The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine

85 点作者 mgunes大约 10 年前

11 条评论

bane大约 10 年前

I think this bit was really interesting analysis:"Amiga’s financial difficulties provided the opportunity of a lifetime to a bunch of folks that may have struggled to get in the door in even the most junior of positions at someplace like Apple, IBM, or Microsoft."It reminds me a bit of the recent realization Google has had (after trolling through vast amount of employment data) they see virtually no difference in performance from people with high pedigrees that people without.<a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-not-impressed-by-your-fancy-ivy-league-credentials/" rel="nofollow">http://www.the-american-interest.com/2013/06/24/google-is-no...</a>It's a lesson that seems to keep getting relearned over and over again. Hire the individual, not the GPA, not the degree, not the school.These guys produced an amazing machine virtually on a shoe-string.It also comes up a lot in some circles that the Amiga was spiritually the follow-on to the Atari 8-bit computers, not the ST. A podcast I've been listening to recently has some wonderful interviews with some of the industry people from that time period and there's some great insight into this transition.<a href="http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/</a>

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cmrdporcupine大约 10 年前

This is a good honest account of the Amiga, I'm glad to see somebody to admit its faults and quirks rather than blindly sing glorious praise to it as is often the case with its former (or present) users.I was an Atari ST user back then, the "other 68000 home computer". When comparing the ST and Amiga it is easy to get caught up in hardware capability comparisons, but the ST was 2/3rds the price of an Amiga, and shipped with more RAM and didn't have the interlaced video. There was nothing like the ST's hi-rez monochrome monitor (very good quality) for the Amiga. Really the ST was like a budget Mac, but with a higher clock rate, higher monochrome screen resolution, and disk format compatibility with MS-DOS. Here's a similar accounting of the first genesis of the ST: <a href="http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html</a>The Amiga was a great piece of hardware, and the games for it were generally the best in class. And it was made by some really inspired people. But it only took a few years and that hardware advantage meant little anymore. Mainstream Macs and PCs absorbed the multimedia capabilities. Game consoles from Sega and Sony were able to outplay it, and there were even machines like the Sharp X68000 that blew it away on the hardware front by the late 80s (and even outsold it, albeit only sold in Japan.)

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andrewstuart大约 10 年前

It's hard to convey the feeling when I first saw an Amiga. In the office, surrounded by monochrome early DOS machines someone had set up an Amiga 1000 showing the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. It's like someone had switched on an electric light for the first time.

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jug大约 10 年前

Still reading this, just wanted to thank you for posting this! I owned an Amiga back in the day. I wasn't old at all, I was only just barely getting my toes wet in programming, but I knew I was using something special, and when I look back and see an Amiga 500, I still think it is. It's even pretty despite the design's age. Or maybe it's my pretty memories of it speaking.Making me even more nostalgic about this era, is that it felt like the golden age of computing, so many wildly different concepts. My ZX Spectrum 48K, my Atari 520 STE, then my Amiga 500 Plus. It felt like anything was possible, that anyone had a chance of building a famous new computer with its own operating system and all. And all that felt on countless LAN's. Man, those were the days!

babuskov大约 10 年前

Ah, those were the days. I learned Assembly on A500. You would just load an image into memory, tell the video card to point to that location and it got shown on the screen.I recall writing a simple program to extract images from games. After reboot, the game graphics would remain in RAM. Using the program I would change the address with keyboard controls until I got something that looked like an image from game on my screen and then I would save it into a file.And I got docs for programming it via a friend who had access to some BBS.Kids these days don't know what they have.

protomyth大约 10 年前

Jay Miner was one heck of a designer. I do wish there was a book that focused on the forgotten hardware designers of that era.

bitwize大约 10 年前

Ah, the Amiga -- computing's Lamborghini Countach. Sexy, powerful, revolutionary engineering for its time. Fueler of many a pubescent schoolboy's wet dreams. But also hopelessly stuck in the 80s in terms of design and fiddly enough to put off non-enthusiasts.

josteink大约 10 年前

As someone who grew up on the Commodore 64 and Amiga, I sorely miss the 68k platform.The few times I'm still forced to deal with the X86-architecture at assembly-level it just pains me to see the clusterfuck that modern the Intel-platform represents.The 68k was clean, nice, logical and let you work on the data you wanted to process. The X86 looks like a patchwork of instructions and registers added cumulatively over time, with no design behind them, and the majority of code is moving data in and out of registers, not actually processing the data.The X86-architecture marked the end for when I cared about knowing how things worked all through the stack. It was just too ugly for me to embrace.

kenjackson大约 10 年前

I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than anything else out at the time, yet never caught on.Is there anything like that happening today, where there is something significantly better than its competitors, but has no traction. I don't mean something debatable (e.g., Windows Phone vs iPhone or MacOS vs Windows), but something clear cut?Probably the closest thing I could think of is Tesla, if they go belly up.

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NoPiece大约 10 年前

In the comments of the article some pointed to a Kickstarter in progress right now for an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain view to celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Amiga.<a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-anniversary-in-california" rel="nofollow">https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/890300835/amiga-30th-an...</a>

icedchai大约 10 年前

I got an Amiga in 7th grade! It was a hugeee step up from my previous computer (an Apple II.)It felt truly amazing for the time (late 80's).