Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[the_leander]

This type of question crops up more frequently than you might think.  Why is that?  Personally I don't believe its just nostalgia, and its not due to people lacking information or knowledge.  Conversely, in the PC world, many many people express dissatisfaction in one form or another. All these Amiga user and all these PC users can't all be crazy!!

You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.

Windows, for all it's faults does a pretty reasonable job of working well enough that most people don't really think about it - they're too busy with whatever application they're using. MacOS takes this simplicity and ease of use to another level again. Linux isn't there yet, but I think things like WebOS, ChromeOS/Android, Moblin etc are good steps forward.

Amiga did a good job in it's day of making computing accessable to folk. However, it has to be said that things have moved on a very long way from Windows 3.11.

And I don't think you can just narrow it down as being hardware or operating system issue.

Why not? There are litterally tens of billions of variations of both hard and software out there. Sooner or later you're going to run into quirks.

And that is completely discounting those who really have no business operating a computer (and yes, I do mean that - imho refusing to update or maintain your system, in this day and age should come with similar penalties to those who refuse to maintain their cars). I firmly believe that something like the European Computer Drivers Licence should be manditory to have before being able to use a computer online.

Amiga that makes the user experience greater than just a sum of its parts.

This is purely subjective. Yes, the Amiga was a great machine in it's day. But I would sooner go without a computer then be forced to give up the convenience, stability and flexability that comes with a modern OS.

There's a feeling of control, responsiveness, accessability, simplicity and elegance that the amiga system gives that modern computers just quite don't have.

They also (for the most part) don't have the crash happy issues, lack of support for standards, vast overpricing (some might say gouging) of hardware upgrades and so on and so on.

Simple OS's are nice, even useful as educational tools. But a non memory protected OS, with no security has no place in an online world outside of a classroom or museum.

[the_leander]

I think you under-estimate the deep level of dissatisfaction amongst users with Vista.  When the daily papers run routine articles on it and routinly describe Vista as "underwhelming", you know its not just some of the people who are not happy.  Some of it wasn't deserved, most of it was.  There's no doubt MS fast-tracked Win 7.  And its clear that whilst new features are not a priority for Win 7, putting the user back in charge of their computer is.  I always felt that i had that with Amiga.

I was talking Windows in general.

Vista is a dog, no doubt, it is the ME of this generation. XP however, for all it's faults is still the tool of choice within the computer industry. I can't think of the number of people I've helped "downgrade" from Vista.

Why? Because it works, it is fairly consistant in it's performance, it's quirks are well known. Win7 is what Vista should have been and there is very little doubt about that, imho it'll quickly take over leaving the misery that was Vista a mere memory.

Vista's single biggest issue however was the fact that it had to follow up from XP. The vast vast vast majority of complaints about Vista if you look were also being made about XP upon it's release. Difference was there, XP was following on from ME or 98 for most people (2kpro is still imho the greatest release MS ever produced).

But the simple fact remains, XP (to a lesser extent Vista) and OSX offer a far more flexible and user friendly environment then Amiga could ever hope to offer.

Windows is a very stable and capable platform in ways that the Amiga could never hope to challenge.

OSX offers a level of ease of use that nothing else even comes close to challenging.

Linux is a superb server OS and now getting to the stage where it'll be able to take on the big boys on the home computing environment (yes, I include smartphones and netbooks in this catagory too). Even now however, it offers more then AmigaOS ever could.

[the_leander]

The Amiga was the first computer to put things like a GUI, a real OS (with things like multi-tasking), and hardware acceleration all in one package.  Now all computers are like this.

Err, no. You might have a point about hardware acceleration if you discount Jay Minor's earlier works: CTIA and ANTIC. But Multitasking has been available for UNIX and GUIs came to the mainstream with Apple (which itself had Multitasking as far back at 1984).

None of which makes any difference to todays computing landscape.

[the_leander]

I disagree.

The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage.  Also an extremely fast bus.

One could say this follows the Amiga model.  Or it just follows what makes sense.  Not sure on that one.

Very Amiga-like, I'd say.

Not really. The chipset of the Amiga is an intergrated system, it's not designed to sit on a bus like PCI or zorro. For the PC, everything is sat on a general purpose bus (be it ISA, VESA, PCI, PCIE etc etc etc). Everything within the PC arch is modular in a way that the Amigas OCS, ECS and AGA sets simply never were.

It made for a great revolution at the time, but it simply could not maintain pace with the evolutionary process that the PC used.

The concepts of offloading things from the CPU were well understood by other companies then C= at the time of the Amiga. By the time of the A4000 however these concepts were being used far more effectively by other companies. Even within the Amiga world third party Zorro cards offered far greater performance then any C= chip.

[the_leander]

His point was that all these aspects were put together.

The only thing you're missing out of the Apple was hardware acceleration. I suspect if you looked around you'd find UNIX boxes with all of those features and then some.

What the Amiga did was make such features that were available to high end businesses, was make it affordable to all.

And that's it.

No, but if the Amiga people back then thought making a computer wouldn't make any difference in the back then computing landscape, they certainly wouldn't have made a difference indeed.
Today needs todays revolutions, not todays bugfixes.

They were commissioned to do a job. They pushed the boat out because their employers let them get away with it. Eventually, they burned through their cash and had to go cap in hand to various big name companies to desperately save the situation.

They wanted to make the best computer they could. And they succeeded. However, within a handspan of years of their achievement, the PC was technologically superior in every aspect.

Bugfixes are the difference between your product being declared great, or your product being panned as a useless hunk of crap. Revolutions are happening and will continue to happen, but it is evolution that makes it continue.

To say that the Amiga arch is in any way relevant or even to suggest that it influenced todays PCs is at best a hell of a stretch and at worst an out and out falacy.

[the_leander]

Leander,

Apple did not have multitasking in 1984.

Au contraire mon ami...

From Wikipedia:

"Classic" Mac OS (1984–2001)
Main article: Mac OS history
 
Original 1984 Macintosh desktop

The "classic" Mac OS is characterized by its total lack of a command line; it is a completely graphical operating system. Noted for its ease of use and its cooperative multitasking

OS9 onwards had Preemptive multitasking.

Now, if you'd said Amiga was the first to have preemptive multitasking, you'd have been correct.

[the_leander]

Having hardware that had graphics and sound chips that could function independently of the CPU at a time when most other computers required the CPU to be involved intimately in every task, including moving the mouse pointer, is the same philosophy used in modern PC architectures.  The amiga had it first, and showed the way

I highlighted the key word in this for you, since it clearly didn't register when you wrote it.

I'll restate again what I said previously: What the Amiga did, was bring features that would otherwise only be seen in high end gear down to the consumer.

These features would have found their way onto consumer systems regardless of the Amiga due to the trickle down effect of computer engineering. Whilst you might argue that the Amiga encouraged it to come down quicker to consumer PC's quicker, that is a different argument.

But to say that this influenced the PC arch? No. Sorry. Just no. On the PC everything hangs off of  busses , which in turn all branch off from a northbridge/southbridge set (the northbridge has somewhat been subsumed by the cpu on the more recent editions of the x86 line). This was the case with the humble 286 all the way up to present day hex core monsters.

This choice allows for a highly modular and highly flexable setup in ways the Amiga simply could not compete with.  It's why the PC arch hasn't really changed all that much in all this time, sure, busses have changed, gotten faster, but the base principles and concepts haven't.

[the_leander]

Leander stop trying to re-write history.

NO U.

Firstly if the engineers at Commodore were "allowed" to do what they wanted by their employers, then there's a good chance that Amiga might have survived a lot longer.  Commodore Inc, screwed up.  

They were comissioned to design and build a games console. They decided instead to build a full blown computer, ran out of cash. C= bought them up.

How is this rewriting history? Oh that's right, it isn't.

That Comodore couldn't organise a booze up in a brewery is besides the point.

Even before the release of the A4000, there were available for the Amiga (via zorro) both graphics and sound cards that offered far superior performance to AGA.

The writing was on the wall. Even the AAA set would have been behind the times - it was (if I remember my C.S.A.A Dave Haynie comments correctly) capable only of 16bit screenmodes whilst the PC was using 32bit chips as standard on desktops and had DSP soundcards.

Dave also pointed out that PCI slots were being looked into for precisely this reason - they would allow cheap access to powerful hardware.

There were plans in the early 1990's for hardware and software that would have extended Commodore's technological advantage and made your P100 CPU with 16 meg running Win 95 every bit the boat anchor that it was.

I remember a guy on here talking about how he litterally spent many hundreds getting an 060 card for his A4000, only for his brothers Pentium PC that in it's totality cost half as much run rings around it doing lightwave rendering.

No amount of bug-fixes for that set up would have turned it from the horse-drawn carriage that it was, to the modern motor car that the Amiga still was.  But some illegal business practices from MS, stupidity from IBM to let the x86  patent lapse,  plus total business incompetence from Commodore, along with some smart business practices like selling cheap to the business world and subsidizing workers home computer if they ran MS crap, results in inferior technology eventually winning out.  Apple was on its knees for the same reason, and was saved by a portable music player.  

Apple survive and thrive now because they offer an end to end computing experience that is seamless - Something that no one else can say they do in the general computing market. They were on their knees because it stubbornly refused to get off the PPC, yes, the iPod has been a runaway success, but be under absolutely no illusion: the move to x86 saved the computer lines.

Evolution doesn't promote "the best", it promotes "good enough". Both in terms of hardware and software, the Amiga was effectively end of life by the time AGA was released.

Conceptually, there's a lot of amiga in today's PC hardware and OS architecture. Co-processors, pre-emptive multitasking, fast boot and shut down, prioritising the user input over other tasks. The PC may go about it in a different way but the objectives are the same.

Because no computer ever had any of that before...

To declare pretty much all of these concepts as born of the Amiga is arrogant at best.

As for conceptually, no, the Amiga has more in common with a games console - a closed, tightly integrated system.

you're doing it again: trying to re-write history.

NO U.

Just before Commodores collapse, no-one-and I mean no-one- regarded the PC architecture of the day as being modern.  In fact it was seen as down right archaic.

And? The fact is it doesn't have to be "modern". The bebox was modern, what it has to be is flexable, it has to be cheap. And I'd say one of the biggest selling points was the lack of patents involved.

The x86 hardware architecture ended up dominating that way because the patent was allowed to lapse by IBM, who themselves saw no future in the heap of junk that the x86 platform was.  No patent meant every electronics hardware factory in Taiwan could mass produce the same junk for next to nothing, and intel could keep ramping up the mhz on its CPU's to overcome many of the bottle necks that existed throughout the system.  Highly moduler and flexible, in ways the amiga simply couldn't compete?  My backside!!!  

I can take a motherboard and depending on what I plug into it, use it as the basis of a Asterisk telephone exchange, any number of server configurations, a silent low power office box, hardcore gaming system or anything in between. And the key part is I can rip out non necessary parts (such as graphics chips, for instance).

All from one motherboard. And by one I mean any ATX motherboard currently in production.

As for bottlenecks. There is really only one on a modern system and thats the hard drive. Its been the only real bottleneck for the past 10 years. SATA on it's own doesn't offer any significant performance boost over PATA, what it does offer (at least in just about any board you buy today) is cheep and easy RAID. Which does boost performance.

Name one thing you couldn't shove in a Zorro slot (since 1985) that let you do everything that an ISA or PCI slot let you have? And it autoconfiged. One will do.

Be affordable.
Be available.

"Right back at ya"

As for the Mac, I stand corrected.

[the_leander]

Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...

In PC land, at around the same time, Quake had just been released. I played it on my mates PC at the time and was absolutely blown away by the graphics, the playability and the sheer fun of it. Later that year he was using Quakeworld and playing via dialup...

I remember breathless, it played like an absolute dog. Clunky, slow... Possibly the only FPS I ever played that was worse then Gloom. I played it about 3 months or so after I first tried Quake.

To say I was disapointed would be a grave, grave understatement.

[the_leander]

Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030.  And we knew what was better and why.  Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't.

And a lot of those justifications worked great right up until you had to do any heavy duty work, at which point the Amiga was insanely overpriced for the job. I do not deny that the PC was a pig in terms of OS's available at the time. However to deny that AmigaOS was EOL, when even the engineers who were actually working on the next gen gear have admitted such is laughable.

As has also been pointed out, AAA (Nyx, and later hombre) would have been woefully underpowered in every respect compared to the PCI addon cards it would have had to go up against. Hell, even AGA looked damn tired compared to midrange PC gear.

Apple was shit-scared of Amiga,

For about 18 months until they realised that C= weren't going to do crap with it.

MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform.  

And it's height was already a memory by the time AGA was released!

They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side.  Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.

What you're ignoring is that the costs to get a high end amiga that could take on and beat a mid range PC of the day was substantially higher then the cost of that PC. It also ignores the fact that a pentium PC could utterly monster any A4000 or A1200 you cared to lob at it on every level.

[the_leander]

So did it work better on a CD32 than an A1200?

Did Akiko work faster if you had an accelerator in the CD32? (ie would Breathless work better on a CD32/040 than an A1200/040?)

No it wouldn't - for one reason only: The CD32 only ever got an 030-50 accelerator, and they were as rare as hens teeth.  

One game it did make a difference on however was an Amiga only Bomberman clone that used c2p. I had an A1200 with an 040, and without using software c2p the game was unplayable, but the cd32, with its stock 020 (and an extra 8Mb ram) was able to play it without any such hacks.