
A history of the Amiga - cesare
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1.ars
======
MC27
Having stuck with the Amiga until '98, with an overly expanded computer -
capable of playing Quake etc, it was the last real computer platform I cared
for. All these useless companies that purchased it without a long term plan
was exasperating. If anything, it's taught me to take a step backwards and
avoid becoming tribal over any technology.

~~~
tjr
I hung in there with the Amiga until around 1996. I truly enjoyed that
computer system, in a way I haven't enjoyed any computer since. Perhaps part
of it was the overall novelty of personal computing, as there was still so
much totally new development going on... but I sure didn't have that same
enjoyment factor when using IBM-PC clones or even Macintoshes of the same era.

I think, maybe, somehow, probably unintentionally, the Amiga captured the
1970s/early-1980s "hacker spirit" better than any of the other personal
computer systems. It wasn't a Lisp machine, and it wasn't a PDP-11, and it
wasn't particularly used for artificial intelligence, but its users thoroughly
enjoyed tinkering with it and making it do awesome things.

And awesome things it did.

------
unwind
The Amiga remains magical to me, having grown up programming it and having had
more "aahaa!" moments thanks to it than any other computer in particular.

I still have things like this, floating around in my brain somewhere[]:

    
    
      .loop: move.w $dff006,$dff180
             btst.b #6,$bfe001
             bne.s  .loop
    

It was so awesome, a computer with a great CPU, intriguing and poweful custom
hardware for graphics/sound, and still a very decent operating system on top.
It had it all. Sniff.

[] Somewhere slightly shady, since I mis-remembered the two first register
addresses, and also the sign of the /FE0 bit being read by the third
instruction. Still, it's been 14 years since I switched to Linux, so I'm kind
of happy.

~~~
rryyan
What does this code do?

~~~
hackermom
$dff006 is the vertical raster position register, $dff180 is the background
color register, and $bfe001 is one of the registers belonging to one of the
two CIAs of the Amiga; the piece of code copies 16 bits of data (on the amiga
referred to as a "word") from $dff006 to $dff180, checks if bit 6 in $bfe001
is high - the bit that contains the status of the left mouse button of
joy/mouse port #1 - and then branches back to the .loop label if the
comparison resulted negatively - that is, if the bit was not high.

In plain-speak, it renders vertical green/blue/cyan gradients in the
background until the left mouse button is pressed.

(as a side note, I spent 4-5 years coding on the Amiga in the early 90s.)

------
jackfoxy
I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985 or 86, and hung in there with a 2000 or 3000
(can't remember now) until 1996. Only about a year ago I finally tossed all
the old floppies, but I kept several thinking I might write an Amiga
retrospective someday.

Here are some highlights. It's been a long time, so I'm sure to make some
technical mistakes.

Rexx Plus Compiler -- by Dineen Edwards Group; Implementation of the Rexx
language (ARexx). You cold easily hack together the OS and many applications
as well. ARexx was one of the things that kept the Amiga alive.

UEdit -- by Rick Stiles; One of the first great things available for the
Amiga. A highly programmable editor. If Rick hadn't passed away too soon UEdit
may well have lived on past the Amiga.

Migraph OCR -- by Migraph, Inc.; I was scanning financial data from Investors
Business Daily, compiled quite a database.

Descartes! -- by Mindware International; Some sort of AI-ish thingy I never
found a use for.

Magellan -- by Emerald Intelligence; Expert System generator I never found a
use for. The company ran into some sort of trademark infringement and later
renamed it _Mahogany_.

Boole -- by URSIC Computing; Fuzzy logic and Bayesian Inference. Actually a
DOS program, but you could run it on the Amiga.

The Amiga was really a hacker's machine. Thanks to programs like ARexx and
UEdit you could really do some interesting stuff at a time when a DOS computer
mostly just ran stand-alone programs. It was greatly stymied by Commodore's
terrible marketing and lack of commercial applications.

I think in a way I was scarred by investing so much learning effort in a
technology that dead-ended. It was probably a factor in my taking a career
detour to more business, less technical work for several years.

------
rbanffy
I really wish we had more hardware diversity. With open-source software, it
shouldn't be very hard to do.

Having to choose between a Core i3, i5, Athlon, Duron, Sempron, Whateveron, or
between embedded, ATI or Nvidia doesn`t really feel like having any choice...

Or, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can choose any architecture, as long as it
runs Windows.

------
Robin_Message
If you are irritated by the fact this was only part one, part 7 - with links
to the earlier parts - can be found here.
[http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/05/amiga-
history-p...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/05/amiga-history-
part-7.ars)

~~~
DLWormwood
I’m sad that that stopped about halfway through the story, I think they were
shooting for about 10 parts or so. But part 7 was a kind of sidetrack listing
games on the platform, and the writer might have run out of contacts or behind
the scenes info to finish the narrative.

------
jlc
My Amiga 1000 is sitting about five feet from me. I haven't turned it on in a
very long while.

Even my beloved Commodore 64 is long gone, but I haven't been able to part
with the Amiga. Not saying this is a good thing. Just saying.

------
DLWormwood
I honestly feel as though I missed out on something big regarding the Amiga.
While a teenager, I would regularly get .info magazine, and wonder in awe at
the games and media tools the platform had. However, in my neck of the country
(NW Ohio), there were no stores or support for the platform. Ironically, given
its marginal status at the time, it was easier to find tech service and stores
selling Macs than other platforms in the late 80’s. When I got my first
“modern” computer (a Mac LC) in college, one of the first things I put on it
was an Amiga module tracker…

------
Kurtz79
Amiga 500: Best Computer Ever.

~~~
peterbotond
second that.

------
henrikschroder
I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice.

(More of my school friends back then had Ataris than Amigas, so it was a no-
brainer decision for me.)

I'm curious what spurred the insane die-hard mentality though. Most of us left
the Amigas and Ataris for the PC in the early 90s, except for a few who swore
by their Amigas and loved them to bits even though their relative performance
grew more and more pathetic.

So what caused it? First love? Or was there something genuinely good about the
system? I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
kenjackson
"I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice."

You do realize that thems is still fightin' words? The Vi/Emacs war is a
pillow fight compared with the Amiga/Atari ST wars.

~~~
henrikschroder
I can almost remember how the arguments went.. Guru meditation sucked more
than the bombs, but the 800kB weird-standard diskette format was better than
the 720kB one? And MIDI-ports were better than that weird 4096-colour format
that noone really used?

------
geophile
I had Amigas, 1000 and 2000. I didn't make much use of its graphics
capabilities, as a developer. However, at the time, it was the only
affordable, multitasking system with a flat 32-bit address space. Not
protected, but this was a long time ago. It also had a nice C++ environment,
and I could pretty easily port code back and forth between Solaris and Amiga.
Good times.

------
vyrotek
Oh, so many memories of playing FirePower and Impossible Mission!

~~~
TheAmazingIdiot
And I think the sound for HN should be

"Another Visitor. Stay a while. Stay FOREVERRRR"

------
protomyth
I could only imagine what Jay Miner could have done in the mobile space if he
was still alive.

------
peterbotond
[http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/08/a-history-of-
th...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/08/a-history-of-the-amiga-
part-2.ars)

here is part 2.

------
erikstarck
The Amiga is a good example of how in the long run a platform always win over
a product.

The platform in this case being the PC.

