For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then.
The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.
This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.
As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.
I would not be who I am if my father didn't buy an amiga 1000 for my bigger brother. I was around 7 years old, I still have a few memory frames of the original package unboxing when it arrived.
I was too small but I remember the feeling, after that I merged with computers.
the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system), dialed into BBSes of many sorts.
At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.
Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.)
I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems.
Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.
It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today:
1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties
> 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').
What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions
AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.
When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985."
Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game.
The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”).
The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?
What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.
The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas.
In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.
That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.
In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else.
At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.
The first 386 PC didn't arrive until September 1986. It wasn't until like 1991 that sales of 386/486 PCs went above 50%.
Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.
DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.
I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be.
However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
I'm a millennial and I discovered the Amiga, the demoscene, the lore and so on way after its era thanks to the catchy tracker music and demos. I've had several different re-introductions over different stages in my life, but the first was by trying to figure out as a kid how the tunes of my games could pack so much in less than 1MB per song, when my mental model was only MIDIs, WAVs or MP3s. Then I figured it out and got Modplug Tracker from the school's computer lab (had no internet at home) and that whole rabbit hole.
I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.
There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:
I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.
My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).
My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.
My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.
I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.
I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.
I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.
(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)
As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.
However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.
Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
That last sentence of the article about waiting for the rest of the world to catch up really describes how I felt for way too long after 1994. In addition to the things mentioned in the article and the comments here, by that time I was used to having a standard OS-supplied scripting language that every self-respecting software program integrated with (ARexx), a standardized localization mechanism for software (locale files), and a generic OS-wide mechanism for handling file formats (datatypes).
Finally switching over to Windows and Linux really felt like a big step backwards in some ways, and it took quite some time for the rest of the world to catch up (subjectively at least).
I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing.
Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit.
I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations I'm unaware of that we've largely forgotten about.
> ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be
Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.
> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.
Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.
> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).
GenXer signing off.
P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people.
Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then)
Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.
By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.
The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.
The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.
This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.
As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.
the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.
thank you commodore, thank you dad.
and thanks for this time traveling post!
At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.
The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos
You are right about graphics.
Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.
It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.
https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/
(previous discussion)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972
The Amiga feels fast because its slowness is predictable. Modern systems have unexpected slowness, and unexpected things are always more noticeable.
The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.
Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes
2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)
3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties
Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').
What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.
> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions
AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.
Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?
What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.
This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.
Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!
In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.
That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.
In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple.
Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.
DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.
That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...
However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.
There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ
My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).
My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.
My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.
I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.
I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.
I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.
(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/
Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9
As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.
However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.
Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing.
Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit.
I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations I'm unaware of that we've largely forgotten about.
Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background.
And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music.
I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.
Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.
> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.
Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.
> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).
GenXer signing off.
P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then)
Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.
By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.
We Gen-Xers are used to being completely ignored as a generation. That is not new at all.