From the feature article:
"Lets however get one thing
straight right off the bat. Nobody
can forsee that the Amiga
will rise from the ashes to be a
mainstream competitor."
Its funny, because I have given serious thought for the past 10 years about acquiring the IP and rebooting the brand (and doing a REAL reboot, not just sticking a PC in a Commodore skin (or keyboard, as one IP holder did)). If you look at Apple, the company was in a rather dire situation before Jobs stepped back in. Likewise, I think dust is collecting on one of the most valuable "unclaimed" brands out there.
I was a huge Amiga fan in the 80s, but I'm really not seeing anything beyond nostalgic value for the brand in 2015. That value is strictly limited in cash terms.
When Jobs came back Apple stopped being beige and started producing fun, quirky, colourful computers with iconic visual design. Jobs didn't try to re-release the Apple Mac - he tried to produce a product that had the USP of the original Mac, but with newer technology and better design.
A successful Amiga reboot would have to reinvent the Amiga difference and not just produce something average that happens to run AmigaOS. You'd have to introduce technology maybe five years ahead of the market mainstream and dramatise it with show-stealingly awesome demos.
That's a hard thing to do in 2015 - possibly harder than it was in 1985 - and anyone planning to do it probably won't be aiming at any of the current computing form factors.
Totally agree with you. As I mentioned in another comment, I'd like to kind of rethink things on the software end (and possibly the hardware end if that were in the budget). Anyhow, I doubt I'd be involved in such a thing with current obligations stretching out several years already, but it is nice to think about. :)
There's no Amiga of our era. When I got my Amiga 500 in 1988, I was blown away: My jaw literally dropped. This was the future, years ahead of schedule.
Apple has had some awesome, amazing products, yeah. But it's all incremental.
I was an electronic tech in the air force back then and a buddy and I disassembled a couple of Sony laser disc players for the lasers. We got a pair of servos and created a 2 way mirror deflection device. We used the STEREO output of an Amiga 500's audio to control the servos' deflection, one channel for each servo/direction. With a little programming, we were able to "paint" a picture on the wall with the laser.
Apple does in no way capture the imagination like the Amiga did in the 80s, for most people it was the first interaction with a "real" computer, pure magic.
The former holds the trademark and other IP, while the latter seems to be working on further improvements to AmigaOS4 and producing hardware to run it on.
I really think that a device that captured the spirit of Amiga could be a success. Not only amongst ex Amiga users, but amongst other users as well.
What was the "magic" of the Amiga in the 80s and early 90s and what could be something similar today?
In the 80s and 90s:
- Really good graphics and sound (when most PC users got EGA graphics and PC speaker sound, if anything besides ASCII at all)
- Easy to use (you could do everything with your mouse)
- A device for games, fun AND serious stuff
- Relatively affordable
What could this be today? Maybe an affordable "ready to use" device that drives forward Virtual Reality for games and other use cases? A smartphone that is also your PC and you can easily combine it with monitor, keyboard and mouse?
I agree with you that there's potential. I particularly see it in MorphOS: beautiful, usable, different, very responsive, and all on cheap hardware. Might be pushed as an alternative to Chromebooks, gaming, and design boxes that combines best features of each. Gets out of your way, bloatless, fast, supports key apps/features, fun side stuff, and doesn't spy on you. ;)
I also see a use in business. This comes from products like THEOS that are still around despite having almost no functionality haha. One selling point that product uses is that it doesn't run modern stuff. The reason? Productivity boost if you're mainly using it for line-of-business apps where people can't screw around because there's no software in it for doing so. So, above benefits to consumer applied to business scenario in companies that want work to get done and with OS more pleasant to work with.
So, these are two possibilities I see. Some possibilities in low-end market like OLPC project, too, but I haven't fleshed that out yet.
Much of the attraction of the Amiga (and the Atari ST) from that time, as far as I remember, was the 'step-up' in terms of the quality of the graphics and the games, when most people were rocking 8bit micros like the C64 or Amstrad.
In terms of what you could do software-wise, I think we can forget about the mainstream games industry. Same with the mainstream graphics industry (for the reason we have no Adobe Creative Studio for Linux).
What would interest me would be a killer OS with an active ecosystem supporting more indie-style products like Firefox, Sketch (https://designcode.io/sketch), Sublime Text, Atom etc, as well as indie games like Hotline Miami.
Start 'small' and see where it goes kind of thing.
I, for one, would be very interested in something like this.
Thing about Amiga was that it was the last of the micros, where the state of the computer was blanked with the flip of a switch.
Any game has the run of the place, and you didn't have persistent storage beyond the floppies it came on. Thus if the game blew up, it could only take it self down, it could not ruin your spreadsheets or the monthly report.
The closest you get to that today is a Chrome-book/-box. This because very little is stored internally, and nothing the user does can touch the OS side.
> and you didn't have persistent storage beyond the floppies it came on.
Well. While that was true by default for the majority of models, it wasn't for the A2500HD, A3000 or A4000, and the A600 and A1200 had internal ATA ports and were often sold with harddrives pre-installed. And after-market harddrive expansions quickly became common for every single other model too (including via horribly ugly "sidecar" type designs).
You're sort-of right in that certainly a large proportion of Amiga's were A500's sold mostly as game machines.
Note, though that generally even HD models were surprisingly robust against harddrive crashes etc.: You could generally safely assume that you could just wait until the hd light stopped flickering and flip the power.
There are basically 3 buckets of enthusiasts (I know, because I fall into across two of them).
1) Retro-nostalgia game geeks, mostly from Europe but some in North America as well, just vastly fewer. The Amiga sold better in Europe than comparable consoles like the SNES, Genesis, etc. I compare it to consoles because that really is what the Amiga offered to most folks - console quality games in the guise of a computer. Disks (lots of disks) versus cartridges. And some hand-wavy productivity stuff, like the C64 did (it's OK mom, this is a computer and will make Jonny better at school!), that a few folks used.
2) Antiquated video toaster tinkerers and hardware geeks. These folks like to play with hardware, especially antiquated hardware, and see how far they can push it for the novelty of it all.
3) Old Amiga OSes vs Amiga OS 4+. I think Amiga 4 is really for the folks who want to turn the brand into something usable and modern, but in all honesty, I think Amiga - if it were to ever rise from the ashes - would need a complete reboot much like OS X was compared to OS 9 and earlier. OS X was a total rework, and allowed some backwards compatibility for a little while but ultimately divorced itself from the old days. This is the only way it could ever succeed. Amiga (and, ultimately, Commodore) will always be thought of fondly by past customers, but to get a new market Amiga/Commodore would need to reboot. That's my opinion, anyway. And focus on innovation. The brands are currently zombie brands, owned by various firms that simply license the logos to any Tom, Dick and Harry that want to slap it on a Chinese mobile phone, toaster, teapot, whatever. Those days would have to stop.
I personally started in bucket #2 above. I own a never used/never sold Amiga 1200. And as soon as I got it, I cracked it open and installed an accelerator board (they are easily purchased from Amigakit in England) that pushed its RAM from 2MB up to a whopping 9MB. I also installed a 4GB compact flash hard drive (the original never-used hard drive was a dead brick, naturally). As a result, I can load virtually anything I want onto the machine and use it relatively quickly (see bucket 1). Currently I'm on Level 3 of Eye of the Beholder. :) Yes, I deal with PAL vs NTSC issues at times, among other things, but overall it's a pretty nifty setup. Next year I plan to get it on my Wi-Fi - because.
So, from a hobbyist standpoint, it's quite a lot of fun. And it's vastly more enjoyable than an emulator. But it's not for everyone. And my pipe dream about a renewed Amiga/Commodore brand is really, frankly, never going to happen. If a company could create a vision like I described, they wouldn't anchor it to a dead zombie brand (that I love).
I'd like to wish you luck if you decided to do it. Would the real reboot you had on mind be based on the software or the hardware (custom hardware could be pricey)? Would you consider partnering with the companies that currently work on Amiga hardware and software?
Thanks - I doubt it will happen any time soon (or at all), but it is always something on the back of my mind. I'd be willing to work around existing hardware potentially. Primarily I would be interested in creating a really simple, elegant OS/IDE/compiler/language/etc - even if that means limiting it to one set of hardware (I am totally a custom-built PC guy, but console-ish devices have their virtues). I'd really like to bring back CPU-based graphics programming (even if the means to it is GPU-style parallel architecture).
"What is the future of Amiga" asks the cover for issue #1.
There hasn't been a future for Amiga for a couple of decades. Amiga was dead in 1995 already, not to mention 2015.
Don't get me wrong. I think I used mine till early 00's (for serious stuff, such as email and work). I loved Amiga and I think no other platform except BeOS has ever captured the same feeling that you get from having hugely advanced technology in your hands. If I could jump back to the 80's/90's which is the time I got my serious with my Amiga, I would. No doubt about it.
But Amiga as we know it is dead and has been dead for so long I barely remember. I would welcome another Amiga that would again be such a state of the art platform that it would compare to nothing else――although I wouldn't know what that could it be. Maybe you could say iOS is the new Amiga, but it doesn't convey the same feeling.
What I do remember from Amiga was how snappy it was.
AmigaOS had a modern design with no bloat. My i486 running my first Linux installation in the mid-90's beat it hands down, technically, but it never felt the same. Things were crazy fast (in comparison to MC68030) but they never felt fast. And feeling counts for 99% for a human being, even if my mind is telling me my phone is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than my Amiga.
In contrast to how my Linux@i486 behaved my Amiga did just what it had to do. Linux (and Windows and Mac) always seemed to do a lot of things until they bothered to do what I asked. I've only experienced something similar in BeOS. It's weird that there are no other mainstream operating systems where user interface would be prioritized over anything else. I still experience lag in my 10's machines when running Ubuntu whereas I'm longing for the experience where no button or window ever hesitated to behave when I asked it to. It would be very much possible to implement (run UI in a single process that is never paged to disk and runs on SCHED_RT priority and never depends on the application itself to ultimately react to user interface events) but nobody has done it. Yet that's what I still do miss from Amiga. The feeling is almost tactile, and it needs to feel it comes from 20 years in the future.
I don't know how I feel about any Amiga magazine or any of the Amiga rebirth projects there are. AROS is nice but none of them is the same. Even if we did 00's things in 80's architecture running on 10's hardware, it's not the same. I don't give a dime about keeping the old Amiga on life support. Every few years I fire up UAE and conclude that, all right, it still has that X but is lacking A-W and Y-Z. I understand that I'm a human being and my emotions attach to points in time, and that's how it's going to be. It's worth remembering but not holding on to. At best, we can take what was extraordinary back then and if it's still extraordinary, reimplement it on a modern platform.
I am glad to see somebody write this because it still astonishes me that I'm faster than the computer. I don't want to wait before I'm ready to input things, I know it can work faster!
There are two sides to it - poor choices leading to performance issues, forcing the computer to wait, and also animations that completely halt UX until they are complete. Not much is more annoying than the seldom-overridden 300ms javascript click delay on touch devices, or the iOS animations that waste a lot of time.
Its funny, because I have given serious thought for the past 10 years about acquiring the IP and rebooting the brand (and doing a REAL reboot, not just sticking a PC in a Commodore skin (or keyboard, as one IP holder did)). If you look at Apple, the company was in a rather dire situation before Jobs stepped back in. Likewise, I think dust is collecting on one of the most valuable "unclaimed" brands out there.