Amiga
Amiga
nice history article on the birth of it - brings back the memories!
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture ... part-1.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture ... part-2.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture ... part-3.ars
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Amiga making a comeback?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... dware.html
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/amigaos4.ars
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... h-os5.html
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture ... part-1.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture ... part-2.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture ... part-3.ars
---
Amiga making a comeback?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... dware.html
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/amigaos4.ars
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... h-os5.html
WHY did they have to be called ARStechnica?
The hardest part of BEING yourself is FINDING yourself in the first place...
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
LOL Amiga OS for xbox
http://amigasys.extra.hu/eng/index.html
damn those icons brings back the memories!
http://amigasys.extra.hu/eng/index.html
damn those icons brings back the memories!
Yes. Not quite the rosy colour picture painted on the website, is it? Lest we forget! lolradiance wrote:
The hardest part of BEING yourself is FINDING yourself in the first place...
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
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- Posts: 21
- Joined: Thu Nov 23, 2006 10:14 am
You have to compare it to the other systems available at this time. The x86/DOS PC was a crude hardware with no innovation but lot of shortcomings. The bad hardware design was to be seconded only byit's crappy OS (if one can call this big service interrupt for floppy actions an OS).DaveC wrote: Yes. Not quite the rosy colour picture painted on the website, is it? Lest we forget! lol
Amiga had innovative multimedia capabilities and an operating system with a standard gui and 32 bit preemtive multitasking. 10 years before Windows 95 came out.
It ran fine on a 8MHz 16/32 bit CPU with only 7.xx MHz, thanks to good OS design (Andy Hertzfeld) and the custom chips for the audio & graphics. It was the time of CGA/EGA on PCs, wich were really slow framebuffers without any logic.
Surely the Mac II had better hardware, but it was 10 times as expensive than a A500.... and had a crappy OS to (but with a nice GUI).
The Atari ST was the only real competitive system at this time. It had MIDI onboard and a good 72Hz Mono-Monitor, which was better for office stuff and DTP.
But the Amiga could show 4096 colors at once. The EGA graphics board (which was more expansive than the whole Amiga 500 computer with graphics build in) provided just 16 colors out of a 64 LUT at a time.
There was software that could crash the system, but this was true for every system of the late 80ties. Even Win ME in 2000 had no real memory protection, also it was technically feasible since the 286 MMU in 1983.
The Amiga 500/600/1000/2000 had no MMU, so no protection hardware. There was a lot of freeware and shareware everyone used, simple hacker software that often crashed...
But there was also Videoscape 3D + Modeler 3D and their child: Lightwave 3D, Sculpt Animate 4D, POV Ray originates from DKB-Trace source, Cinema 4d, Real(soft) 3d, Reflections/Monzoom, TurboSilver/Imagine, Caligare Broadcast 24, Martin Hash's Animator Apprentice. Electronic Art's DeluxePaint, etc.
In one sentence: Amiga brought ray tracing and computer graphics to the masses. At least to the kids of the late 80ties. SGI and other Workstations had better hardware and software, but only for the professionals with big budgets from Hollywood or marketing departments of big companies.
The Amiga started the multimedia (r)evolution. The x86/DOS-PC was a better typewriter and calculator, no creative tool.
And PCs even didn't crash as nice as the Amiga with it's Guru Meditation code and the program counter and a ROM debugger over the serial port (if you had a terminal or teminal emulator to use this feature...)
So everyone who talks of Amiga, as if it was some stupid funny game console with keyboard and mouse, that only crashed all the time, does not know what (s)he is talking about. Maybe because:
- to young to know all the useless crap IBM & MS sold at this times
("640kb should be enough for everyone", you could use an A500 with
16 MB RAM at this time, if you had the money. 1MB was common).
- was fooled be MS marketing at this time and thought of Amiga as game kiddie stuff (and there where really tons of cool games, the DOS-PC couldn't master with its crappy hardware+OS even years later).
- was forced by his boss/parents to use this DOS trash-system and could only overcome his envy and jealousy of Amiga by ignoring it or going out of touch with reality and pretend to himself that x86+DOS were "professional" computers.
- was a DTP designer with a Apple Mac and had to ignore Amiga because he wanted to be the elite and saw that this kids had even cooler graphics on their cheap "game machines", than he had on his super expensive Mac IIfx.
- was a Atari ST user and was frustrated, that even with MIDI expander the Amiga had the better (sampled) sound, and cool MOD files, mind blazing graphics demos and cool graphics apps, while they draw black and white art with Calamus... or wrote DTP love lyrics with Signum (to say it plainly: do boring stuff)..
Amiga - I'll never forget my first love.
@Knaxknarke:
Um, wow. That's quite an indepth explanation of all stuff that I already knew. Thank you. I was not putting the Amiga down. Just pointing out that it wasn't perfect. It had it's problems. I loved the Amiga too. I owned several and will own more.
My last Amiga was an A1200 with a 50Mhz Turbo board and 34 Megs of RAM. Plus a hard drive (can't remember the capacity). All converted to fit in a tower case.
I have NEVER enjoyed computing as much as I did with the Amiga. But, let's be real. It wasn't perfect. Hardware compatibility issues. Web compatibilty issues (not the greatest browsers in the world, probably). The guru (cute but bothersome). Still, 1000% better than the contemporary PCs.
<-best smiley ever
Um, wow. That's quite an indepth explanation of all stuff that I already knew. Thank you. I was not putting the Amiga down. Just pointing out that it wasn't perfect. It had it's problems. I loved the Amiga too. I owned several and will own more.
My last Amiga was an A1200 with a 50Mhz Turbo board and 34 Megs of RAM. Plus a hard drive (can't remember the capacity). All converted to fit in a tower case.
I have NEVER enjoyed computing as much as I did with the Amiga. But, let's be real. It wasn't perfect. Hardware compatibility issues. Web compatibilty issues (not the greatest browsers in the world, probably). The guru (cute but bothersome). Still, 1000% better than the contemporary PCs.
<-best smiley ever
The hardest part of BEING yourself is FINDING yourself in the first place...
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
Maybe the Atari users where frustrated because the Amiga users where arrogant; the Atari was NOT designed to play samples, but they found a software hack to do so (about 17KHz). Yes the sound was better on Amiga but the Atari came from further, and I've been a mod composer (for myself, congrats CoolColJ) untill the beginning of this century. And while you were laughing at me I was painting using the full palette of 512 colors. That's not a lot but THAT is correct.
obsolete asset
I, personally, was an Atari user and an Amiga user. Once I got into the Amiga, the Atari didn't get a look in (poor thing).
The hardest part of BEING yourself is FINDING yourself in the first place...
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com
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