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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

The Juggler showed off the Amiga graphic abilities. It is what helped sell some of the 1986 and 1987 Amiga computers.

Before that it was a bouncing checkered beach ball. Other computers did their own bouncing ball, but the Amiga could multitask and had multiple bouncing beach balls, each program running on its own. I think you could have multiple jugglers as well.

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A few years later 1992 "State of the Art", Spaceballs demo shows off Amiga 500 pretty well. That whole thing fits on 880 kB floppy and it's rendered realtime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0

A year later same group released "9 Fingers", also running on Amiga 500.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ

9 Fingers "making of" video, where the Spaceballs dudes videotaped their highschool friends for the dance shots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgriMuXZ3QY

I think Jannicke, the state of the art girl dated Paul (Lone Starr) at the time. They were all teens when they made this and Paul was one of the by far youngest democoders in the scene at the time.

Interview with Jannicke (look how young everyone is): https://web.archive.org/web/20050307132321/http://spaceballs...

More context in Borzyskowski's work: "THE HACKER DEMO SCENE AND IT'S CULTURAL ARTIFACTS" http://fullscream.com/wp-content/uploads/borzysko.txt

Raw #5 diskmag: http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=9511

One day I'll really take the time to write a properly researched history of this very unique era..

Did those run on a stock Amiga 500?

Yes, this ran on an 1987 Amiga 500 with the Commodore A501[1] 512K RAM expansion. This means:

  * 1MB RAM
  * 256K ROM
  * 7.16 MHz (yes, that's 0.007 GHz :)) Motorola 68000

plus a whole lot of custom chips [2]

There were different ways of expanding the Amiga RAM and the demo became so popular it was reverse engineered by a popular cracking group Skid Row[3,4]., patched and re-distributed

[1] http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a501

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500

[3] http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Skid_Row_%28old%29

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqfcrViBGn8

This says 50fps, so I assume it was the 7.09MHz version...

Correct, just like with the Commodore 64, the CPU clock actually differed based on the graphics hardware output, which was back in the day adjusted for the household CRT TV sets.

The master clock crystal oscillator on the motherboard was set to be 2 clock cycles per pixel and other chips clocks were derived from that.

Hence the CPU was set to 1/4th of master clock, so the European PAL[1] machines (a 50fps TV standard) actually ran slightly slower than the American NTSC[2] machines (a 60fps TV standard with a smaller vertical resolution).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC

7.16 MHz (NTSC) / 7.09 MHz (PAL), and what's worse, average instruction takes about 8 clock cycles. Fastest ones take 4 cycles. "move" (like mov on x86) takes from 4 up to 36 cycles depending on addressing modes. Multiplication is up to 70 cycles. Divide up to 140 cycles (unsigned) and 158 (signed).

In some sense it's really like a 1.7 MHz machine. And that's being generous.

Yes, the Amiga was a great piece of hardware.

I was the only one from my friends having a PC at home instead of an Amiga, but luckily we had lot of scener parties at their places so I got to learn lot about the system.

It was an environment ahead of its time with dedicated hardware for sound and graphics, pure multitasking even if lack of MMU meant occasional crashes and the whole libraries concept was great.

Some of the amazing capabilities of the Amiga were influenced by one of its architects: Carl Sassenrath. He has since gone on to create the Rebol language which is even more astounding once you begin to look into it.

He's currently at Roku where I can only begin to imagine what he's working on. My only wish is that they'd replace the horrific BrightScript with Rebol.

The hardware owes it all to Jay Miner and Ron Nicholson (rhn). Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff:

http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/photo-cv.html

Notice how he was the guy behind the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) for the Mac and the beautifully minimized Apple //c in addition to being one of the key persons in creating the essence of Amiga hardware magic: Denise, Copper and Blitter.

Carl Sassenrath and RJ Mical were super influential on the OS side, making a super lightweight preemptively multitasking OS with small components that messaged each other and the OS abstraction layers that the rest of the personal computing world will not see in the next 10+ years.

> Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff

Like he'd let a little thing like death stop him! :)

Ha! :) Sorry, meant to write "rhn is still out there", but I dropped I replied to hastily and by the time I figured it out it was too late to edit my post..

I don't know if he is still selling them, but: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/index.html

Dave Haynie, one of Commodores hardware engineers, films the last day at the Commodore plant. And the layoff party afterwards. Hilarious, informative, and sad at the same time.

I thought Wendell Sander did the IWM?

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Five_Different_Ma...

(and lots of other pages.)

I consider Andy Hertzfeld's site a very accurate reference as well as a patchwork of authentic fascinating stories that just draws you in.

However, Ron Nicholson (rhn) is on the Mac case signatures, he also did major work on Apple //, so I find it strange that he is not mentioned anywhere on folklore.org . I think this is something worth researching..

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