The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing. Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It’s amazing to think that the Amiga series is only one generation newer than the Commodore 64/128. There were also a lot of good games for it, so the game developer community must have embraced it too.
Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI and all.
I had to wait another nine years for that to come to Windows in Windows 95.
At least as impressive (now in hindsight that I understand the added effort that comes with this) was drivers were fairly plentyful and I could buy a random HP printer and just start printing documents. It just worked. Besides the printer of course. Inkjet printers in the early nineties were no joke.
It was a lot more than just a 7Hmz processor. The graphics and sound chip made it head and hands above anything Mac or PC, for years. I programmed on it, and when I read how easy it was to access everything, my friend who owned it, just went out and bought the programming manual. We used the word: "Superlative" a lot.
> Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI and all.
Perhaps not as advanced as AmigaOS, but Commodore 64 famously had GEOS for a good few years in the second half of its lifespan, which ended up being very popular for that machine. On a 1MHz 6502! Although I don’t know if it came with a command line.
The Amiga I grew up with only ever had AmigaOS 1.3, but I’ve heard a lot of praise surrounding ARexx, a scripting language that I believe shipped with 2.0 and later.
From the AmigaOS wiki:
> The ARexx programming language can act as a central hub through which applications - even those created by different companies - can exchange data and commands. For example, using ARexx you can instruct a telecommunications package to dial an electronic bulletin board, download financial data from the bulletin board, and then automatically pass the data to a spreadsheet program for statistical analysis - without any user intervention.
On a more personal note, I’ve been working on a game for classic Amiga over the past couple years, and it feels like such a novelty to have OS bindings for things like memory allocation and file handling while working with a machine from 1985. Especially for file handling, I have the assurance that my game will run off of floppy, hard disk, or even a RAM disk on any generation Amiga, because I get to use modern file path logic via the DOS library.
As a language Arexx was pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of Arexx ports and user expectation that "everything" should be accessible to script
made it immensely useful anyway.
E.g dbus on Linux is comparatively underused because the threshold to using it is too high.
I think my unreasonable expectations for applications to be scriptable today comes from my experience with the Amiga.
I didn't know the words "interprocess communication" when I first encountered Arexx and Aress ports. I came from a mostly MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 background. I hadn't used much multitasking software up to that point.
Once I grokked why Arexx ports could be cool and useful I had a terrible time trying to explain them to non-"Amiga people". I remember a friend asking to be shown the "Arexx port" on my Amiga 1200 trying to explain it was a software construct and not a physical hardware device. I'm not sure if knowing the words "interprocess communication" would have helped, but it couldn't have hurt.
I feel like I've spent a significant part of my sysadmin career making dodgy hacks to bolt-on IPC functionality to applications that don't properly expose any. Fortunately it feels like it happens a lot less today than, say, 25 years ago.
Yeah, on Linux even when there are dbus ports (systems and Gnome have plenty) they're relatively poorly known and/or not much less of a pain to use than a "proper" API.
If you need a schema or binding, it's not good enough. If you have to hunt for docs, it's not good enough.
The Amiga 500 and 1200 of my father were the first computers I got in touch with as a boy growing up in Germany in the 80s and early 90s.
I think every generation feels more or less nostalgic about the things they grew up with. But oftentimes I get the impression that this is especially true for the Amiga community (in comparison to, let‘s say, people growing up with Ataris). If true, I wonder why this is.
I think it's the same reason I guess why people mourn e.g. BeOS.
The Atari was a nice system, but it wasn't ground-breaking. The Amiga was decades ahead of it's time and could have been so much more if Commodore had any business-savvy. It's hard to overstate the impact of seeing an Amiga A500 in full flight, coming from the previous generation of 8-bit machines. It felt like it was straight from the future (and still does in many ways).
It also straddled the line perfectly of being ridiculously powerful for the era yet simple enough and approachable for a kid/teenager with dedication to understand it on a level that simply isn't possible these days. To quote myself from an article I wrote on the floppy disk[1]:
"I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.
It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.
That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible."
Yes, I grew up on the Amiga and think about this a lot myself. I think the Amiga occupied a sweet spot in the history of computing. You could kick out the operating system and hit the hardware directly like an 8-bit machine, but you also had a true multitasking OS, a lightweight GUI and a command line environment that approached Unix only on a much cheaper machine. And as you say, it was feasible to learn and master all of it. And the hardware was interesting enough that devs could be creative with it throughout its lifetime.
Accessibility, and ergonomic access to the power of the machine definitely has a lot to do with it. Blitz Basic is a good example. With Blitz on the Amiga you could write hardware hitting games, native GUI apps and command line tools out of the box, with no dependencies and none of the tedious configuration and administrative work that now accompanies supposedly high-level languages today.
You'd think that in 2024 our high-level language environments would be even more ergonomic, that you could open a window, play a sound or draw something in one line of code, out of the box. But we've let that fall by the wayside. It frustrates me every day when I think back to the future I imagined as an Amiga user.
I really hope that the Amiga's accessibility and immersiveness is something we can revive in some way. Our systems are now very complex, but I don't believe that should preclude such complexity being within a humane, ergonomic framework that can be navigated and known.
Our modern language runtimes want to be small and portable across platforms, so all the features someone might want in an accessible BASIC-prompt-like environment (drawing to the screen or playing a sound) are delegated to libraries. Libraries make the user engage in dependency management, so they have to create a project, learn Cargo or 'go dep' or npm, find out which packages to install that give them the APIs they need, learn those APIs through varying qualities of documentation, and finally figure out how to import and call those APIs in their program.
The best system for an all-inclusive programming environment like this, that one might feasibly already have on their system, is Emacs; this is because they've accumulated this stuff and made it available on every platform, so you truly can write a couple of lines of Emacs Lisp to draw an image or play a sound without getting into the arcaneries of dependency management. But even with Emacs you need to know the right incantation to get to a REPL or execute code from the *scratch* buffer, and your PC is never going to ship with a bootloader that jumps straight into Emacs.
The other thing I miss from the Amiga is quite difficult to quantify, but it's that sense that you have the computer's full attention.
I put it down to low latency between the mouse counters and the hardware sprite, and immediacy of visual feedback due to the on-screen gadgets being rendered in a high-priority task distinct from the application's task.
A 40-year-old 7MHz computer can genuinely feel more responsive than a brand new machine thousands of times faster, because of those two things - even if the machine then takes minutes or hours to complete a job the new machine can perform almost instantly.
BeOS was probably the last system which offered that same degree of responsiveness.
The Amiga’s mouse never, ever lagged. Unless the thing was completely crashed, you could always wiggle the mouse and see the cursor instantly leap in the right way. The cursor was the mouse in a way I haven’t really experienced since.
The only time I ever saw the Amiga's mouse pointer lag was when transferring files over serial with TwinExpress at an unrealistically ambitious rate (for a machine without a buffered UART, anyway.)
But yes, that direct connection is one of those things you don't really notice until it's not there any more. The first time I tried using a mouse on a PC (with 1200 baud serial mouse) I described the experience as like trying to walk when my foot's gone to sleep.
Amiga OS 2.04 still looks so clean and great, and Workbench 3.1 with MagicWB and MUI on an Amiga 1200 with a hard disk and some FastRAM was just amazing for it's time. This was when Windows 3.11 was the competition - or the Macintosh, which was much more expensive. Add AmiTCP and AMosaic and you're browsing the world wide web, in 1993. Or get your software from a Fred Fish PD Disk, or directly from the source, by which I mean Aminet over FTP or CD-ROM. And while Norton Commander was pretty neat on PCs, Directory Opus 4 on the Amiga was just so ridiculously powerful once you started customizing the buttons to run custom scripts.
And man, the Multimedia Software. Deluxe Paint was THE pixel editor for its time. Not just on the Amiga, but it was used to create graphics for many, many other systems like the SNES as well. It's only logical that it was created by a video game company (Electronic Arts). Then we got the early 3D stuff, including Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D. Presentation stuff like ScalaMM (and yes, I know that Hypercard existed on the Mac many years before). Genlock/Video Stuff thanks to Newtek's Video Toaster. And not to forget Brilliance/True Brilliance in case you had an AGA system or the holy grail, a graphics card. It's a shame that stuff like Final Writer came along very late, because I remember it being pretty great as a word processor. I think that Wordworth was the popular one before it.
The pure elegance of ASSIGN/virtual drive letters is also one of those features that seems pointless until you used it with removable media. Arguably though, in this day and age it's no longer needed.
One could write a history about how the Amiga was amazing without mentioning a single video game, so the fact that the Amiga 500 was the ultimate video games machine for a while (until the SNES/Genesis came along) doesn't take away from how great the system was as a work computer.
As you said, it really feels like a machine that has traveled back through time, a system that should've been released in 1994 but was actually released in 1985, and then got significant upgrades in 1987 with the Amiga 500 and 2000.
But enough gushing about it, it's unfortunately all in the past, and as much as I want to embrace Linux, it just lacks that cohesion that the Amiga had.
I still have wonderful memories of the Amiga. I upgraded from an Apple IIe to an A500. It was like night and day, and felt like a true quantum leap. I learned C on the Amiga and probably owe most of my programming career to it.
Unfortunately, I disagree about the "significant upgrades." The hardware barely changed from the A1000 release in 1985 until late 1992 with the A1200/4000 AGA machines. Yes, they added multiple expansion slots with the A2000 (an extension of the Zorro slot present in the A1000.) They also made a few very minor changes with ECS (video modes almost nobody used.) All incremental changes.
The reality is Commodore sat on their butt for years. The only meaningful change came with the graphics updates on the AGA systems, and that was too little, too late. The A1200 was performance limited, a 68020 at 14 mhz, a chip that was 8 years old at that point, no "fast" RAM, etc. By that time, 386s with SVGA and sound blaster cards were starting to become cheap and very common.
Software wise, AmigaOS 2.x was a huge upgrade. Too bad it didn't happen 2 or 3 years sooner though.
> The pure elegance of ASSIGN/virtual drive letters is also one of those features that seems pointless until you used it with removable media. Arguably though, in this day and age it's no longer needed.
When you think about ASSIGN's capability to associate a virtual drive to many directories, it's still needed. Linux re-invented it with "mount -bind", much later.
Nostalgic BeOS user here and I can absolutely relate. BeOS enshrined the design epitome of the time — nineties cartoonish icons and draggable yellow tabs on windows — and ran rings around existing software on similar hardware. BeOS was multithreaded and was designed from the ground up to support multiprocessor architectures at a time when even true preemptive multitasking, well-understood though it was, wasn’t implemented in the predominant consumer OSes of the time (pre-95 Windows and Classic MacOS). I keep trying to imagine a future in which Apple had acquired BeOS and had used that as the basis for their next-generation OS rather than purchasing NeXT and going the route that they took but Apple lacking the Second Coming of Steve Jobs is such an imponderable I cannot really draw any even wildly speculative conclusions as to how things might’ve played out…
I don't just miss the Amiga. I miss Commodore. Commodore made powerful machines for reasonable prices. The Amiga was very powerful for it's price. I would put an Amiga against a PC or Mac of the same era any day.
Were there more powerful computers? Yes and they were not within reach of most users.
"Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head."
This is exactly what appeals so strongly to me about Amigas. This is so true that I run AmigaDOS on real Amiga hardware and also run NetBSD on Amiga hardware (the m68k instruction set is actually understandable to me).
There's something so real and tangible about being able to look at individual chips, know how they're connected to other things, know what they're doing, and imagine the work they're doing happening in real time. Modern computers, by comparison, are amazing collections of functional black boxes that mere humans can't directly touch (some can - but how many of us are working with the kinds of electronics that can interface with DDR5, or PCIe?), so they lack the approachability of hardware we can breadboard / wire wrap.
I almost had an Atari, but ended up with the Amiga back in '88, which I am forever grateful for. I'm not sure that I would say the Atari wasn't ground-breaking, though. Think back to the '90s and you can see how much of an impact the Atari had on the music industry in the UK. It was huge, but specific to one particular area - music.
