If you didnt have a Amiga....

[Waccoon]

My first machine was a C64 and MS-DOS was pure simplicity by comparrison.  I'd have likely gone the MS-DOS route and then worked on UNIX systems at school.

Working on UNIX at the university was REALLY painful after being raised on the A1000 (especially since the CS department thought Amigas were trashy toys and always sneered at me).  I almost instantly lost my interest in computer science and changed my major to graphic design.  I really wish GUIs on UNIX were as mature back then as they are today.

Now I want to work on a new desktop system BASED on the Amiga -- with a stripped Linux as the core.  I'm not giving up that easily!  :-D

[Waccoon]

If not for the Amiga, multimedia would not have existed until the advent of the PlayStation.  The PSX borrowed more from arcade machines and high-end CGI boards than the PC, and that really turned the industry upside down to where people were programming with standard APIs (the CGI board itself), rather than hard-coding everything with the CPU in assembly.  Most early CGI boards (like the one in Hard-Drivin'), were just standard paralleled CPUs rathter than purpose-built graphics chips.

I really think PC multimedia was more inspired by arcade machines and Nintendo than by the Amiga.  PSX is what prompted the invention of the 3D accelerator.

Then again, remember that CD-ROMs were considered "multimedia" in the PC industry.  Graphics and audio were pathetic on their own.  :-)

MMX is a good example of what went wrong with the PC.  Six years of work on multimedia MMX extenstions for the CPU died overnight when the 3DFX cards came out.  It really is sad how long it took "custom chips" to work their way into the PC, but it would have happened eventually.