A history of the Amiga – The demo scene (2013)
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Schedule (German time) http://2015.revision-party.net/events/timetable
Live stream here http://2015.revision-party.net/live
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edit Wild compo is ongoing:
demos on a Microcontroller, a Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, and some guy made a digital camera out of a scanner, some lenses and a Rasberry Pi.
And a version of a Rachmaninoff Rhapsody with orchestra provided by several Commodore 64s. This would have been on the forefront of Avant Guarde music not too many decades ago.
There's also another volume on PC demos and a blu-ray with more modern demos: http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
But they didn't :(
It took till 1993 that the Mac even caught up to a Amiga 500.
Bloddy site is filled with Apple wankery and minutiae about the intersection of tech and US law (i'm not American, for the record).
I really miss Hannibal's detailed articles on CPU internals, but i guess he was right about how there was nothing new to write in that field any longer. These days it seems to be all about cache misses.
One thing that made the Amiga special, that can't really be replicated is that it occupied a sweet spot in the history of computer hardware. You could make like a C64 programmer, kick out the os and write pure ASM to the hardware (which was strange, complex and fascinating, unlike PC hardware), or you could go in the other direction and write object oriented (using BOOPSI) GUI apps in a true multitasking environment. And to top it off, it was a system that one programmer could completely understand, more or less. There was a real feeling of power and elegance when you programmed an Amiga.
I probably spend too long thinking about this :) It was the "Amiga feeling" that got me into computers when I was younger, and I keep trying to replicate it :)
Sure, nothing comparable with the Amiga. But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly.
My biggest frustration coming from the Amiga was that I wasn't able to display anything on a PC (at least, not with the limited knowledge I had at that time). With the Amiga, it was easy, no need to worry about system calls, you just wrote at the right place into the RAM et voila. And it wasn't complicated to make things move using the Blitter and the Copper. It was something a kid could do.
EDIT: talking about the aesthetic aspect of the Amiga, I think it was a beautiful computer too. People always praise Apple for making computers beautiful. But to me, my Amiga 500 was much better looking than an Apple II or a mac from that era.
Depends. I came from the ZX 80, Amiga and PC. My first UNIX was Xenix on 1993, followed by DG/UX in 1994 and Slackware 2.0 in 1995.
Never found out an environment similar to Devpac, Amos, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Borland C++, Turbo Assembler back on those days.
Sure I did learn a lot from UNIX, but the spirit wasn't really the same.
Yes. I ended up loosing a few years trying to meet demosceners in GNU/Linux, only to finally reach the conclusion that everyone that moved away from Amiga was either on Windows or Mac.
Back then the demoscene culture, games and making each group cool demo secret, were the opposite of the GNU culture driving Linux development.
Windows 95 almost killed the demoscene completely -- it took years to really recover. All of the investment in demo toolchains simply stopped working. For quite a while I ran some kind of hacked version of Windows 95 that booted directly into the MS-DOS build that ran underneath (this was before NT eliminated that layer) just so I could still do demoscene stuff.
But it was clear that this wasn't going to last. The scene really had to take a few years to step back and reevaluate and rediscover itself in order to understand how it could continue moving forward.
The modern scene is really a new scene that's risen from the ashes, and in an age of such powerful home machines that many of the traditional rules and categories no longer make sense (hence the old-school and retro-machine competition categories).
I'm not sure exactly when it revived...maybe 2003-2004? but it's definitely demoscene 2.0. But it's definitely come back super strong and as big and vibrant as it ever was and it seems like in the last few years a renewed interest and rediscovery in the old pioneering work has started to integrate into the overall scene. New productions on minimal hardware are truly awesome stuff, and productions on old systems that are informed my modern ideas are truly amazing.
It's like a Renaissance is occurring the scene and we're in the middle of it and we really have the passion and energy from the C64 and Amiga scenes to thank for it.
http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm
Sure, it won't replace your regular PC, but if you want something fun to spend time on, there's plenty of fun hardware projects updating the classic Amiga's in ways that still refuses to yield to the mainstream..
Not sure about the state of emulators.
Fun times.