Posted on 05/27/2006 5:55:07 PM PDT by Coleus
Also I can't believe people still use Amigas! LOL
I will tell you that there were features of the Amiga that have STILL not been duplicated on either Macs or PCs... things like changing screen resolutions in midscan... Half the screen at 640x480, a third at 1024 x 768, and another sixth at some other rez... and the ability to drag those screens up and down. I often blew away PC and Mac users when I would have up to eight or more DIFFERENT resolutions being displayed at the same time on the same monitor.
In a day when the PC and Mac did not even have cooperative multitasking, the Amiga used true hardware controlled multitasking and it was extremely smooth... It also had a Unix like kernal and an OS that could boot from a single floppy... very tight, very well written. It was capable of emulating both DOS and Mac operating systems as fast as they ran on native machines (actually, the Mac emulation was faster on an Amiga than on a Mac with the same speed processor).
The Amiga pioneered the use of multiple processor computing. It was the Amiga that lead the way to the idea of having graphics handled by something other than the CPU... my Amiga 3000 had EIGHT co-processors. This was the secret that allowed a 25MHz 68030 Amiga to emulate a Mac and run it faster than a 25Mhz 68030 Mac could do it... the Mac used the CPU to do all graphics work while the Amiga had two co-processors to do it, leaving the CPU free to do more computing.
The Amiga 2000 with the NewTek Video Toaster was a phenomenal combination that opened broadcast quality video to the masses for the first time... and was used by professionals as well, replacing over 100,000 dollars of video switching gear with a $2000 computer and a $1600 video processing card.
The PC and Mac versions of the Video Toaster were really funny... both were a complete Amiga 2000 (with name removed) with Toaster card, connected to a complete PC or Mac through a SCSI cable... and only used the PC and Mac keyboards to control the Amiga... and display the Video Toaster control panel on their screens, while displaying the video output on the Amiga's screen. We Amiga users called the PC and Mac Video Toaster approach the most expensive dongle arrangement in the world.
The Amiga was a very sophisticted computer that was 10-12 years ahead of its time. I still have my Amiga 3000 and it booted fine the last time I tried it a couple of years ago. I still get some Amiga eNewsletters... the enthusiasts are still trying to resurrect the Amiga. It now runs on PowerPCs...
Actually it was CPM-86 with the serial numbers ground off... Trameil was furious when he found that Commodore had snatched the Amiga... so he raided Commodore for some of his old engineers and designers and quickly came up with the AtariST... and bought an operating system off the shelf, pasted an off the shelf graphical user interface on top of it... and beat the Amiga to market by about a month.
Another funny thing... the Commodore Amiga was designed by ex-Atari engineers using some of the design concepts used in the Atari 400 and 800... and the AtariST was designed by ex-Commodore engineers using some of the design concepts used in the Commodore 64 and 128! Ironic, wasn't it.
This was in the Mid-80's I was like in 5th grade.
One slight correction... I misrememberated... it's Jack Tramiel who bought Atari (with no money down, incidentally, and a promise to pay $140million dollars later) thinking it had the Amiga...
Sam Tramiel is his son who later became the CEO of Atari after his father elevated himself to Chairman of the Board.
I still remember playing Atari baseball and football for hours! And ultima on both computers I think Ultima 5 is the last one i bought for the commodore.. :D
Regards, Ivan
WOW! no money down! sheesh.. what a gamble... :P
There was one C64 game that was phenomenal... literally. Magic Carpet was this simple little game that had you flying through these triangular gates that came at you, increasing in size as the got closer... they could rapidly change direction and you had to "bank" your carpet to follow the path. You controlled the motion of the entire screen as though you were sitting on a magic carpet with the joystick... soon you would be swaying back and forth in your chair as you felt the flying motions... fun.
WOW! I never played that one... I had racing destruction(or construction cant remember) set, but you could get these cars and race them and smash each other! that was fun! Also a space game called "Elite" I remember it had this stupid plastic thing as a anti-pirate technology where you hold it up the the screen... Sheesh! kind of like an early version of homeworld or something.
more misremberation... it was $240 million to pay later.
Also, I found a citation that says that, contrary to my memory (and I distinctly remember hearing Jack Tramiel himself talking about the "Tramiel Operating System" at a meeting I attended) the name of the OS was TOS for THE Operating System.
I actually think The Operating System is revisionism by Tramiel... apparently he didn't like people pronouncing his name TRA-meal when it is TRA-Mell... it irritated him to hear people say TRA-meal Operating System.
Another reason I think this is that THEOS was already established as an operating system... and it was registered as The Operating System. I used THEOS in some vertical solution applications in the late 70s and 80s... it was a fast, powerful, and small OS for Intel computers that was superb at database management. Atari could not have registered The Operating System as the name for TOS. It was taken.
OMG the guy must have been insane! LOL
thanks for the info on that Atari! imagine going back in time with one of todays laptops, armed with all the emulators! sheesh they would be freaking out!
That they would... good night.
good nite, and thanks for the chat. :D
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