDNA
The Amiga was so far ahead of its time it was truly remarkable. I would have
friends over and show them my computer games and they would be stunned. The
Amiga was a contemporary platform of the original 8-bit Nintendo and most
people had PC's running DOS that maybe supported 256 color VGA (if you were
lucky). To see an Amiga flexing all its crazy powers was truly remarkable. You
got to experience the future way before everyone else.

~~~
jug
I rememver using Amiga to circa 1993 when the problems for Commodore was
quickly getting apparent. Switching to PC was weird. It felt like I moved from
a platform with good sound and graphics to PC speaker and barely VGA. I
quickly had to adjust to the new world of essential expansion cards. Not a
world I particularly enjoyed. I kept being puzzled why they didn't just put in
awesome miltimedia hardware and custom designed the whole system for it.

~~~
agumonkey
The question was more why did the market react more to subpar clones rather
than a nice builtin box like the Amiga. I was too young to know, was it much
more expensive than the average PC ? or lack of mainstream game / soft ?

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ZenoArrow
The classic excuses for getting a computer back in the day was to 'help the
kids with their homework' or to do work at home. Even though the Amiga was
capable of being a business machine, it was seen as a hobbyist/gaming machine.
If the Amiga had native support for the leading business software (Lotus
1-2-3, etc...) and had the option to work with the IBM-PC compatible disk
format, things could've turned out differently. Then again, that was just one
of the many missed opportunities with the Amiga.

~~~
Annatar
Amiga DID have the "option to work with the IBM-PC compatible disk format":
starting with AmigaOS 2.# (KickStart 37.###), the operating system came with
the MS-DOS FAT driver. One could either have it loaded by explicitly clicking
on the "PC0" icon in the "DOSDrivers" drawer (directory), or have it be
automatically loaded by putting the relevant commands in S:User-Startup.

DF0: would then have the equivalent PC0:, DF1: PC1:, DF2: PC2: and DF3: (the
fourth floppy drive) PC3:.

The Amiga floppy drives could read double or high density floppies formatted
at 720 KB (although in general, DS-HD floppies were unreliable when formatted
at low density 720 KB capacity); if one installed high density floppy drives,
the MS-DOS FAT driver could read and write 1.44, and up to 2.88 MB MS-DOS, FAT
formatted floppies.

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rasz_pl
> if one installed high density floppy drives

no, unless you mean _one_ particular model sold with Amiga 4000 - chinon
FZ357A spinning at half the rpm. Amiga doesnt have traditional fdc controller
with hardware MFM/NRZI encoder, instead uses part of audio chip for
serialization and operates on raw data stream. Problem is Paula can only
handle 500Kbit/s, while HD floppies require 1000Kbit/s.

[http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=55344](http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=55344)

~~~
anexprogrammer
That was another of the issues that 3000+, and the new Paula + peripheral
chips was pegged to resolve. 3000+ was meant to be enough of a step forward to
buy time to release AAA. Those 3000+ chips were just about ready if I remember
right.

Cancelling AAA was an Ali cost decision, it would probably have been well
received releasing AAA even late 90s.

A4000 was a horrible low budget kludge as there was no money for anything
90/91 on.

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rasz_pl
No it wouldnt. Amiga was dead man walking due to culture of clueless
management at Commodore. Tramiel took pride in not knowing a first thing about
computers, he would be as happy selling cars or meat. His replacement was even
worse, not to mention rest of the management.

Besides world moved on, even cheaper Sega Megadrive was better, never mind
PlayStation. Then came the revolution, 1997 was the year of real 3D
accelerators, Voodoo/Riva 128, 1998 Voodoo2/tnt. Amiga still couldnt muster a
doom clone running at 320x240 above 7 fps while PC saw Quake 2, Unreal, half-
life, Tribes and Thief.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Pretty much what I said about ali - he was a hatchet man. Gould making Medi
Ali CEO in 90, or whenever it was, destroyed the company. Tramiel was
generally disliked, but they did pretty well under him until he left.

Engineering was decimated both in manpower and budget by Ali. Morale was
wrecked too - lots who weren't pushed just left. I don't know how many were
left in engineering, but it wasn't many. It was also Gould/Ali that destroyed
the Unix deal with Sun.

AAA was specced 10x or more faster than original chipset, and way overdue. It
was meant to land 91/92 of course. I think the reason they looked at RISC 3D
was also cost - budget to get AAA to silicon under Ali was never going to
happen, so buy in something. It wasn't 3D so I've no idea how it'd compare
with voodoo etc.

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aidenn0
For those interested, the video overlay features of this were used for anime
fansubbing in the 90s. If you saw a fansub before 1996 or so, it was almost
certainly done on a Toaster.

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mjg59
Wouldn't that just need a genlock? A Video Toaster seems like pretty
significant overkill for that use case.

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aidenn0
Ahh, you're right, you could do genlock without the toaster. My memory isn't
what it used to be.

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camperman
IIRC Robocop's distinctive first person view was done with a Video Toaster.

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romanr
Looks like this "Part 9" is the first and only article in series?

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robin_reala
It’s a fairly long running series. They’re collated at
[http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-
amiga/](http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

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doener
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11318052)

