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Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

I saved up my summer job money and got an Amiga 500 (with an actual monitor!) - ordered in November, so it was on our doorstep when I got home from my afterschool (probably senior year of high school) job. My dad warned that I should probably let it warm up overnight, to avoid shorts from condensation. It was torture! I woke up like 2 hours before school to set it up :)

It was glorious! It was shocking to be able to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it - like magic!

I was devastated when my parents moved to a new place when I was around 30 and I discovered they had just tossed out my TRS-80 coco, C-64 (and about 3 shoeboxes of disks), and my Amiga :( So sad.

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”to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it“

I haven’t ever used an Amiga, but thought its “main display” was its GUI, or that its GUI at least was on par with the command prompt. Am I wrong, or am I reading too much in this statement?

In this context "main display" means "whatever display is in the foreground" as you could have, say, a Deluxe Paint screen. It'd take up, literally the whole screen, and you could drag it down by the top bar and see the OS desktop screen behind it, possibly in a different resolution and number of colors.

And now fullscreen apps are all the rage, again. In my mind, desktop computing in general has always converged, sometimes in roundabout ways, towards the Amiga experience.

I really wish they'd dispatch with the standard "minimize/maximize/close" trio of controls and change them to something more interesting. Close is fine, but I'd rather it be a bit harder to use. I don't need to suddenly close something, and it far more often happens that I accidentally close something. Seeing the Amiga video, a foreground/background button could be cool. Or maybe "make transparent while I hold the mouse button down". Or any number of other things. These days I just maximize my windows, then alt-tab (or equivalent for Mac) through my windows. Only rarely do I do things side-by-side, and would rather have some tiling capabilities rather than having to do it manually.

I remember have several things running simultaneously, all at different resolutions and bit depth. Talking on a BBS on one layer, playing Tracker files on another, writing a paper on a third, and the Workbench behind them all.

It was glorious and very productive. Not that it would be super useful but I don't really think we can replicate the same "layer" thing on todays displays.

The Amiga’s Intuition library, the core engine of the GUI, can draw graphics primitives on “screens”. Because of the Copper co-processor which displays the screen raster line by raster line, these screens can have different resolutions with different numbers of colors - all of them displayed simultaneously on the monitor.

Here's a video clip showing the feature - too bad there isn't another application running behind the Workbench screen.

https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=8m54s

I grew up with this feature. At the age of 5, that was 1986, I used my father's just bought Amiga. I took all of this for granted... So for a long time I never used a PC seriously. Around the time Commodore blew it, I looked into PCs and linux, 1993 IIRC. PC have looked primitive to me for a long time.

This is hard to describe, but easier to show. If you load up: http://www.chiptune.com/ the Workbench emulator, click and drag down the white bar at the top ("where it says Chipbench release) you'll see what is meant.

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