I don't know much about the Amiga, but it sounds to me like the way in which it was a "nice computer" was that it was pushing a quirky design well past where it should actually have been, and that it was rapidly hitting the end of the road technically regardless of what the management was doing. That is to say, listening to descriptions of the Amiga reminds of listening to OS 9; yes, it's full of nice things and there's all sorts of ways to argue about how it's "better than PCs" but in the end you can't handwave around the fact that the foundation is at or beyond its capacity and there's no way to incrementally advance.
Apple managed to make the leap to OS X, as Microsoft managed to move to the NT base before it. I don't see how Commodore was going to do it without being something fundamentally different. Their machines were nice but it seems to me they were always building machines for today, never thinking much about tomorrow. But tomorrow comes... it always does.
I'm posting this because I'm curious about reactions; if this is flamingly wrong I'd love to hear. I don't have direct experience, except with the Commodore 64, which looking back was already experiencing the "make a computer for today" problem in many ways.
I have to disagree. The Amiga's design was not the decisive problem. The IBM PC prospers to this day with many traces of its legacy surviving as junk DNA from its haphazard evolutionary path. Had the Amiga survived in some form, no doubt the fully evolved platform would bear similar marks of its gaming-centric past, mostly in the hardware interface, not the operating system.
You yourself bring up the Mac's leap to OS X. On a technical level that wasn't so much a transition as a hard reboot, only made possible by some truly heroic programming of compatibility systems software. OS X got off to a bumpy start but not enough to kill it. The Mac since went from PowerPC to x86 by another feat of compatibility wizardry in the form of Rosetta. But what would have been easier than looking at the state of the Macintosh in the late 90s and pronouncing it a dead-end, a lost cause?
Commodore's problem was first and foremost cultural. I've always found myself in the unusual position of loving the C64 and the Amiga but hating Commodore.
The problem is that the management of the Amiga did little to evolve it. It didn't need a revolution, ala OS X. It just needed refinement over time, of which there was none. The Amiga that Commodore purchased was the Amiga that died.
The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1984. Had VideoScape 3D in 1987.
It's hard to say that they were building computers for today, when they're machines were doing things the mainstream OSes (Mac and Windows) wouldn't do for a decade.
It would be like introducing the iPhone in 2000. And then doing nothing for 10 years.
I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so far ahead of the field when released. And yet virtually all of it squandered.
> I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so far ahead of the field when released.
Maybe the PDP-1? Or the Tera MTA? Or the Transputer? Or the CDC 6600? Or VisiCalc? Or the 6502? Or Intel's first X25-M SSD? Or Gmail?
Preemptive multitasking by itself isn't very interesting. It's useful if you're running a real-time control task (in which case, on MS-DOS, you would hook an interrupt, and fuck the lack of OS) or if you have memory protection, which the Amiga didn't. That's why the mainstream OSes didn't have it for another decade: because it didn't matter. (And concurrency control is much simpler without it.)
The Amiga had lots of other awesome stuff in the late 1980s, stuff that (as others pointed out) still isn't mainstream. But preemptive multitasking without an MMU is mostly a waste of time.
I did use an Amiga, but not long enough to really get a feel for it.
Gmail was so much better than the competition — Hotmail and Rocketmail — that Microsoft thought it was an April Fool's joke and advertised that new Hotmail users would get something like a terabyte each.
It's disappointing that you deleted your post, because I hadn't heard of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_1604 before. The way that I heard the PDP-1 was significant was that it was something like 100 times the speed of any machine within a factor of 10 in price. But I can't source that in any detail. Is it possible that that statement was true but only until the 1604 came out in the same year?
Sorry, deleted my last post. Thought I was a bit snarkier than I usually am. :-)
I will say that I thought Yahoo was almost strictly better at Gmail launch, except one thing... storage. And Yahoo was actually reducing the size if I recall correctly.
I do use gmail now, although I still find the UI, on the web at least, to not be to my liking.
The 1604 was a great device, along with the PDP-1. The PDP was certainly smaller and cheaper (1/4 the price), but the CDC was faster. Both were among the first (maybe the first two?) transistorized computers.
Amigas of the day ran Mac software much faster than the mac did - they shared processor architecture (68000), so there was no need to translate code, and unlike the macs of the day, it had hardware acceleration for 2D graphics ("blitter") and sound (paula, denise or angus - can't remember which).
The amiga was a technology marvel when it came out - it could do background 14-bit stereo sample playing in 1985 (PC got there around '92), and true useful multitasking with 128K (PC got there around '94, but not with so little memory).
Graphics wise, it was on par with the arcade machines of the era - the PC got there in '93 or so.
Technically, it was superior. And then the business part was miserably run, and the tech side stagnated (that is, was also miserably run).
The Amiga was unique when it came out due to its custom sound and graphic chips that placed it beyond any existing home computer at the time (1985). Unfortunately, the hardware didn't change all that much and was slowly eclipsed first by graphics (VGA came out 1987 offering more colors) and then sound (SoundBlasters in the early 90s).
The other issue was the operating system, which is really three pieces---Exec, DOS and Intuition. Exec is the kernel, written in 68000 assembly and appears as just another shared library to the system (neat design really). It's small (I was able to recreate over half of it in C in just a few hours) and would have been able to keep up as is until multiprocessor cores became popular, which would have required a somewhat major change (critical sections were handled by literally disabling task switching). It also has no notion of users (being a single user machine).
DOS, the file system. This itself was a port of a portion of Tripos (written in BCPL) which only took two weeks to do (or four; it was a really short period of time). It's a bit quirky (due to it being written in BCPL) but it worked and given the nature of device drivers in the Amiga (a combination of shared library and a potential thread) it could easily support other file systems rather transparently. This is probably the least problematic aspect of the operating system to update for modern machines.
And finally Intuition, the GUI. This was written in C, and unfortunately, was rather closely tied to the underlying hardware. Not only could you specify a new screen (different screen resolution and color depth) but access to the blitters (which were also used by the floppy disk drivers to decode the bit stream I kid you not) and even the raw video co-processor (a three-instruction CPU that could be used to reset the video registers at an almost arbitrary portion of the video scanning beam). Some of the upper layers of Intuition were fairly video independent but not enough of it to survive a major redesign of the video subsystem.
You're pretty much right in that it was a "nice computer" (I found it really fun to program) but it didn't evolve all that much while on the market. Exec would need some work to work on today's multicore hardware and Intuition would have to be reworked from the ground up.
Apple managed to make the leap to OS X, as Microsoft managed to move to the NT base before it. I don't see how Commodore was going to do it without being something fundamentally different. Their machines were nice but it seems to me they were always building machines for today, never thinking much about tomorrow. But tomorrow comes... it always does.
I'm posting this because I'm curious about reactions; if this is flamingly wrong I'd love to hear. I don't have direct experience, except with the Commodore 64, which looking back was already experiencing the "make a computer for today" problem in many ways.