Today, 30 years ago, Commodore introduced the Amiga | Hacker News Reader

Today, 30 years ago, Commodore introduced the Amiga

amiga30.com

217 pointspdknsk80 comments

For a 41 year old man like me and many of my generation the influence of Commodore was life altering.

It was the Apple of it's time, better in many ways than Apple itself with so much potential. Seeing Defender of the Crown for the first time, or using Deluxe Paint, or ProTracker. You just felt like living in the not evenly distributed future where you were in the forefront and everyone without an Amiga was years in the past.

The innocence and magic feeling of all this at the time, unexplored possibilities an amazing time I hope every generation gets to experience in their own way.

Well said, its just hard to see that combination of accessibility and magic happening again, everything was new to everyone (almost) back then.

Same age, same experience. I also remember when years later I first started really using Windows and an IBM PC at university - they were already 486DX2 at a whopping 66MHz, but the UI still felt more sluggish than my 7MHz at home.

Computations, on the other hand, were incomparably faster.

I'm a little older (46) and my first computer was a Vic20. That was followed by a C64 which I owned when the Amiga 500 was released and the difference was staggering. The introduction of the workbench desktop was jaw dropping compared to the relatively clunky Commodore Basic interface of the older machines. I couldn't afford one at the time so I only got to play with the 500 at a friends or in stores which probably made them even more fabulous - it was years before I actually owned an Amiga and that was the 1200. The next time I had such an experience was when I started using Sun Sparc stations connected to a network and the SunView interface. Great days.

First computer was a PC1211. Then I got an ORIC ATMOS and an Atari ST. Never really had a chance to play with an Amiga and couldn't buy it (a bit pricey - although maybe an other way to play that hand would have been to save the money spent in other computers to only buy the Amiga. But at that rate, I'd probably still be waiting for something better to come around.

"The Future Was Here" really got me to understand what was so great about the Amiga (because, the ST also had the Boing demo - but the sound wasn't as nice.)

A bit younger (I was in my last year of primary school when I graduated from the C64 to the Amiga 2000). I fondly remember reading through the back of the Amiga 2000 reference manual (the ring-bound one) on Christmas day. It had schematics and everything! (back at that age, schematics just LOOKED cool - I couldn't really read them as such).

I remember those $5 shareware disks you used to be able to get at the markets.

By the end though, several years later.... Oh man.... Games weren't as smooth as on the Amiga, but OH THOSE SIERRA VGA GAMES ON THE PC!!!! Especially compared to their horrible Amiga ports (which were also Sierra abandoning the platform.... the port of King's Quest VI that was done by Revolution Software shows how much better they could have been).

Awesome memories!

They had shareware disks bundled with magazines. I knew someone who worked at the magazine shop and we would slide some out to copy them. It's amazing how now I can get any software so easily.

so well put.

One of the best memories I have of my father is when he opened the car trunk, beaming, presenting me a brand new Amiga 500, and the joy and the excitement my very nerdy teenage self felt.

A fantastic machine, at the time the best of both worlds for gaming and productivity.

Two years younger.

Same experience here, specially because some of my friends were active in the Demoscene.

However my parents though I was better off with a 386SX (looking to the present they were right), so I had to go to their places to play with their systems.

No system has kind of captured the same spirit.

Still have my Commodore 64. It still works. And I still have probably a hundreds of games and progams I downloaded from the old BBS systems on a 300 baud modem that at the time I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I busted my butt one summer mowing lawns to afford to pay for my own telephone line so that I could spend endless hours on that thing. And then the movie WarGames came out and I beefed up my efforts to take over the world on my old C64 :)

Love it! I started out on C64 too. Buying computer magazines and programming books. Didn't really understand much back then but it was everything I wanted to spend my time on.

Same boat. Funny a few years ago I was cleaning some stuff in my parent's basement and came across a collection of old computer magazines from back then. Ended up climbing up in the attic, grabbing the old C64, and hooking it up just to make sure it still worked. Started right up and worked just like the first day I got it. Wish I could go back to those days without a care in the world.

>The innocence and magic feeling of all this at the time, unexplored possibilities an amazing time I hope every generation gets to experience in their own way.

I'm your age and can't speak on what young people today are feeling, but the last time I felt "magic" in the computer world was when I stepped up to a Kinect. Suddenly the game was tracking me and my avatar was making my movements. It just felt surreal and psychologically somehow put me in the game. Like the Amiga, it was a little half-baked and then ultimately unprofitable, but for a short time I remember thinking, "Wow, this kind of tracking could be the future. Think about unlocking your front door by analyzing your gait, having a whole body motion cap avatar that does everything you do including facial expressions, games that you play with your whole body, etc" Sadly, the game industry has gone back to its hobbyhorse of AAA shooters and next-gen consoles without much to offer. I guess we'll see how VR does as well, but that just seems like more of same - a screen on your face instead of in your living room.

I hope to experience magic again. Magic Leap and Hololens sound like they might be the proper middle-ground between "face on screen" and Kinect.

Amiga was like Tesla (the car) is now.

Not that it was (is) blazing fast and technologically advanced in comparison to other models but the fact that it seems to have come from a whole another plane of technology.

Surely it helps to have multiple special-purpose chips onboard as it helps to have dense battery pack worth of 500km baked into the chassis. But that's not the thing.

What a 32-bit pre-emptively multitasking operating system with modern library stacks and system services for building user interfaces and applications was to old machines where you poked memory addresses directly to draw something on the screen is quite akin to what an internet-connected fully electrically powered and from-the-ground-up architected smart&mobile device-on-wheels is to clunkers primarily designed to host an oily, fire-burning engine and an appropriate steel drivetrain, with a passenger cabin retrofitted wherever there's space left from the mechanical components.

You could write high-level code and put that space ship spinning on the screen, and still have it rotate more smoothly than in any of the machines from preceding era—where no operating system or user interface was messing in the way. That was like having the cake and eating it too. And yet you could switch to "insane mode" by suspending the operating system and commanding the special chips directly, and do things people couldn't even imagine on 8-bit machines (and for the most part, on 16-bit machines too).

Amiga had elements so modern that it almost lasted till the end of the 90's, except for cpu power and marketshare. Considering it was born in the early 80's when 8-bit cpus could beep and produce blocks of color on the screen and died (for all practical purposes) in the internet era, that's one long stretch of time where it made the difference.

IIR, there were still Amigas buried deep in TV studios right up to the switch to HD. I remember watching local weather broadcasts and every once in a while that tell-tale amiga mouse cursor would make an appearance, and this was into the 2000s.

It's interesting that the OS has actually aged pretty well. I went back the other year and wrote a small application in AmigaE, a great little OO language specifically tailored for the M68k, and had a blast. I architectured it to use multiple processes and IPC, with the UI running at high priority at a steady 60 fps while image loading a decoding is done in the background. No assembly code or direct hardware access, just plain E and the full OS multitasking int he background, and it still runs without dropping a frame on a 7 MHz A500 with a floppy drive.

The code is on Github if anyone's curious:

  https://github.com/MagerValp/ArcadeGameSelector

I'm going to re-post a comment I wrote a few days ago here. Your last paragraph really struck a nerve with me (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894670)

> One of my best memories was Christmas 1985, waking up to my dad fiddling with the A1000 in the living room. He learned enough from the ComputerLand salesman to type `dpaint` at the `AmigaDOS>` prompt and launch the coolest thing[2] I'd ever seen.

> That computer was my only machine from 1985 through 1997, when I finally got a secondhand 486DX2-66 to replace it. It wasn't until well into the 2000s that I had a computer that could do the things I could do with that Amiga.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894641

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint#/media/File:Amiga....

In 4th grade a friend got an Amiga. He boasted that it had 4096 colors, and we ridiculed him mercilessly. There aren't that many colors! Can you name them?

We had our Apple IIs and TI-99/4As with their 16 colors or less and couldn't imagine anything greater.

Then we went to his house and saw Defender of the Crown, and we were humbled.

I remember having similar trouble imagining why a PC would need a sound card.

After all, the PC speaker could already play every note: C, D, E and so on... What could a sound card possibly add?

Then I got a copy of Sierra's demo cassette that had sounds from games like King's Quest IV and Space Quest 3. It blew my mind. I listened to it a hundred times. (The whole cassette is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A )

Of course the Amiga had 4-channel sample playback several years before my Sierra cassette revelation, but I didn't know anyone with an Amiga at that time.

I had a similar experience calling into Sierra's 800 number and listening to their hold music, which was music from their games played on a Roland MT-32. I had an 8 bit Sound Blaster at the time, which sounded pretty good, but this just absolutely blew my mind.

Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time, there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent. In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.

Yeah, it's interesting how we pretty much hit the ceiling on digital audio quality more than a decade ago. If I'd built my computers instead of buying premade, I could still be using the audio card I bought in 2000 and not have any problems with it. That's so alien to the general hardware experience.

Similarly I used to think that resolutions above 320 x 256 are just unnecessarily hi-fi. After that it becomes very difficult to see individual pixels, so how can you really appreciate the artwork of the game anymore?

There's a cool video on YouTube of the Monkey Island theme playing on different systems with varying sound cards, from the farty PC speaker, across a decade's worth of sound cards playing the MIDI differently, all the way up to the modern WAV audio mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y

The annoying thing about Defender of the Crown, is that as beautiful as the Amiga version was, the game was actually better balanced on the C64.

Its crazy how much tech leapfrogged back then. In 84/85 you still have the Apple II's in play, C64/128 were still being used, the PC jr just came out, and then the Mac and later the Amiga launched (at 1/3rd the price of the Mac, no less!)

Then DOS/Windows/Intel ate everyone's lunch, yet when did Windows have parity with Amiga and Mac? 3.0 nearly 5 years later? I guess this shows first to market isn't everything. Being able to tap into all that DOS business software turned out to be a big deal, even if the Wintel product was technically behind. The Windows 3.0 product with a 386 was just hard to beat and Amiga couldn't keep up. Especially since Commodore had to wait on Motorola chips that Apple didn't want before it could even order them.

Regardless, 82-90 was an insanely innovating period, the march from the C64 to Windows 3.0 was a fun ride. It must have been very exciting, and somewhat scary, to be in the industry then.

One can read "The Future Was Here", to learn more about the platform and its contributors. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here - there's also an accompanying website: http://amiga.filfre.net

Note that the Platform Studies series (http://www.platformstudies.com) has exciting upcoming stuff.

These are absolutely fantastic books. They hit the nostalgia buttons, but then go into some nitty gritty details about what these things were.

Racing the Beam absolutely changed how I think about pixels on a computer screen in a way that's hard to explain, but is quite profound.

I was 13-14, and a member of Telenet's "Net Exchange" BBS, which existed to support members of its "PC Pursuit" [1] service. I dialed in via a backdoor on one of Telenet's 800 numbers, using (at first) a 300 baud modem on a HP 110 laptop.

I got to be friends with a number of the folks on the system, and at the time, my main system was an Atari 520STfm (it was all we could afford). A bunch of the guys on the board took pity on me, took up a collection, and (secretly) called my mom. A month or so later, a Very Large Box arrived in the mail.

The guys had gotten together with one of their own who owned a computer store, and bought me a used, but well-equipped, Amiga 1000 system, along with an adapter that let me use my Atari monitor with it. The letter that came along with the system said "No smart kid should be without a decent computer. All we ask is that you do the same for someone else when you're able." It made my mom cry.

I used that system every day. Took it to school to show off a couple of times (we were using PS/2 Model 25s there, in comparison). It was used to do titling for the public-access news show my media class produced, among other things. It was my main system up until I had to "upgrade" (blech) to a 386sx-33 so I could run 1-2-3, Wordperfect 5.1, and DBase III+ for college classes. Over the years I acquired numerous A2000s, an A3000 or two, and even an A4K, but nothing beat the fun of firing up that A1000 back in the day.

I turn 41 this year, and have had a great 20+-year career as a UNIX/Linux systems administrator. I'll never forget those guys who pitched in and helped out some kid living in a tiny rural Oklahoma town - they really helped get me to where I am today. To continue the tradition, I build and give away at least 2-3 computers a year to people who are less fortunate. It's the least I can do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit

There's a YouTube channel with excrutiatingly in-depth Amiga repairs: https://www.youtube.com/user/RetroGameModz/videos

He goes down to the circuit level, including within microchips, identifies problems with all kinds of tools including spectrum analysers, and shows off some (to me) amazing soldering skills.

Here's a four hour (I kid you not) video of the repair of an Amiga CD32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZK3Rmerg1I

Wow

RetroGameModz videos are extremely by the book, IPC to the letter. Afair he is from Netherlands, or some other old rich European country, so he can afford 'wasting time' during repairs as a hobby. In real life this level of attention to detail (pedantry) is present _only_ in military, aviation and space (even medical is not that crazy). For example normal people dont reconstruct pads, they jumper over with kynar/enamel wire.

Couldn't agree more, his videos are extremely detailed and very easy to follow! I followed his A4000 audio repair video and managed to fix all the problems with my board.

The "Viva Amiga" film project doesn't seem to be finished yet, but according to their July 3, 2013 blog post, they interviewed Tim Jenison, the creator of the Video Toaster [2], and the current NewTek CEO, Jim Plant. That alone will be interesting.

Even if you aren't old enough to remember how the whole world somehow overlooked the amazing capabilities of the Amigas, it's an interesting and humbling historical lesson in how the best tech does not always win.

[1] http://vivaamigafilm.blogspot.com/2013/07/newtek-and-video-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

There also this movie coming some time soon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1195082866/from-bedroom...

I was about 12 years old. I had been engrossed with both the family Apple IIe computer and the fleet of Apple computers installed at my school, learning how to write BASIC programs. Wandering through the local shopping mall with my dad, we saw in the window of a software shop an Amiga 1200 running Lemmings.

I was awestruck. I started getting copies of Amiga-related magazines, and saw these amazing three-dimensional pictures of things like balls and rubber ducks. It was like gazing into the future.

Thankfully, my dad was likewise impressed, and within a few months we received delivery of a shiny new Amiga 3000. In anticipation of continuing my pursuit of programming, we got a compiler for an Amiga variant of BASIC, but I ended up focusing on two-dimensional graphics with Brillance, three-dimensional graphics with Imagine, and video editing with a variety of tools.

A friend at school picked up an Amiga 2000 and joined the multimedia production fun. It might be a good thing that we didn't have YouTube back then, as we likely would have published all sorts of embarrassingly poorly-done animations and videos. We persuaded our school to buy its own Amiga computer for us to edit the student newsletter on, but we both left the school the following year, and it was reported that the Amiga got shoved into a storage space, never to be used again.

I tried hard to persuade anyone who would listen to get an Amiga. The IBM-clones and Macs of the day just seemed so flat-out inferior, I couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't want an Amiga if they just realized what it could do.

I suppose I would have been happy to still be using the Amiga to this day, except that, after the demise of Commodore, it became increasingly (but not surprisingly) clear that support for the Amiga platform was dwindling. Some users have heroically clung to the Amiga even to this day, but even by 1996 or so it was looking prudent to move elsewhere.

Like remembering a corned beef sandwich from a deli you visited twenty years ago, I might be remembering the Amiga greater than it actually was. But even after thirteen years of using modern Apple computers (and iPads and iPhones and what-not), I still feel there was something magical about the Amiga that has not been captured in anything else.

Or maybe the Amiga captured something magical in me.

My first contact with a A500 was in a friends house. I was amazed by the graphics and the sound. At that time, I had a ZX Spectrum 48k, and had to save money for about 2 years to buy it. never had the money to buy a Amiga. Last month, got myself a A500 and I'm discovering a whole computer world that I've missed.

One interesting memory that I still have trouble explaining to people - multiple video modes on the same screen. I remember having a 640x400(ish) 256 color screen, then pulling it down halfway and having a 320x200(ish) workbench screen behind it. "Huh?" is what I usually get. Then "why would you want that?"

A nifty feature that's only possible on analogue monitors, I think. Like light guns.

It was also only worthwhile as long as multiple resolutions had different tradeoffs in terms of supported palette etc.

On the Amiga you even had paint programs using this to display the image you were editing at one resolution/palette, and the UI / tools etc. in a strip displayed at a different resolution.

Need to add to the Amiga love anecdotes.

- My first Amiga was an A500, eventually ended up with a chip RAM upgrade, an A520 20MB hard disk and some extra Fast RAM.

- I owned several Amigas in the early 90s, but I actually cried when I sold my A1200 to buy a 486 DX2 66! Why you may ask? Doom. It changed everything.

Doom was the death knell for my Amiga days as well. That and by that time, IIRC, it was obvious that Commodore was going under fast. I don't want to go pull out an Amiga and play, but it's rare to experience something that actually feels like a whole new ball game. (The Oculus Rift is close.)

After my first machine, an Atari 800, I had an Amiga 500 and loved it. But I didn't keep up with industry news at the time, so my first indication that All Was Not Well was when I walked into my local Amiga store (Omnitek, in Tewksbury, MA) and the Amiga stuff had been moved aside to make room for IBM PC-contemptibles... some of them with Commodore badges.

If you want an excellent book about Commodore:

http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/...

Or a great DVD about it's end - The Deathbed Vigil: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/video.html

Note that there's a second edition that's split into two volumes. The first covers the "8-bit era". The second, covering the "Amiga years" has just had a successful kickstarter [1] and should be ready by end of year hopefully. It greatly expands on the original.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-th...

I got an Amiga 500 the following year (or 2 years later? I can't remember). I was a kid, so 99% of my time was spent on games; most of my friends had a C64 or a ZXSpectrum, so basically they queued to come to my house...

My father went on to use Logistix extensively in his work, and even to compute results for some school election -- printing tons of pie charts with a dot-matrix.

He also used some graphic effects software (3dtext? Videotext? Can't remember). Because we did not have any video equipment or laser printer, he ended up taking pictures of the screen with his Reflex and then have them printed on actual slides. His colleagues were in awe. Now I can't believe he went to all that trouble!

By the time I actually paid some attention to the manuals and tried my hand at Workbench stuff, Amiga was on its way out. I ended up using an IBM emulator to run WordPerfect, and then just moved to a Windows 3.1 laptop; by then, "real" games had moved to consoles anyway.

The real question : Where do I download a dvd image with an emulator and 1000 games to replay my youth ?

Here: http://www.amigaforever.com/

I loved my Amiga A1000. I forgave the early, buggy floppy-based firmware (Kickstart) and OS (Workbench). I think this experience tempered me for a life working with good-intentioned but buggy operating systems. :-)

Fun fact: Comedian Dana Carvey's brother Brad Carvey built the first wire-wrapped Video Toaster -- arguably the Amiga's "Killer App", which spawned Lightwave3D and powered the visual effects of countless 90's science fiction shows (as well as some film work). In Wayne's World II you can spot Garth wearing a Video Toaster t-shirt to their music festival.

Also, Wil Wheaton did QA for the Video Toaster (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Post-Star_Trek).

Wow, that's really something -- stars on hit TV show for better part of a decade and moves to Kansas to QA an Amiga product. Illustrative of how passionate people were about the Amiga.

Often the software and OS APIs on that system are glossed over in favor of the hardware or the graphical shell. The Exec[1] was a marvel at the time -- and in some ways, still is. I don't know how much ARexx[2] preceeded AppleScript, but it was also, something that other OSes seldom got right.

It took other user-oriented operating systems about a decade to catch up, and in fact, the hardware everyone raves about in the Amiga fell behind far sooner than the system software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx

I still have my Amiga 500, working. Some years ago I built this 'website', imagining how an Amiga comeback would be: http://darioportfolio.com/amiga/

There's a very nice interview on Tweakers.net taken on the Amsterdam Amiga day, with many influential developers:

http://tweakers.net/video/10600/30-jaar-commodore-amiga-de-i...

RJ Mical and Dave Haynie are interviewed, who did hardware development for the Amigas, as well as Mike Dailly (creator of Lemmings) and Allister Brimble (composed for some well-known games of the platforms).

Lot's of Dutch inbetween explaining the historical significance, without subtitles, but probably worth a listen to just for what these guys have to say about the platform.

I remember when we upgraded the family computer from a (second-hand) Apple ][e to an (also second-hand) Amiga 500.

I had gotten my start programming in BASIC on the Apple ][, and was blown away by the stuff I could do using AMOS on the Amiga.

The Amiga 500 was eventually replaced by a new Amiga 1200. Sometime after the end of Commodore (I must have been 14 or so) my parents bought our first PC, a 486 (the latest and greatest at the time) running DOS / Windows 3.1... it just wasn't the same.

I missed out on the Amiga, going straight from 8bit Atari to x86. I used a A500 but never owned anything made by Commodore. I still find it fascinating and the Deathbed Vigil video was a great but melancholy watch. I never programmed for the Amiga but like everyone else I was always impressed by what the Amiga demoscene could do.

An unfortunate clash for the opening weekend with quakecon dates.

I'm reading "The Future Was Here" and it gives an excellent dive into the guts and history of the machine. I've really come to a new appreciation for how this crazy machine worked. Highly recommend this book for anybody with more than a passing interest in this legendary machine.

Amazed at an Amiga 1000 of a friend. Amiga 500 then A4000/40/RetinaZ3.

Been reading about modern Amiga hardware recently like the upcoming X5000 with Amiga OS 4.1. Almost tempted to try it. I forced myself to use Windows, OS X and various Linux for years, but they never felt right.

I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend.

> I am so going to this! My 13yo son is going to be so excited to attend.

I suppose you mean your 13yo inner child?

If you can afford it you should always sell a product for no more than a 100% of your cost. [1]

[1] 31:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvbsPNBIyk

Good old times!

Cool overview of the history of programming languages: http://goo.gl/Fa7mNi

Got my amiga 500 down from the loft about a year ago. It had lay dormant for at least a decade. Plastic had yellowed. I plugged it in and turned on the power switch, expecting to hear a fizz/pop and declare it dead. It booted up fine. And ran kick-off 2.

Seems the only thing to degrade in those 10 years is my reaction time.

Assuming you're hoping to play more Kick Off 2 (plus a bit of Sensi perhaps ;-) ), it's highly recommended to replace the capacitors, as leaking capacitors have a nasty habit of ruining old computers. Also, regarding "Plastic had yellowed.", you may be interested in this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright

I was in love with my C64 and everything Commodore including the Amiga, as any Apple die hard is today; but isn't it time we moved on? it was a computer, and it is no more... chao, and thanks for all the fish...

We won't move on until we have systems that consistently beat it. My phone is incomparably more powerful than my old Amiga - with a quad core CPU running on a clock frequency hundreds of times faster and with overall performance at least three orders of magnitude greater, yet even simple apps are often more sluggish, for example.

Sometimes it feels like we've moved backwards in many respects (yes, there are amazing improvements too)

and I seem to remember "the 6 million dollar man" as the most awesome series ever, and yet once every couple of years when I get the urge to look up an episode for old times sake I need to confront reality, that it actually totally sucked.

take a look at this top 10 games video for the Amiga - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kwS9fU7N4 , it may have rated as awesome in 1985-1990 but comparing it with anything today is totally ridiculous; and gaming is just an example, since this comparison extends to any other software genre, such as office, communication, engineering, scientific tools, programming tools, etc...

I have used AmigaOS and "descendants" like AROS many times in recent years, so I'm not just looking at this with rose-tinted nostalgia. In fact, I've contributed code to AROS.

And yes, there are still awesome things about it.

I've pointed out here before, for example, that I can booth AmigaOS or AROS on modern hardware (either under an emulator in the case of AmigaOS, or the Linux hosted version in the case of AROS) and have it boot straight into a text editor, and that whole process starts faster than Emacs on my laptop.

And there are still massive amounts of functionality that isn't readily available in mainstream OS's today.

Exactly because attitudes like yours means that lots of developers ignore a lot of the lessons these systems have for us - it's not just the Amiga.

> And there are still massive amounts of functionality that isn't readily available in mainstream OS's today.

Can you specify?

> lots of developers ignore a lot of the lessons these systems have for us

what lessons are you talking about?

> Can you specify?

One thing that always gets brought up is the datatypes API. I never got to experience it first-hand (as my username suggests, I'm more of a C64 guy). But the idea is that different types of media are handled independent of applications.

So something like Deluxe Paint could load a PNG by asking WarpPNG.datatype to parse the PNG file and return an IFF (the default data format for audio & video on AmigaOS). If it wanted to display the PNG without modifying it, Deluxe Paint could tell WarpPNG.datatype to display the file at (X,Y) at (Width, Height) and it would get rendered without any special code being added to the application.

This future-proofed applications. Imagine if Photoshop, Chrome, Preview, and Pages could all work with webp images as soon as you added a library and it registered itself to handle "pictures".

> Can you specify?

A few examples:

Datatypes lets most newer Amiga programs load any type of file of a format that people have written datatype libraries for. E.g. all image viewers and editors that supports datatypes (pretty much all the were still under development when datatypes where introduced) can load pretty much any image format you can think of without any explicit application support as people are still writing them. Datatypes support also exists for e.g. music, word processing documents and others. For some applications it makes sense to have their own custom filters for some formats, but datatypes provides a minimum level of support for even obscure formats, as well as continued support for new formats for applications that are no longer in development.

Similarly any app that supports XPK can transparently decompress and compress any compression format you drop a library for into the right directory (and in fact there's a XPK datatype, that if installed lets any application that supports another datatype - such as for images, or documents - support compressed versions of the same).

Assigns is one of my favorites: Amiga applications typically load libraries from "libs:". "Libs:" is a virtual directory that is the union of a set of paths that typically includes "progdir:libs/" (but doesn't have to). "progdir:" again is a virtual directory that refers to the directory the application is installed in. It's somewhat like $PATH, except you can create your own assigns, and lookups are handled at OS level. You can somewhat simulate it on Linux with combinations of various obscure filesystem drivers, but there's nothing like the ease of use of assigns. Assigns are also given special treatment in filesystem dialogs/requesters, which meant that e.g. having a "docs:" and "pics:" assign or similar was common ways of creating shortcuts to the stuff you used the most, without needing any explicit support anywhere.

And these names also extends to volumes/labels of physical media. Think backup application that knows the label of the DVD you burned file X to. Want to restore it? Backup application could ask you to insert DVD labelled "August 2014", or on AmigaOS it would just try to open the file "August2014:X" and AmigaOS will ask you to please insert volume "August2014" with no application support needed. This is admittedly a feature that was far more important when dealing with physical media was more common.

OS support for running controls/widgets (gadgets in AmigaOS) in separate threads ensures a high degree of responsiveness even when the machine is under high load.

Ease of writing filesystem drivers means you find stuff like FrexxEd - a text editor that exposes the open buffers as files, so that you can operate on the open buffers with any tools that can process a file.

Pervasive AREXX support meant pretty much every application can be fully scripted, either "natively" in AREXX, or from pretty much every language by talking to the applications AREXX port.

> what lessons are you talking about?

Decomposing applications and treating the system as a whole, for starters. For AmigaOS this was an absolute necessity: You wouldn't have the space to effectively multitask on a machine with 512KB RAM if everyone needed to pull in huge amounts of different dependencies. So there was a lot more effort into standard components, or replacements for standard components, that allowed applications to do more with very little.

Not being wasteful, certainly. Above I mentioned FrexxEd. The custom filesystem in FrexxEd might seem like unnecessary bloat. But on a small system it meant that you did not have to write to a temporary file in T: which would commonly be assigned to RAM:T/ which would mean you'd suddenly have a second copy of the file in memory, instead of just processing what was already there. Similarly, the way cut and paste is implemented in AmigaOS is intended to be able to deal with efficient buffering to T: in case it has been re-assigned to a slow device (even a harddrive would have been slow enough to make the UI sluggish if you were to cut and paste a large chunk of data).

But the things that made these applications work well on such small machines also makes them blazingly fast on modern machines where UI's are somehow still sluggish even when they don't add much functionality (it's another matter if a super-complex UI is slow)

the apple II, the C64, the mac, the Amiga, and later the PC, the Internet, Windows, Linux and then the IPhone and Android, dozens of other amazing projects, products, technologies and movements (e.g. open source), all revolutionized and transformed our lives or at least had some impact on the history of computing,

but how does an API for handling image formats amount to that today?

isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that time is now past?

Or to put it in Mr. Praline famous words: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Many of the abstract concepts introduced by the Amiga have not been replicated since. All the amazing things we do today we do by brute force. By throwing more clock speed and storage capacity and memory at the problems. Meanwhile, every application developer has to explicitly write—or include a library for—every format they want to support, every codec they want to be compatible with, etc.

Even with all of our gigahertz and gigabytes, we misty-eyed nostalgics know that it could have been so much better, more elegant.

> isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that time is now past?

Yes, it's totally fair to say that. But don't mistake all the love letters people write for the Amiga as irrational pining for "the good ole days". There's real substance there, real things that were lost, as vidarh's comment shows.

Datatypes were a very cool feature, not just a simple API. For an application to be able to support new format be it an image, video, spreadsheet, document or anything the application has to be updated to use a library or to add native support for that format.

Imagine if you could add a Datatype for an image format such as EXR and you would instantly be able to open it in Paint, embed it in Word and Powerpoint without having to update the apps. A DOCX Datatype would allow Wordpad to open Word documents. A new video format on the internet? No need to wait for browser support, just add the Datatype and it would work.

Another advantage of a system like this would be for security. If an serious exploit was found in a popular image decoding library then you could delete the offending Datatype and none of your apps could be exploited until the fault is fixed. May be inconvenient but at least it would be safe. Shared libraries could be used to handle this to an extent but most apps would probably crash if you deleted a required library and who knows if the app is using the shared library or a statically linked version?

There was a few nice features that were in the Amiga operating system but this was one that i wish had been implemented in other operating systems.

Tomorrow a new image format comes out (like it has many times over the years; consider WEBP for a reasonably new example). None of your applications supports it.

Suddenly you have to update everything before you can use it, and because it's like that for everyone, getting the new format into use is hard.

Except, your apps uses datatypes, so you just download a single datatype library and description, put it into the right directory, and suddenly your browser, your desktop publishing software, your paint program, your word processor, your image viewer all supports the new format and will happily load and/or save images from/to the new format.

Sounds familiar? Probably not, because it doesn't work like that on any modern platform. It did on the Amiga.

That's why datatypes are worth remembering.

As a demonstration of how this helps future-proof software, consider that most commercial Amiga software stopped receiving updates in the mid 90's, many of them before the advent of even png, and certainly before webp and similar. Yet all of the ones that supports datatypes for image access today support png and webp with no changes to the applications needed.

> isn't it fair to say that the Amiga had its day in the 80s and 90s, and that time is now past?

Of course it does, but that doesn't mean these concepts deserve to be forgotten.

What computer today has a culture comparable to the Amiga Demoscene of the 80s and 90s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6WtWYmz3iA

(Part 1 of 3.)

It wasn't just about games and productivity.

Much of that could pass for footage of iPhone games today. Often the clearest giveaway is the slightly lacking colour depth.

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