The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.

This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.

As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.

At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.

The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos

The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.

And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.

The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.

Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.

It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.

1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes

2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)

3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties

the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.

thank you commodore, thank you dad.

and thanks for this time traveling post!

The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.

The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.

Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.

It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.

What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.

It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.

Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.

Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...

Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.

However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.

AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)

But:

>"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable.

But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue."

Not true!

Well, not entirely true...

Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding...

I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience!

Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's.

The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc.

Any program could crash any of those.

So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...)

If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day...

Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it!

So, to the Author, I say "well done!"

An excellent article overall!

That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!