Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.

Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)

It lacks a usable browser for todays websites. Maybe someone gets into the vibe of agentically coding one.

While being at it, the foundations could use heavy fuzzing, lift them up to Open/NetBSD at least. A few looks into Genode for technical inspiration wouldn't be wrong, maybe a port of Aros atop seL4/Genode could be supreme. Same as Haiku.

You are right about graphics.

Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.

And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.

In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.

In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.

You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.

But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.

Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).

The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).

I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.

The FULL experience of Wintel was definitely 10 years behind the full experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.

In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.

Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.

Even a powerful PC, such as running WinNT or Linux on my 9800x3d, doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does.

It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).

Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').

Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked.

What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.

> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions

AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.

But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.

Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.

The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?

What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.

In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.

That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.

In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.

Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!

Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.

DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.

I remember the Mac emulator running Mac software faster than a classic Mac. Too bad the drive was not compatible so you had to convert disks for them to be readable.

Different times...

If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.

Amiga 4 Ever! :D

It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.

I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.

There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ

My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).

My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.

My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.

I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.

I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.

I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.

(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/

As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.

However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.

Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.

Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background.

And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music.

I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.

Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.

> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.

Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.

> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.

How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).

GenXer signing off.

P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).