
The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine - mgunes
http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/
======
bane
I think this bit was _really_ interesting analysis:

"Amiga’s financial difficulties provided the opportunity of a lifetime to a
bunch of folks that may have struggled to get in the door in even the most
junior of positions at someplace like Apple, IBM, or Microsoft."

It reminds me a bit of the recent realization Google has had (after trolling
through vast amount of employment data) they see virtually no difference in
performance from people with high pedigrees that people without.

[http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-
no...](http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-not-
impressed-by-your-fancy-ivy-league-credentials/)

It's a lesson that seems to keep getting relearned over and over again. Hire
the individual, not the GPA, not the degree, not the school.

These guys produced an _amazing_ machine virtually on a shoe-string.

It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the
follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. A podcast I've been
listening to recently has some wonderful interviews with some of the industry
people from that time period and there's some great insight into this
transition.

[http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/](http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/)

~~~
jacquesm
The ST was a way to get access to a 32 bit address space without spending a
very large amount of money.

The Amiga was the fore-runner of the multi-media PC.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
32-bit address space, GUI, hi-rez screen, and good-enough games. In 1987 my
choice was a Commodore 128 or an Atari ST -- I wanted 80 columns, modern
graphics, and more memory and couldn't afford a PC or Mac (nor did I like the
PC anyways). I was coming from a VIC-20. The ST fit the niche and lasted me
until I went Linux on a 486 in 1992. The Amiga was another step up in the
price tier, and less geared around productivity and more around entertainment.

~~~
protomyth
If you were into video at the time, the Amiga was most definitely the more
productive machine.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Oh for sure. But if you were into MIDI, the ST was by far the better choice.
The Amiga sold more the ST in the end. But neither really made a dent in the
market % wise.

Both had a lot of potential and were let down by bad management. Commodore I
think did a marginally better job than Atari did in growing their platform.
Atari had a last gasp of inspiration with the TT and Falcon and MultiTOS that
seemed like they were making up for 5 years of neglect. But then they packed
it in.

I still turn my Falcon on occasionally. It is a really nice machine.

~~~
protomyth
Neither understood the fundamental truth that they had to be priced in the C64
range to stay alive. The C64 was replaced market share-wise by the IBM PC and
neither company repeated the success of their earlier, cheaper machines.

They needed games and price to keep winning.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
PCs didn't become affordable for non-business uses until the early 90s. By
then you could get a 486 or 386 for about $2000. When you think about
inflation, that's a heck of a lot in today's money, but if you take into
account that the original IBM PC was $1500 in 1981 dollars when it was
introduced, that's a heck of a lot more cash. ($3,873.30 according to
[http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/))
That was really out of the reach of middle/working class people.

~~~
protomyth
I'm sorry, but I don't buy the inflation line when it comes to computers. As
an industry, we continually say computer get cheaper every year. I look at the
price brackets. We lost the under $100 and under $200 price brackets and are
only now getting them back.

In the late 70's and early 80's, my family could get me a computer I could
program for under $200 (well under $100 with the Sinclair). After that, I
wouldn't have been able to be a programmer.

As an industry, we have failed our youth. We had no answer to uplift the low
income like the opportunities the 8-bit computers gave us. Big box stores
allowed non-technical parents to get a computer that could be programmed.
Magazines had programming articles.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Yes, I agree! That was my point. We lost the affordable when _everything_ went
PC/Mac. PCs were very expensive until the mid to late 90s. Even then they were
pretty pricey, but not quite as pricey when you account for inflation (my
argument above).

We are only getting the price down again now with the ARM revolution.

Anyways, I could build a pretty darn capable PC in the late 90s for about
$800-$1000 which is about what an Atari ST would run you in 1986/87.

~~~
protomyth
Oh, ok - I get it now. I'm just a little sensitive to inflation calculations
where people say a $200 PC in 80's is just as affordable as a $500 PC now -
which is bunk given people's situations and frankly demonstrated by the $99
price point for cellphones and other electronics.

I dream of getting rich enough to build a modern Sinclair / Atari / Commodore
that could be sold in retail stores. Something that a kid can write a program
and then share it with other kids without purchasing a developer account. One
can dream.

------
cmrdporcupine
This is a good honest account of the Amiga, I'm glad to see somebody to admit
its faults and quirks rather than blindly sing glorious praise to it as is
often the case with its former (or present) users.

I was an Atari ST user back then, the "other 68000 home computer". When
comparing the ST and Amiga it is easy to get caught up in hardware capability
comparisons, but the ST was 2/3rds the price of an Amiga, and shipped with
more RAM and didn't have the interlaced video. There was nothing like the ST's
hi-rez monochrome monitor (very good quality) for the Amiga. Really the ST was
like a budget Mac, but with a higher clock rate, higher monochrome screen
resolution, and disk format compatibility with MS-DOS. Here's a similar
accounting of the first genesis of the ST:
[http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html](http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html)

The Amiga was a great piece of hardware, and the games for it were generally
the best in class. And it was made by some really inspired people. But it only
took a few years and that hardware advantage meant little anymore. Mainstream
Macs and PCs absorbed the multimedia capabilities. Game consoles from Sega and
Sony were able to outplay it, and there were even machines like the Sharp
X68000 that blew it away on the hardware front by the late 80s (and even
outsold it, albeit only sold in Japan.)

~~~
NoPiece
You are right that the advantages the Atari ST and Amiga had were absorbed
into mainstream consoles and computers, but I think the time gap is a little
longer than a few years. The Amiga released in 1985, but the Sega
Genesis/Masterdrive didn't come to the US until 1989, and didn't arrive in the
UK until 1990. Windows 3.1 was 1992, first color Mac was 1993, and Sony PSX
was 1994.

~~~
niklasni1
The first colour-capable Mac was the Mac II in 1987.

------
andrewstuart
It's hard to convey the feeling when I first saw an Amiga. In the office,
surrounded by monochrome early DOS machines someone had set up an Amiga 1000
showing the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. It's like someone had switched
on an electric light for the first time.

~~~
NoPiece
This was exactly my experience. I was at college, walking to the bookstore to
buy a 286. There was a guy from Creative Computers with table set up demoing
an Amiga. I couldn't believe what I was seeing - it looked so much better than
anything else at the time. I bought one the same day, and struggled to find a
decent word processor for the next 4 years. But the games made it worth it.

------
jug
Still reading this, just wanted to thank you for posting this! I owned an
Amiga back in the day. I wasn't old at all, I was only just barely getting my
toes wet in programming, but I knew I was using something special, and when I
look back and see an Amiga 500, I still think it is. It's even pretty despite
the design's age. Or maybe it's my pretty memories of it speaking.

Making me even more nostalgic about this era, is that it felt like the golden
age of computing, so many wildly different concepts. My ZX Spectrum 48K, my
Atari 520 STE, then my Amiga 500 Plus. It felt like anything was possible,
that anyone had a chance of building a famous new computer with its own
operating system and all. And all that felt on countless LAN's. Man, those
were the days!

------
babuskov
Ah, those were the days. I learned Assembly on A500. You would just load an
image into memory, tell the video card to point to that location and it got
shown on the screen.

I recall writing a simple program to extract images from games. After reboot,
the game graphics would remain in RAM. Using the program I would change the
address with keyboard controls until I got something that looked like an image
from game on my screen and then I would save it into a file.

And I got docs for programming it via a friend who had access to some BBS.

Kids these days don't know what they have.

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protomyth
Jay Miner was one heck of a designer. I do wish there was a book that focused
on the forgotten hardware designers of that era.

------
bitwize
Ah, the Amiga -- computing's Lamborghini Countach. Sexy, powerful,
revolutionary engineering for its time. Fueler of many a pubescent schoolboy's
wet dreams. But also hopelessly stuck in the 80s in terms of design and fiddly
enough to put off non-enthusiasts.

------
josteink
As someone who grew up on the Commodore 64 and Amiga, I sorely miss the 68k
platform.

The few times I'm still forced to deal with the X86-architecture at assembly-
level it just _pains_ me to see the clusterfuck that modern the Intel-platform
represents.

The 68k was _clean_ , nice, logical and let you _work_ on the data you wanted
to process. The X86 looks like a patchwork of instructions and registers added
cumulatively over time, with no design behind them, and the majority of code
is moving data in and out of registers, not actually processing the data.

The X86-architecture marked the end for when I cared about knowing how things
worked all through the stack. It was just too ugly for me to embrace.

------
kenjackson
I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than
anything else out at the time, yet never caught on.

Is there anything like that happening today, where there is something
significantly better than its competitors, but has no traction. I don't mean
something debatable (e.g., Windows Phone vs iPhone or MacOS vs Windows), but
something clear cut?

Probably the closest thing I could think of is Tesla, if they go belly up.

~~~
renaudg
Never caught on ? No traction ?

That certainly wasn't true in Europe. It seemed like every kid around me in
the early 90s had an Amiga 500, a few years after they all seemed to have an
Amstrad CPC (wildly popular in France, even though it was a British computer.
The Spectrum was the UK darling, and the C64 was the more popular one
everywhere else)

A generation of game publishers (mainly in the UK and France) thrived on the
Amiga and went on to become household names today (UbiSoft comes to mind)

As the article notes, there were even Amiga magazines on UK newsstands as far
as Y2K, years after Commodore's demise.

So yeah, pretty big deal over here.

In some ways, the Amiga reminds me of Techno music : invented in the US, but
found its true home in Europe.

~~~
krylon
I had an AMIGA 500 in the early 90s. Sadly, I only ever used it to play video
games, got bored eventually and then sold it. I knew several people who did,
too.

I remember part of the reason to sell it was classmates mocking me for having
a machine that was only good for playing video games, while _they_ owned
_real_ computers, i.e. IBM compatible PCs. In retrospect this seems kind of
funny, given that they usually had 286 machines with EGA graphics cards...

------
NoPiece
In the comments of the article some pointed to a Kickstarter in progress right
now for an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain view to celebrate
the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Amiga.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-
an...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-anniversary-
in-california)

------
icedchai
I got an Amiga in 7th grade! It was a hugeee step up from my previous computer
(an Apple II.)

It felt truly amazing for the time (late 80's).

