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Comment by makach | Hacker News Reader

What a great computer. Way ahead of its time. Still usable today. It is one of the last computers produced where all the components are well documented.

The legacy it left behind is huge. Whenever I meet another dev and find out that we have similar background it is like meeting an old friend.

The computer might be discontinued but it's legacy will live on forever.

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If ever the modern open source community needed a Manhattan project / holy grail, it is this:

> “... [a computer] where all the components are well documented.”

I am convinced that the appeal of the Amiga, and retro-computing in general, isn’t just nostalgia - it’s making a stand against the bottomless complexity and disempowerment of modern computing.

It is this for me - since it's so heavily documented and we have the schematics it's super easy to troubleshoot these machines and to build new expansions for them today.

>I am convinced that the appeal of the Amiga, and retro-computing in general, isn’t just nostalgia - it’s making a stand against the bottomless complexity and disempowerment of modern computing.

Agreed 100%. I was born well after the original home computer movement was over and the idea of doing things like graphics and audio simply by writing to registers seems nothing short of magical.

good god, man. well said.

I think the Commander X16 intends to be that computer where all the components are well documented and simple enough for a single person to fully (or almost fully) understand.

I'd put the emphasis on clever design.

The custom chips achieved a lot of functionality with a low transistor count due to clever design[0].

AmigaOS[1] achieved a lot of functionality (preemptive multitasking with priorities, fast interrupt response, elegant APIs[2]) and low overhead despite.

Links are Amiga as of ~1991 (ECS and AmigaOS 2.0).

[0]: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui...

[1]: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Libraries_Manual_gu...

[2]: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodo...

Jay Miner was a very clever engineer.

That he was, but the chipset wasn't a one man job, nor was AmigaOS (to which AIUI Jay Miner didn't even contribute).

Totally agree. That entire team was ahead of their time, and arguably produced more efficient and elegant technology than many in the industry do today.

Also if I remember correctly, Jay's dog helped. Cannot forget the pooch...

Very good point. The combination of technical excellence and easily available, open documentation for all system components is also what I find most compelling about that whole ecosystem, and I haven't seen it replicated since. Hopefully we'll see something like that in the not-too-far future, as newer open architectures become available.

In many ways it is still ahead of its time today. All electrical signals coming from user input devices are causing interrupts in the CPU resulting in a jmp directly into the interrupt routine which gives you the unmatched I/O latency and responsiveness. In a world of USB polling, CPU sleep/wakeup, compositing desktops and slow switching LCD-Displays it is easy to see why people enjoy going back to the Amiga for good old times because some things really were better.

On that matter, you'd think vectored interrupts and tight interrupt service times would be standard today, but alas.

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