If you’re an Amiga fanboy type, kindly refrain from posting “nonexistent” or “obsolete”. I mean if the Amiga platform had remained alive and gained some marketshare, and was perceived as a viable #3 choice throughout the 90s (and presumably evolved and perhaps converged as the Mac and PC did). Or had done quite well and had become the market leader, with the Windows PC and the Mac behind it at #2 and #3 but still doing adequately well themselves.
A viable Amiga platform’s best ideas would have permeated the Mac and PC platforms, I assume. What ideas from the AmigaOS might have been picked up on and become ubiquitous?
I remember they had a different approach to a command line and how it interacted with programs when you ran them. How did that work?
What else was different, not so much in terms of applications or games or chips that only the Amiga had, but in terms of its approach to things?
I remember that the icons were different and could be any size.
Disks…how disks mounted. It was neither the PC way with drive letters nor the Mac way with volume names, right? It was more like Unix (disk2s1)?
The problem is: this is hard to answer because it didn’t thrive.
The truely amazing stuff (offloading video and audio to dedicated chips) were only amazing because commodity silicon couldn’t do the same stuff as fast. I’ve noticed that these features never seem to go very far long term (I’m thinking the chips on the Amiga, the custom DSP’s in the NeXT cube, the AltiVec instructions in the G3-Gg5 chips.)
Does an nVidia card and seperate soundcard sound familiar? It’s pretty much what the Amiga did…with the benefit of having the ability to piecemeal upgrade those components.
but that’s unimportant. If there’s one thing the Computer industry has shown is: Just how poorly geeks run companies. Amiga died primarily due to incompetent management.
I never used an Amiga but I have heard great things about them. I did have a Commodore 64 and still run it under emulation on my current computer. You can pry it out of my cold dead hands. The thing taught me at age nine things that lead me to my current job.
This isn’t about the Commodore 64 but it is. Commodore was once an outstanding computer company. They ushered in the personal computer age like no one else including IBM and the clones. The Amiga was supposedly truly superior to both the PC and the Mac :eek: in terms of hardware and design. Somehow, they screwed the pooch and the opportunity is probably lost forever. It could have gone other ways in an alternate universe though and we would be sitting here basically the same but just a little different.
Yeah, I remember seeing a 4096-color Amiga doing interesting artwork when all Macintoshes were those little black-and-white toasters like my SE. I agree that if they hadn’t had massively incompetent idiots at the helm they would at a minimum still be in the game as one of the three commercial platforms, and under ideal conditions for Commodore Inc might have been the only player left standing.
Pretend I’m a computer ignoramus and you’re going to teach me how to open programs, save documents, mount disks, use a word processor, connect to a server over a network, send an email, draw a picture, create a spreadsheet, duplicate a file, rename a folder, format a hard drive, copy a file to a different drive, etc: if all the ideas had come from the Amiga as it stood when Commodore folded, what would those tasks be like?
I suppose it’s a twofold question, since I never had an Amiga: how did you do those things on an Amiga, and which of them stand out in your mind as superior to how Macs and/or Windows PCs did them at that time and therefore might have become THE way that computers did those things?
The first thing that comes to mind is that the Amiga OS has preemptive multi-tasking long before Microsoft or Apple. And it worked in 256kb of memory. Also, Amiga introduced the concept of ‘plug and play’. Any device for an Amiga needed to be plugged into use.
Preemptive multi-tasking didn’t come to Microsoft until Windows 95 (7 or 8 years later). I’m not sure when it happened with Apple.
‘Plug and Play’, of course, was introduced by Microsoft with Windows 95, although I’m sure everyone remembers that it was referred to as ‘Plug and Pray’.
Bob
Apple computer designers (like my brother) were more likely to look at what was being done in the research labs or in the high-end computers, than at competitors like Amiga. The Mac line was more influenced by the work at the IBM research park, and by Apple’s own Lisa computer.
So what were the file naming conventions on the Amiga? How many characters long could a filename be, and did filenames also have extensions? Prior to Windows 95, the 8.3 convention was one of the biggest limitations on the PC platform.