DaveC wrote:
Yes. Not quite the rosy colour picture painted on the website, is it? Lest we forget! lol
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).
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.
