How the Commodore Amiga Powered the Prevue Channel

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-commodore-amiga-powered-your-cable-system-in-the-90s

by doener • 10 years ago

85 35 10 years ago

erickhill• 10 years ago

I cringe at the thought that the Amiga is partially responsible for what we perceive today as Muzak. As sourced from the article: https://www.youtube.com/user/PrevueChannelMusic

Mithaldu• 10 years ago

I hope you'll be happy to hear that Muzak is being kept alive even nowadays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84iTur1-yww

MrBuddyCasino• 10 years ago

Surprisingly awesome.

fit2rule• 10 years ago

Muzak predates Amiga by at least a decade I'd say ..

commieneko• 10 years ago

Muzak dates back to the 1930s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak_(brand)

ktRolster• 10 years ago

Also helped to make Babylon 5

bch2• 10 years ago

And Todd Rundgren videos[0][1]...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mH8PaWbi1E

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Wind

Jaruzel2• 10 years ago

And early bits of Star Trek Voyager.

I am and always will be an Amiga fan; Got an Amiga 1200 with modern '040 CPU board, and a DVI video out. Best home computer, ever.

ayuvar• 10 years ago

I didn't know they had DVI cards yet, much less one with a flicker fixer built in.

My 1200HD has a sketchy VGA adapter that came with it when I found it in a Value Village; when I try to play games every LCD I have in the house refuses to go to a low enough scanrate. A flicker fixer seems like just what I need.

wallflower• 10 years ago

I still want one.

https://medium.com/people-gadgets/the-gadget-we-miss-the-vid...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/49562/video-toaster-4000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1OVWfmynPw

anexprogrammer6• 10 years ago

I just want someone to implement how Intuition did screens into any other platform, ideally OSX or Linux. It often gets mentioned, yet no one ever has. It can't be that difficult. I can live without the copper trickery.

louprado• 10 years ago

It can't be that difficult.

I remember a Commodore developer(?) once saying "Intuition is the only one word oxymoron he knows".

The context isn't clear but perhaps it was difficult to implement.

vidarh3• 10 years ago

Enlightenment provides draggable workspaces, or at least did (I haven't used Enlightenment since about 1999) provide that. I used to use that. The usefulness is substantially less today without having different video modes and the copper trickery

(EDIT: For those who haven't used the Amiga, apart from providing multiple workspaces, which was in itself a big deal for home computers at the time, it was exceedingly useful because there was no "best" video mode those days - you could have high resolution and few colours, or low resolution and "many" colours - this made draggable screens very useful as you could e.g. have a high resolution screen visible on part of the display, and a low resolution screen on the rest if you wanted. E.g. some paint programs made use of that to show their toolbars etc. in a fixed resolution, with the image itself on a different screen)

Today there's always AROS, which can run hosted on Linux and runs a bunch of Amiga apps, though there are still painful missing parts to AROS and it's not an option to let you run Linux apps on Amiga-style screens.

baldfat• 10 years ago

I cam just to say how BIG Video Toaster was in video. My church was about to drop a HUGE amount of money for a similar product in the 1980s. As a teenager I got heard and they bought the thing. It was working all the way till 2001.

mhd• 10 years ago

I definitely remember the Guru Meditation Errors on our local public TV station...

anexprogrammer6• 10 years ago

Now you get billboards and news channels showing Win BSODs.

Did you know that you could plug in a serial terminal hit right mouse and drop into a debug session (ROMWack) from a non-recoverable guru? Guru got a lot of stick, but they were really useful for developing.

bch2• 10 years ago

Origins[0], for those not steeped in Amiga lore. I love it when this sort of humour or inside joke works it way into production...

I also recall the schematics for the chips/PCBs having song lyrics[1] (I assume this is a Tom Petty reference) on them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation#Origins

[1] http://www.amigawiki.org/dnl/schematics/A2000_R6.pdf (page 9, bottom right)

Edit: Now I see that it looks like _all_ the pages have pertinent lyrical hints... the Tom Petty lyric happened to be what stuck in my mind

esaym• 10 years ago

I remember watching that channel at my grandmother's house. Every summer I used to stay there for a month or so. I'd always hit the "channel scan" option on the TV menu to see if they had any new channels that they didn't have from the last time I was there. I remember this channel popping up on like channel 97 on Time Warner or something.

spdustin• 10 years ago

Oh the Video Toaster. Kiki Stockhammer. Newtek was doing amazing things for less money than anything else in its time. we had a Video Toaster in my HS TV Productions class. Between that and OctaMED, I spent a lot of my extra time in that class.

yeureka• 10 years ago

This is the machine were I learned about programming, graphics, sound, 3D design, animation, video editing, Vjing, games development, operating systems, multi-tasking, you name it, and all in the early 90's.

One of my first jobs before university was doing realtime cgi on an Amiga 3000 with a GenLock attached to an editing suite full of Betacam machines and editing desks.

Fun times!

But I try to avoid reading the latest posts on the Amiga because I tend to feel nostalgic and sad when I do.

It was painful when Commodore went bankrupt. I almost considered not going into computer science.

baudehlo• 10 years ago

I still to this day feel like I never got the full system slow downs that our current OSs get on my Amiga. It may have had no memory protection and thus crashes took down the whole system, but it sure was a joy to use. It's a great story of how a fantastic system was doomed by the company that owned it.

aswanson• 10 years ago

Funny thing is the cable UI for preview is pretty much identical to this today.

Spooky23• 10 years ago

It's far worse for me -- the scroll is about two lines high, and there's a constant barrage of really bad advertising.

hoodoof• 10 years ago

So many viruses.....

How the Commodore Amiga Powered the Prevue Channel

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