Companies today with Amiga-like magic

[James1095]

I would say anything Elon Musk touches. Even just reading the Wikipedia summary about him makes him sound like a gosh-darn American Hero.

Disclaimer: I own stock in Tesla, lol. :laugh1:

Musk is a very sharp guy, but from what I hear he's quite an a-hole on a personal level, possibly sociopathic. Most guys reaching his level of success are to some degree, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, extremely driven, meticulous, workaholics. Their job is their life and they are unable to relate to the fact that many people do not want to place their job above all else in life.

[James1095]

Newtek, they supported the Amiga years after its production ended with hardware like The video Toaster/flyer and groundbreaking software like Lightwave 3D. They are still in business selling PC based video editing hardware and software including Lightwave 3D. They dont get nearly as much credit as they should. They even did repairs to video toaster hardware for no cost till about 5 years ago when they finally ran out of parts.

Not to mention they released the source code for the original Toaster software, how many other tech companies do you see doing that? Personally I think it should happen far more often, both for historical reasons, and to allow continued development of long-dead products. I would like to see schematics and firmware for any microcontrollers, ROMs, PLDs, etc released for any hardware device that is discontinued as well to allow it to be repaired.

As for the computer industry in general, computers were new and exciting back in the days of the Amiga. Technology was evolving at a breakneck pace. Computers were never quite powerful enough for what you wanted to do, a computer that was a year old was getting obsolete, 2-3 years old and it was so far behind that it was practically useless. Today things have matured, general purpose PC's are so powerful that the available computing power has vastly outstripped the needs of the average user. Case in point, until a couple years ago I was using a nearly 10 year old desktop as my primary PC and it was perfectly adequate for most of what I needed, I was using it for PCB CAD and even some light FPGA development and it did alright. The main reason I upgraded was so that I could do video transcoding and I plan to use the i7 I have now for 10+ years. Software used to improve constantly with each version adding new capabilities and improved features. These days whenever I update to a new version it's more like ok what useful features did they take out, what new bugs does it have and where did they move everything around to? I no longer look forward to new versions and rarely upgrade at all until forced. The whole industry is mature and the magic is gone. The personal computer has reached ubiquitous commodity status.

[James1095]

I suspect the 68K would have run its course either way, I think it had pretty much reached the limits of the architecture and that's why the industry moved on to other designs. The 68040 ran hot and struggled to reach 40MHz and likely would not have scaled much higher. Personally I think the genius of the Amiga was the chipset, even if imperfect for a while it was far and away ahead of anything else out there in terms of graphics and sound in a personal computer. When the A500 came out most mid-range PCs had 286 CPUs, CGA or EGA framebuffer graphics and little more than a beeper for sound. By the early 90s with the advent of sound cards and improved graphics cards for the ubiquitous PC clones the Amiga lost some of its advantage combined with Commodore falling behind in improving it. I suspect that the Amiga could have been just as easily developed around Intel CPUs and the end result would have been similar. From the user perspective it doesn't matter what CPU is inside, the competing architectures had broadly similar processing capability. It's what the surrounding hardware and software does with that capability that makes the experience. As an example, the original Macintosh machines used the same 68000 as the original Amigas and provided a completely different experience.