Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

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1985.

The PC had just got EGA. VGA wouldn't arrive for a couple more years. Everyone was speechless seeing the A1000 after loading a demo, game, or even the desktop. Then make it talk - software speech synth better than hardware solutions of the time. Pre-emptive multi tasking. Windows could background print.

It was so far ahead, how could it possibly fail? C= marketing.

They got so much right. There's still things I miss - Amiga Screens for one. Open IFF file formats and datatypes.library. Arexx. CygnusEd. Intuition was lovely to program. Card autoconfig that worked - none of this plug and pray bull.

I hated every PC I used until probably XP. I bought several fully loaded PCs, but kept going back to the a3000 and a4000 for ages and loaded FreeBSD or Linux on the PCs.

I remember getting some program for both platforms - Superbase maybe, I forget. Something big and businessy. On the Ami it was 2 floppies. On the Win version it was around 20 floppies. The Ami version had a couple more features and lacked none.

Yet the PC and windows won. Funny old world.

>It was so far ahead, how could it possibly fail? C= marketing.

True. But also, the hardware barely advanced for a long time. Commodore didn't even start to architect a next generation graphics chipset until 1988, and didn't release a significant upgrade until the AGA in the Amiga 4000, in 1992. Seven years after the original Amiga! In retrospect they should have been far more aggressive with their hardware upgrades. Their inability to do so let the rest of the market catch up.

Also very true. Don't forget Dave Haynie and the rest had been working (intermittently) on AAA since 1988-89 or thereabouts, and had a prototyped 3000+ running the OS in 91. This was right about the time Medi Ali was appointed CEO and chief asset stripper, who started kicking out people from engineering, replacing with PC people and putting projects on hold. With hindsight they probably distracted too long with CDTV. They never did figure out how to market the professional side though.

3000+ was another good leap forward - 16 bit Paula with 8 full pcm channels, DSP co pro, on board network, a stupid amount of DMA channels (64?), and the AA Agnes graphics that did make it to the 4000. I think also on board soft modem (via yet another DSP).

What we got was the 4000, with IDE (spit). We'd had specs and schematics of the 3000+ going around the developer community for a year or more. I'm hazy now what was AAA and what was 3000+, but no one at all was impressed with the 4000. It was a cheap PC with some Amiga chips. Even Commodore UK were unimpressed (and later called the A600 a total screw up) :)

AAA was another stellar leap in 1988-90. PC's were starting to catch up in 1992/93 so it was abandoned for the RISC project. No idea how far that got, but it wasn't going to be original chipset compatible. Bankruptcy came next in 94. Then all the new owners. Starting with Escom who almost immediately went bankrupt. :D

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