The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.
https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...
I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.
1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.
I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.
I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.
The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.
But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles.
When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.
It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV.
As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead designers.
Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles.
(Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)
Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive).
>I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.
For anybody curious, the Amiga Documents[0].
None of us replaced them with consoles.
While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.
Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)
Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.
Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.
My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).
Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.
Like Apple/Mac?
Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?
The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time.
The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
I mean TV studios and media houses, but admittedly, that's not exactly a huge market.
This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.
I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)
Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.
It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.
In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with the experience of it being VERY common for people around them to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one with one.
Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
Isn't this what "Unified Memory" does in more modern systems? There's nothing wrong with sharing memory between CPU and hardware graphics.
Memory speeds plateau'd while CPU speeds skyrocketed. Almost all the complexities of modern architectures have to do with this. There used to be "no need" for something as funky as L1/L2/L3 caches really because often your memory was faster than your CPU (hence why something like the C64's VIC-II or the Atari ST's "Shifter" are even possible).
Hell there were systems back then that didn't even have onboard registers in the CPU, but used external memory for it (TI's TMS series). The 6502's "zero page" is another example.
You can't do that anymore. The CPU will run many laps around your memory.
Still it'd be interesting to see what Jay Miner would have come up with in the late 90s or 21st century, if he was still around and in the game.
If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip.
Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips.
And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".
To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip".
I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade.
(What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...
Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX, AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...
Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT.
The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked"
Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.
As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM.
If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great.
Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs.
Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus).
Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
They had patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US4780844A/en they had design documents for original chip, they had chip fab, they had no one with skill nor will to pay for it. All it needed was adding switchable clock dividers to control logic.
Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did. (2024)
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.
Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.
Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.
Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.
I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.
I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.
If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still be around today.
