The Amiga lives! Ars Technica reviews update of classic platform

This may be irrelevant to about 99.9% of you, but Ars Technica has an in-depth analysis of the Micro-AmigaOne and the Amiga OS4 operating system. Amiga, you say? Didn't that platform disappear around the same time asteroids were obliterating the dinosaurs? Well, sort of. Like many a failed-but-elegant system (OS/2 Warp, anyone?), the Amiga has been kept alive by devoted fans through years of ownership changes, bankruptcies and false starts. According to Ars Technica's review, the platform is remarkably up-to-date and includes handy features like an Internet connection wizard, a Winamp clone to play MP3s, and a Photoshop knockoff. Pretty slick if you're an Amiga fan, but we won't be happy until someone releases an updated version of the Apple Lisa.

[Anthony @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

Wow, there is a blast from the past!
For you kiddies that don't know....
When the PC had 16 colors and only beeped, when the Mac was a tiny little black and white screen, I was able to do full color 30 fps animtion. 3D modeling and animation. Sound editing in stereo, video capture... and real multitasking. Like living in the future. :)
Thanks to the Amiga computer I was fully prepared for the game industries arrival. Alot of the artists on the first consoles started on the Amiga using D-Paint.

[ramoo @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

funny, the apple lisa story makes me wonder if history will repeat itself with apple as a company...

[J. Philipp Bohn @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

D-Paint...

I even revved up my Amiga 500 for a total of 1 MB. You could switch it on and off again, in case you didn�t need so much calculating power.

[010111 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

funny, the microsoft bob story makes me wonder if history will repeat itself with microsoft as a company...

see? everyone makes a crappy product or two. you could plug anything in there about any company. OS/2 was referenced too... didn't feel like dissing IBM? why not? not 'popular' to do that? it would be just as deserved as mocking a computer that apple made *22* years ago.

furthermore ... the lisa itself wasn't a bad machine or a mistake *at all* though... looking at it from a purely historical perspective... it simply cost way too much for what it was. $10,000 FYI. apple doesn't sell too many $10,000 machines these days. besides the lisa was the progenitor of the *modern* (you 'Xerox PARC made the first GUI though!' nerds can park it downtown.) GUI and the inspiration for the macintosh project... a project designed (well... eventually) as bringing the GUI goodness of the lisa in a much more affordable package. had there been no lisa... there would have been no macintosh... and there would have been no Windows 95 (as Windows 1.0 -> 3.1 were hardly comparable to Mac OS at all... 95 is when they figured it out finally.) and as a result you'd be working on something with a considerable different feel than you are now. it's truly not that difficult to inform yourself about these things... and having some historical knowledge behind what you frequently denegrate would if nothing else... at least improve and somewhat validate your criticisms.

http://www.folklore.org/ is a good place for at least moderately entertaining macintosh history. as well as numerous books like Apple Confidential. etc etc.

back to the Amiga... the first job i had in TV production had an Amiga 1200 for titling. at the time it was totally the coolest thing i had seen for the price. i sooooo wanted the big boy Amiga 4000 at the time and eventually a Newtek Video Toaster. then Amiga sort of went under... and though i still wanted one... the rumors of recovery or acquisition or further development started getting more and more sketchy and full of way too much undeserved wishful thinking. the past 10 years have been pretty bad for the Amiga in general... and though 4.0 was finally released (after changing hands how many times? and who makes the hardware now?) ... at this point it is about as relevant as BeOS or MorphOS. something thats fun to have... but nothing you can really take too seriously. i know they have some PPC reference boards out there and hardware from them... but they are all like 6 year old tech... if it ran on a current G5 or G4 mac box... i might at least try it out. but no way would i purchase a dedicated board to run it.

here's hoping that Atari releases a new version of TOS on a PPC750-powered Super Falcon 64!

(i wish i was joking but a quick gooogle reveals plenty of seemingly active TOS development... yikes...)

[010111 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

dur. i meant...

here's hoping that Atari releases a new version of TOS on a PPC**970**-powered Super Falcon 64!

seeing as the 750 i originally wrote is the G3... and not 64bit.

[Rick James @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

This story seems to resurface with a new operating system every 6 months. I think its eventually got to the point where any system would simply not be cost effective, especially with the $499 mac mini. It was an excellent machine in its day tho'!

[Andrew @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

YAY! That means the Video Toaster might live again. Once more, we can be dazzled by the amazing Kiki wipe or Falling Sheep!! Good times, good times.

[Jeremy Holloway @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

bah...the Atari ST is still the better platform... (ducks!)... :) Granted, had Atari and Commodore buried the hatchet and co-developed a single successor 16/32 bit platform (and licensed it), it would be the PC compatible platform and the Macs that would be occupying the category of irrelevancy at this point. Granted, if you really want to cry, go over to the Atari Museum website and read about the Phoenix and Gaza projects Atari Inc. had under development in 1982/83...parallel processing home computers based upon the Motorola 68000. Somehow these machines were forgotten...

[Craig Randall @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

Amiga was the best thing going from 85 to 93. Nothing could touch it. It was the Amiga that brought us amazing computer graphics to all parts of TV. Amiga has been a driving force in delivering a better TV experience, though it's always been behind the scenes and never talked about.

Here are the specs for the AmigaOne XE:
# 800MHz PowerPC 7455 (G4) processor
# 512 MB RAM
# ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card
# Creative Vibra 128 sound card
# 3Com 3c905C-TX Ethernet controller
# 52x CD-ROM drive
# 40 GB hard disk

Nothing there sounds like it's hardware from 6 years ago. You can buy an AmigaOne XE and AmigaOS 4.0 now. They are not vapore ware. Worried about software? Many open source packages are being converted to Amiga (Open Office and Mozilla for example).

[Bill Panagouleas @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

Nice to see the awesome Amiga return, good luck with Amiga OS 4.0

[Eric Lampi @ Dec 19th 2005 1:37AM]

I still have my Amiga 2000. It has a 40MB HD, a GVP 22Mhz '030 accelerator, and 9MB ram. I can't bare the thought of ditching it. I was the sweetest machine of it's time. What other machine could manage multitasking except for high end (expensive) Unix systems? 3D animation? 30FPS hi-res Video playback?

While in Art School, the other kids were in the computer labs struggling with 486 machines and 3D Studio V.2 or Infini-D on the (chuckle) Mac. I was sitting in my dorm room cranking out animation with Lightwave, making a rough edit by cutting the sequences together with Scala. Did I mention that I could keep both apllications running while I was working? You couldn't do that on a Mac or PC for years after Amiga went under. I would be rendering frames in Lightwave, and painting in D-Paint. I could set the render's task priority to low so that when I wasn't actively doing any painting, it would use up the available CPU power for the render. It kicked ass! I was so sorry to see it die, and I must admit, I am more than a little freaked out that it's still around. Amiga fans are by far the most extereme... You Mac people don't know dedication like these guys.

Commodore was run by complete a$$holes who had the best thing in the world and they BLEW it! Man, to think what it would be like today if they had gotten their act together.

It's the reason I am doing what I love today, 3D animation and Visual F/X. Hmmm maybe I'll dig out the Amiga today and see if I can get it to work :).