Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-time/

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phs318u• 7 hours ago

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.

khazhoux• 6 hours ago

It was magical.

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.

pjmlp7• 6 hours ago

I sign the sibling comment about being magical.

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.

TacticalCoder• 6 hours ago

... 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).

vidarh11• 6 hours ago

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.

vidarh11• 6 hours ago

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)

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/

doener2• 5 hours ago

I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.

Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9

quadpro• 5 hours ago

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).

vidarh11• 5 hours ago

I'm still waiting...

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.

mickelsen• 4 hours ago

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:

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

anthk3• 3 hours ago

A millenial there; I could emualte it with ease under UAE and floppies and multiple guides in early 00's.

tosti• 6 hours ago

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.

technothrasher• 3 hours ago

I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.

metalspot• 5 hours ago

In the early 90s I had an elementary teacher who was an amiga nerd and had a couple for us to play with. Best class ever.

kryptonomist• 5 hours ago

Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.

Annatar• 5 hours ago

We all have our delusions.

vidarh11• 4 hours ago

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.

flohofwoe4• 2 hours ago

Ok I had to upvote you for old times sake and to honor the eternal Amiga-vs-Atari flamewars. But of course you are obviously and objectively very wrong.

Amiga 4 Ever! :D

dosisking2• 1 hour ago

Of course, everybody knows that the X68000 is better than both the Amiga and Atari ST

dosisking2• 2 hours ago

In hindsight, I think it was. The built in MIDI is extremely useful. The high resoution B&W monitor with high refresh rate as well. My main complaint is that it should have came with the YM2203 sound chip, or at least had an optional card slot for it.

It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.

SwellJoe• 5 hours ago

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.

The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos

actionfromafar2• 4 hours ago

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.)

You are right about graphics.

iugtmkbdfil834• 1 hour ago

Agreed. In my particular case, it did not help that were not exactly rich, so I got to, however briefly, become a zealot in amiga vs pc war. Still, one of a kind experience.

johnyzee• 33 minutes ago

Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.

somat• 5 hours ago

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.

vidarh11• 5 hours ago

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.

dd8601fn• 5 hours ago

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.

Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.

pjmlp7• 2 hours ago

Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT.

In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.

atomic_cowprod• 1 hour ago

The 80's Mac were also two other things that made them less desirable for home users: they were seen as very slow (compared to "contemporary" home computers of the time - "instant-on" Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and DOS machines), and they were monochrome. No colour = terrible for gaming.

spacedcowboy2• 5 hours ago

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.

doener2• 5 hours ago

but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected

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.

UncleSlacky• 2 hours ago

The UK also had the Sinclair QL (68008-based) in 1984 for £399, famously owned by Linus Torvalds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Linux

smallstepforman4• 2 hours ago

To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.

rwmj• 2 hours ago

I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.

pjmlp7• 2 hours ago

To match the Amiga in gaming, only from STE improvements onwards.

At least when the Amiga crashed it got to do some meditation. :)

phire• 5 hours ago

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.

jjav• 5 hours ago

The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K

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!

brazzy• 3 hours ago

I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine.

Different times...

smallstepforman4• 2 hours ago

You also got a battery backed clock with the 512kb memory upgrade :)

dev0p2• 4 hours ago

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.

elpocko• 4 hours ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw

In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.

Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.

dev0p2• 4 hours ago

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.

mrob• 4 hours ago

There's a good article about this:

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.

flohofwoe4• 3 hours ago

Not surprising since this is a floppy-based system. An HD-based A3000 cold booted faster than most modern systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-e3w7Hh9eU

Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.

amiga3865• 2 hours ago

To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!

This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.

The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.

snvzz• 3 minutes ago

The keyword being latency.

Even a powerful 9800x3d doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does.

It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).

giov4• 4 hours ago

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.

thank you commodore, thank you dad.

and thanks for this time traveling post!

zedr• 4 hours ago

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

flohofwoe4• 3 hours ago

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').

Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked.

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.

0x1ceb00da2• 3 hours ago

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.

fredoralive2• 3 hours ago

That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.

nikanj• 3 hours ago

The trackpad is not "locked", it's moving just as much as it used to, but the driver running the haptic fake click feedback is dead.

Apple's haptic technology is some deep black magic

fredoralive2• 3 hours ago

Implementing mouse cursors as a hardware sprite isn’t that uncommon for 2D accelerated graphics, albeit later than on the Amiga. Something like an ATI Mach32 has one for example. About 15 years ago I had a crappy Dell whose Radeon card would randomly glitch the cursor, so it survived at least until then in newer systems. The extra responsiveness is more of an Amiga thing though.

kamma44342• 1 hour ago

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)

But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.

gxd• 4 hours ago

One of my game's main characters is an Amiga fan and the Amiga vs ST rivalry has small cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

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...

flohofwoe4• 3 hours ago

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.

pjmlp7• 2 hours ago

It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS.

Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.

smallstepforman4• 35 minutes ago

BeOS/Haiku uses datatypes natively

rumgewieselt• 3 hours ago

Unrelated fact: My German Amiga 1000 keyboard has a serial number that ends with ... 00012. loved memories.

krige• 3 hours ago

10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X

andrewstuart• 3 hours ago

I thought “I think I have an Amiga 1200 in the garage in a box.”

Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.

LordDefender• 3 hours ago

Please recap them, or find a pro to do it. Otherwise they get damaged by leaking capacitors.

mdlxxv• 3 hours ago

Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.

SirFatty• 48 minutes ago

I wanted one, but unlike the C64 I could not afford it.. but I wanted that and a Video Toaster.

Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

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