Commodore Amiga celebrates its 25th birthday, Andy Warhol still dead
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted July 23rd 2010 5:09PM
posted July 23rd 2010 5:09PM
It was on July 24, 1985 that the Amiga 1000 computer had its debut at Lincoln Center in New York City. As you're no doubt aware, we have quite a fondness for Commodore in general and its Amiga offspring in particular, so it's only fitting that we would make a note of this auspicious anniversary. And if you're an unrepentant Amiga fanboy (the original fanboys), there was so much to love: color graphics! Stereo sound! Something called "multitasking!" This was a machine that took on all comers, and it coulda licked 'em, if circumstances (and some wonky decisions) on the business end of things hadn't got in the way. For a trip down memory lane, hit up the source link. As for us, we're going to go fire up our copy of Neuromancer and take it for a spin. Some things never change, indeed.
I still have my "signed" 1000 and couple 500s...and a bookcase-worth of white API manuals.
Doing "development" with Aztec C off a 3.5" floppy was...interesting...
Fun times - GREAT Personal Computer (if you didn't mind the outstandingly-BAD marketing behind the "Guru Meditation Error").
@Freakin Ijit
Me too, monitor and all. Mine was "hopped up" with a 68010 and a 1 meg external ram expansion. Last I checked my Genlock still worked also.
@Freakin Ijit
While Commodore "saved" the Amiga, at the same time, they were the cause of it's slow death in the marketplace... such a horribly run company, that had such amazingly talented employees.
@Hazdaz In the UK, the Amiga (particularly the 500, 500 Plus and 600 models) were king for a while - I knew way more people with Amigas than Super Nintendos or Megadrives.
God I miss the Amiga. *sniff*
@Freakin Ijit
Now the Amiga.. THAT was a truly "magical" and "revolutionary" product. At an unbelievable price..
How I loved my 500, a friend of mine that had a 1000 and told me to wait for the 500 to be released. Sold me the first 10 minutes I was able to get a demo .. best PC I ever owned, and I have the distinct feeling that the experience of buying that computer and using it over it's life will be something I will not be able to replicate with another platform.
It's going to be a very big hit..hit..hit..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6FzrxK8aw4&feature=related
Is Romeo Knight badass or what...
@Dale P
Yeah, Europe LOVED the Amiga (as well as the Atari ST), but still, it was an awesome computer that was run by an incompetent company.
At the time, I would get any and every computer magazine that I could get a hold of (Info, Compute, Byte, Amiga World), and when I went to Greece, I got all the UK mags like Amiga Format and a few other ones. Hell, I think I still have a few of them laying around.
@Freakin Ijit
Aztec C? What? Real men used Devpac, Seka or AsmOne !
I kid :) I miss the Amiga. Still have an old 500 in the closet. Such a spectacular computer system with an OS light years ahead of its time. The games, the colors, the audio. Good times.
Best of luck to the people trying to rebuild the Amiga dream from scratch.
The Natami team are amazing considering what they've done with the little money they have
@hemmy Real men used EasyAMOS.
@Freakin Ijit
Had few A500s but the last beauty of a machine was my A1200 with expansion board that boasted 68030 CPU @50 MHz and 68882 FPU (floating poing co-processor man!) with 8MB RAM on the board for total of 10 phreaking megabytes of RAM! Including the original Commodore display that could display the amazing 1024x768 interlaced picture.
I used to load the whole installation of a game or other piece of software into RAM-disk and run it from there at blazing speeds (Wings, Elite II, Dune and Dune II - the beginning of RTS gaming anyone?, Alien Breed, Gunship 2000...).
I built a 3.5" hard drive into the Amiga's case, there was just about enough space, I custom built the cable adapter from 3.5" to 2.5" connector, since there were none to be had in the computer shops at the day. With the HDD, my GUI, multi-tasking Workbench OS would boot to fully functional desktop in 7 seconds.
7 seconds, for Christ's sake!
I was a poor student at the time and had to sell the system eventually. Why? Whhhhyyyyy.....? (sob)
Oh yeah, kneel before the Defender of the Crown!
@Hazdaz
Yea i remember all those magazines , my older brothers brought them for their commdore 64 and then amiga,
i remember reading them when all way from 5-10 years old barely understanding most of it. parents got me a super nintendo which i loved cause it was mine , but i would still jump on the amiga when my brothers where not using it. First small steps i made on the road to becoming a programmer where on those beautiful machines
@Freakin Ijit
LDA #$07
STA $D021
BRK
@Slappy Wag
I'd rather dark grey if you please .. :)
@Freakin Ijit My cousin had an Amiga 500 (with switchable roms). We had a lot of fun with that. Most of my relatives had Amiga 500s. My cousin which lived in the isle of Karpathos in Greece knew everyone which had Amigas, about 10 people. The town that he lived in had about 1000 people and very few were computer literate. They always had tournaments on who was the best in Kick Off. He had a lot of games and knew how to program. A friend of his one time gave him a disk that put in a virus that would just show the contents of the ram and show a red error message. It was benign, but my cousin still chased him around the island.
I was going to get a 1200 but my father wanted to do my homework mainly on that computer so he bought me a 486SX from a backstreet vendor...that broke down all the time. I would have traded in that 486 for a CDTV gladly. Thats how much I hated that computer and how much I loved Amigas.
One can only imagine if the 1200 was released a year earlier. Steve Jobs and apple were afraid of Commodore and the Amiga. They were better than the Macs of the time. If only...
@Freakin Ijit
I lost my 1200 some years ago. Yes, you CAN lose a computer :-(
But I still have a copy of WinUAE running on my home computer.
O man, these nights playing Utopia ... !
@Freakin Ijit - I still have and it set up and working A1200HD/CDR, A500, A2000 and A1000.
The Amiga was first and in many ways still best. Remember GoMF? - Get out of My Face? It would capture Guru meditation errors and let you recover from them. I still miss the operating system and wish they'd port it to run on x86 natively,
instead of over emulation.
Wow, that's way before my time.
BTW: The spinning baby...thing creeps me out to no end.
Uh....isn't the amiga dead too?
@mosammey
Blasphemy.. it lives on... AMIGA FOREVER
In those days software was light-years ahead of hardware and now hardware accelerates way faster than software can keep up.
For instance 64bit and multiprocessor software, there isnt enough of them or they are unstable.
Im looking at you lazy programmers.
@Ceyran
+1
Nicely said.
Back in the Amiga days, you actually had creative programmers that could squeeze out performance from a piece of hardware that would have been considered unpossible.
Now you get lazy programmers that can't write code to save their lives... if it's not 2GBs in size and eats 1GB of RAM they can't do anything. Pathetic.
@Ceyran I don't know, you can't have enough processing power for some good old photoshop (or video editing). I guess both show your PC it's limits ;)
@frauhottelmann Huh. I remember not too long ago when my brand spanking new Photoshop 6 would take over a minute to launch.
@Hazdaz
This isn't completely true, the things (gaming wise especially) that are happening today are infinitely more complex than what was happening on the Amiga..
Hardware has come so far and production values have risen so far to the extent that if you wanted to say.. put Shadow of the Beast up against Crysis, it would be very tough to say who's got more graphical muscle or better immersion per cycle.. it's like apples and oranges..
@hfm
Why don't you compare the amount of raw power that a PC has today to the Amiga... What those guys at Psygnosis were able to accomplish with 7.14Mhz and like 2 MBs of RAM blows away the ~2GHz and ~2 GBs that you'll need to run a modern game.
A modern PC has a processor that is something like 100X faster (multiple cores) and has 100X as much RAM, but no way in hell is it anywhere close to 100X better.
No one is disputing that CPU clock-cycles and the amount of RAM that modern computers have could crush what old computers had... but you are forgetting that code now a days is that much more bloated and programmers today don't give a crap about CPU cycles... back then they would find creative ways to eek out as much performance out of the hardware that they had. Now, no one gives a crap.
@Hazdaz
Well.. they are no longer coding ASM .. there is no way possible that big budget games of today could be done anywhere near enough time to make their money back without middleware, engines, and frameworks. Besides.. probably 5 textures from crysis would equal the entire size of SotB. (exaggerating.. but not really..)
Oh man.. the SotB soundtrack was phenomenal.. I can still hear it in my ears to this day... sigh...
@Hazdaz
Hmm I dont know about that, I'd consider Call of Duty to be about 100 times better than Gloom was.
Oh, Your right too, Amiga owners were the original fanboys. And if your not head over to the excellent WinUAE Amiga emulator site to become a convert!
I was 4. Old people talk, carry on. (-_-).oO(..zZzZz..)
@Baconbits
I'm guessing by your comment that was at most.. what.. 3.. maybe 4 years ago?
@Baconbits I was like negative something :) Not even born
The hell with my i7 Extreme System! I want that commodore!
Man, I absolutely loved my 500 and 2000 (with Video Toaster and IBM compatibilty cards)! I've never to this day owned a computer product that even comes close--and there have been too many to count.
Here's a bit of irony for you, I sold my complete pristine Amiga 500 system a few months ago in order to drum up funds to buy the iPad that I'm writing this on.
@Sinick: Newtek FTW!
Greatest computer platform of all time.
WAY the hell ahead of it's time.
The Amiga came out at a time in which computers and the computer industry was still fun and interesting... now it's just corporate nonsense with incremental speed increases. At the time, the Amiga blew every other system out of the water. It wasn't just X% faster than the competition, but generations ahead in terms of thinking and design... and did it for way the hell less than anyone else. It was actually TOO cheap because few believed that you could get so much power for so little money.
I wish I still had my old A500 and every now and then I get the urge to bid on one on eBay.
@Hazdaz CISC based computing dude. It rocked. That's why we could get great software like Brillance and True Brillance, DPaint AGA, Scala and Imagine for a fraction of the cost of software on Mac or PC. The golden age of creative computing that was years ahead of the competition. wasn't with the Mac and it sure as hell wasn't with the PC. It was all with the Amiga.
@Hazdaz
Ahead of its time? Maybe in 1985. The Sharp X68000 PC was released shortly after the Amiga and its graphics hardware blows the Amiga away in just about every respect:
http://nfggames.com/games/x68k_Gallery/index.shtm
Of course, it was only available in Japan.
@Stanley
The graphics hardware were far from the highlight of the platform, even in 1985.
The OS was, and still is, vastly superior however. Even today I'd rather take a PC with AmigaOS 3.1 over anything Windows, MacOS or Linux. The latter big three are at the point of acceptable usage but light years from being impressive from a software standpoint.
My 18 year old Amiga 1200 is also fully functional and quite capable for general computer usage with it's 50 MHz 68060, 16MByte or RAM and 10Mbit PC-card network. And people think you need 2GHz+ processors to browse the web. *sigh*
@Stanley
Not particularly impressed with any of those screenshots.
I honestly am not very familiar with Japanese computers from that era and I am reading up on it's capabilities right now. It does indeed look pretty impressive, but it's using a similar 68K processor that the Amiga line had. It looks like it had some custom chips like the Amiga did, but doesn't look like any of them were as "high level" as the Graphics, Sound and IO chips that made the Amiga so powerful.
And unless my Yen conversion is way the hell off, we are talking about $3000 to $5000 for some of these systems? That's rather absurd when the A500 was about $500.
@Stanley The link you quoted showed that the Sharp came out in 1987, while the Amiga came out in mid 1985, and you said it was "shortly" after? In 1987, many things have already been upgraded for the original Amiga plus new models. Besides graphics, would the Sharp have better capabilities than the Amiga, such as preemptive multitasking, auto-configuration expansion slot, PC bridgeboard, etc?
@Exodite I may pick up an Amiga to play with, can you connect it to a dsl modem with Ethernet or is it dial up only?
@Hazdaz
Just grab the emulator from Cloanto. It includes the WinUAE and it works fantastic. You can emulate everything from an a500 to the a4000 with no problem. The even give you the software to transfer Amiga files over to the PC (such as game saves).
I still have my A1000 and Monitor, but the disks are probably dead by now. I haven't fired it up in over a decade.
The *original* fanboys? Sir, you are forgetting the Spectrum/C64 Wars of time long past. Those were bloody days, though conducted in a more gentlemanly fashion than these iphone/android whippersnappers can muster.
I do still have a place in my heart for my A500 and A1200 (still going strong). I still contend it was the best multi-tasker ever built.
@RikF But the Spectrum/C64-war was only really in England, since the C64 was the thing for the rest of the world.
Practically no-one had even heard of the Spectrum here in Sweden. It was the same in many other countries.
C64 and later the Amiga was really HUGE in Sweden.
I was still in my daddy's balls in 1985
I bet Sherridan didn't know there were Commodores on Z'ha'dum
I remember the first time I saw an Amiga running Battle Chess at Electronics Boutique and my jaw hit the ground.
...then I picked up the C64 version and was, um... a little disappointed at the difference.
@DeAthWaGer
It wasn't just the C64 version that was disappointing.
Even the PC version - which ran on hardware costing 2X as much as an Amiga - paled in comparison to the Amiga's version.
I remember the Eisenhower Administration.
This is very cool news indeed.
I loved my Amiga's back in the day. Started with a used Amiga 1000, then a new Amiga 500, then to the Amiga 1200. Last but not least, an Amiga 4000.
A cool little side note. Newtek and the Video Toaster started out in Topeka Kansas, where I'm at. Not sure where they are now but they are behind Lightwave 3D these days. A girl I dated maybe 10 years ago bought Tim Jenison's old house where rumor has it he coded Digipaint and or worked on the early hardware for the Video Toaster. I will say the garage in back of the house had several electrical outlets and phone lines added in as well as from what I remember, work benches. Not exactly Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory, but very cool nonetheless.
There was nothing ever like the Amiga and if you were young enough to own one during it's heyday then you will know exactly what I am talking about. I won;'t go into the specs now but it was years ahead of the PC.