Amiga: The Computer That Wouldn't Die

[Antiriad]

Three years ago there was a very interesting article in IEEE Spectrum, a known magazine for electrical engineers. It was featured on the first page of the magazine and it was titled "Amiga: The Computer That Wouldn't Die". I found it very interesting and I was really touched.

Amiga: The computer That Wouldn't Die

The paradox in life is that the "best" things don't last for long and only the "average" are the ones that prevail. Just image how much ahead would the Amiga have been if it was still in existense. It really find it very fashinating that people are still using the now....13 year old A4000 toasters...and they are still state of the art for budget video productions.

BTW Does anybody know anything about the prototype Amiga that was announced in 2001? The box looks really cool.




Here is a picture of the 1984 Working Prototype for comparison

[the_leander]

Antiriad wrote:
Three years ago there was a very interesting article in IEEE Spectrum, a known magazine for electrical engineers. It was featured on the first page of the magazine and it was titled "Amiga: The Computer That Wouldn't Die". I found it very interesting and I was really touched.

Amiga: The computer That Wouldn't Die

The paradox in life is that the "best" things don't last for long and only the "average" are the ones that prevail. Just image how much ahead would the Amiga have been if it was still in existense. It really find it very fashinating that people are still using the now....13 year old A4000 toasters...and they are still state of the art for budget video productions.

BTW Does anybody know anything about the prototype Amiga that was announced in 2001? The box looks really cool.

As far as I know thats all it was, a box, nothing in hardware ever got produced by Gateway. Where the design is now, and who owns it however is a good question as I agree, it was a superb looking design.

[Jope]

the_leander wrote:
As far as I know thats all it was, a box, nothing in hardware ever got produced by Gateway. Where the design is now, and who owns it however is a good question as I agree, it was a superb looking design.

Ryan Czerwinski of Merlancia has the case designs, I believe. Too bad.

[amigamad]

BTW Does anybody know anything about the prototype Amiga that was announced in 2001? The box looks really cool.

Yes it was an empty plastic box i see it at one of the world of amiga shows was used by gateway was used so they could fool people they knew what they were doing when they owned the amiga.

[MiAmigo]

Great article. Very inspirational, and informative. :-o

[Karlos]

The original Amiga had 4 bits each for hue (H), saturation (S), and luminance (L)--a color representation that mapped elegantly to the NTSC video signal. To make the best use of this representation, Miner developed a special hold-and-modify mode, in which data would tell the video output chip how to alter the H, S, or L values from the previous pixel on the screen; it could display subtly shaded images with remarkable realism.

That's news to me. I thought it was always RGB...

[MiAmigo]

Quote:
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The original Amiga had 4 bits each for hue (H), saturation (S), and luminance (L)--a color representation that mapped elegantly to the NTSC video signal. To make the best use of this representation, Miner developed a special hold-and-modify mode, in which data would tell the video output chip how to alter the H, S, or L values from the previous pixel on the screen; it could display subtly shaded images with remarkable realism.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Quote:
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
While the essence of the Amiga's design--the NTSC-synchronous clock and coprocessor circuitry--was elegant, turning it into a working high-volume product was another matter.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There's that word, elegant, again! Durn, I wonder why those 'old-time' programmers and system developers use it so much, when describing the Amiga's efficient design and implementation, which, by the way, gave it such amazing processing powers, on such a limited budget of resources? Sounds like a post I myself wrote, some time ago, which tried to prove that exact point - that such an approach, logically carried into the future, would have had a highly evolved Amiga still at the vanguard of computer technology...

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Antiriad wrote:
BTW Does anybody know anything about the prototype Amiga that was announced in 2001? The box looks really cool.

Twas announced far earlier, IIRC, somewhere by 1998 it could have been....
Amiga was still property of Gateway...
Twas the Amiga MCC (Multimedia Conversion Computer)

[Holley]

Amigo - the trouble with elegance is that scaling it (compared to a brute force solution) is much harder.  For the jumps that Amiga made in technology PCs would go through 100 small developments in every area.

[bloodline]

Holley wrote:
Amigo - the trouble with elegance is that scaling it (compared to a brute force solution) is much harder.  For the jumps that Amiga made in technology PCs would go through 100 small developments in every area.

It's the Evolution vs Revolution argument... Revoltion will get you ahead the quickest but not very far, Evolution will get you further and take an easier route but take longer

[MiAmigo]

bloodline wrote:

Holley wrote:
Amigo - the trouble with elegance is that scaling it (compared to a brute force solution) is much harder.  For the jumps that Amiga made in technology PCs would go through 100 small developments in every area.

It's the Evolution vs Revolution argument... Revoltion will get you ahead the quickest but not very far, Evolution will get you further and take an easier route but take longer

I choose EVOLUTION! Its worked for us (human bings). It aught to work for what we create. 'Natural selection by Order of Intelligence'. Has a nice ring to it, I'm tink!  :lol:

[MiAmigo]

Holley wrote:
Amigo - the trouble with elegance is that scaling it (compared to a brute force solution) is much harder.  For the jumps that Amiga made in technology PCs would go through 100 small developments in every area.

Believe it or not, I agree, almost...
We would need those "100 small devlopments in every area", as you say, or one really creative, smart person, or group of people to figure it all out again, just as they did with the Amiga. We have the technology, and the smarts. I say let's go for it. Isn't that part of the mentality that got us the Amiga in the first place? The steps would be the same as before: Concieve a radical new design on paper, (or, paradoxically, on a PC, how's that for irony?), build a mock-up, work out some more of the bugs, build a prototype, MAKE it more do-able, and more marketable, then pitch the idea to the money-guys, or create financial backing somehow (fill in miracle here), then head to market. And remember, the very first step (conceive and design) don't cost nothin'.

[bloodline]

MiAmigo wrote:

bloodline wrote:

Holley wrote:
Amigo - the trouble with elegance is that scaling it (compared to a brute force solution) is much harder.  For the jumps that Amiga made in technology PCs would go through 100 small developments in every area.

It's the Evolution vs Revolution argument... Revoltion will get you ahead the quickest but not very far, Evolution will get you further and take an easier route but take longer

I choose EVOLUTION! Its worked for us (human bings). It aught to work for what we create. 'Natural selection by Order of Intelligence'. Has a nice ring to it, I'm tink!  :lol:

Exactly!! The Amiga was a Revolution... the PC is an Evolution.

[Holley]

or one really creative, smart person

For a recent example of that not really working out see how Nintendo's hardware has gone ... unfortunately elegant design just doesn't work in real life (would be nice if it did, though!).

[jdiffend]

Here is a picture of the 1984 Working Prototype for comparison

You realize that that most of that will fit on 1 PLD now.