81 Year Old Commodore Amiga Artist – Samia Halaby [video]
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1. show the meat, why you're interviewing them - if the person is say, a miner you start off with machinery and sounds of workers
2. do the intro of who the person is - have them state their name and identity (occupation or other story-relevant identity such as an ethnicity or physical attribute that is relevant to the story)
3. give a backstory - relevant details that led them to the present such as where they started, their parents, siblings, etc.
4. identify the present and show the passion - usually with long-form charles dickens details of rooms or where the person lives along with what they love
5. talk about what the person is about to do - a cross country journey, a competition, get married, etc.
6. set the scene - the person getting ready for it and preparing, setbacks along the way, human interest style narratives
7. make it special - try to frame it as either a unique story or something that effects a very small group of specific people
8. conclude with a future oriented framing - say "the story isn't over" such as talking about next years competition or some more ambitious task they plan to do
It's a bit different for biography, but why not?
This is also the same format done by Radiolab. I don't know if this is a well-documented structure to be honest.
I derived it myself after becoming lethargically bored listening to these types of podcasts. I realized they all had essentially this structure, sometimes with a few steps removed but rarely, almost never, out of this sequence.
I would like to claim, although a lot of data would need to be collected, that these steps have narrow time ranges with normal distributions and fairly tight bounds. As an extreme example, they don't spend say, 53 minutes on machine sounds and then cram the rest in the remaining time. I think there's more or less a clockwork to them.
(Sorry HN etiquette)
Watching old Computer Chronicles episodes – and seeing stuff like this – really makes me think about how different computing was before it became a device for consuming more than a device for creating. Back then, you really had to have a passion or at least a real desire to learn a new medium.
It's so interesting to see the unique things people did with their early Amigas, Apples, Macs, etc – and how many people learned to program out of necessity.
Also, did she upload her work to pouet.net? I think probably she hasn’t but it’d be cool if she did.
It probably would be alive today but people bought computers for the apps.
PCs were still a mix of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x or Novell Netware when the downfall begun around 1994, Windows 95 was still around the corner.
The A1000 was released in 1985, the same year as the NES was released in America. It was a huge leap in capabilities over it's contemporaries.
But their massive lead was slowly whittled away by technology improvements. In 1992 they released AGA, which was barely twice as good as the original A1000 chip-set, while the IBM PC had innovated all the way from 4 color CGA, though EGA to VGA/SVGA with CPUs which were fast enough to any 2d (and increasingly 3d) effects in software.
Commodore really needed to get AAA out the door by 91 to hold onto their lead.
Doom was probably the final nail in the coffin, you simply couldn't implement it on the Amiga chipset due to it's planar graphics.
It's interesting how John Carmack's technical vision decided the winners in the computer industry at the time.
We were usually playing Pirates!, Carmen Sandiego, Cauldron I & II, Ultimate Wizard & the Bard's Tale games and dialing into BBS on the C64. The usual way of dialing with leaked calling card numbers.
Eye of the Beholder on the 386SX machines was cool and all, but once he 'liberated' a 486DX from work and we started playing Doom and using his job's dialup service, the C64 was done.
AAA was started in 88 if I remember right, and abandoned when the rest of the world had pretty much reached it.
Microsoft were pretty well established and very successful by 1985 (when the Amiga was launched). The following year they IPO'd for $61 million dollars - not a lot these days, but back then it was a reasonable chunk of cash for a company of its size in the day.
For Commodore, the edge of the pan was well in sight by 1985/86 because their management and overall strategy was a mess.
Interlace video for hi-rez modes on the Amiga also made it non-ideal for office type applications. Maybe if Commodore had bothered to include a scan doubler by default?
I am old enough to remember having these kind of discussion with people buying more expensive PCs because they were for serious work.
The video wasn't an issue when using Commodore monitors.
They did in the Amiga 3000; It has a VGA 15pin d-sub connector on the back. Only works with modern LCDs if the Amiga is in NTSC mode though.
Open source destroys value, and Microsoft used that to their advantage.
After this there was a flurry of activity: Alfred Faust took up development, the manuals were scanned, and it all continued from there.
(I'm also skeptical about your thesis that music software was the cornerstone of Amiga's popularity. That was most likely games, and Doom was the most obvious killer there.)
Fucking LOL. Tell that to any internet startup since 1995 and prepare to get laughed out of the room
A bit of retro-brite and a few spare parts in knowing hands might be more her thing. Or maybe the plotter that was discussed here on HN last week.
Processing [1] is about the closest thing to her Amiga code, and is totally cross platform.