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For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then.

The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding.

This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it.

As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.

It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS.

Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System nowadays.

It lacks a usable browser for todays websites. Maybe someone gets into the vibe of agentically coding one.

While being at it, the foundations could use heavy fuzzing, lift them up to Open/NetBSD at least. A few looks into Genode for technical inspiration wouldn't be wrong, maybe a port of Aros atop seL4/Genode could be supreme. Same as Haiku.

> AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then

Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)

Hmmm, I use Claude Code to make those two worlds work together -- where a GUI is an obvious complement (visualization, discoverability)
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system), dialed into BBSes of many sorts.

At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.

The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos

Agreed. In my particular case, it did not help that were not exactly rich, so I got to, however briefly, become a zealot in amiga vs pc war. Still, one of a kind experience.
Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.)

You are right about graphics.

I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...
Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.
The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then.

The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.

And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.

The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.

The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.

Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.

And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.

In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.

In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.

> By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

You're mentioning a lot of technologies from 1995 which were goundbreaking no doubt, but lets not forget that that is indeed 10 years later than the A1000, and that Commodore went out of business entirely a year before that.

A VGA card was not in every aspect better than the Amiga custom chipset, otherwise Doom would have happened much earlier. The 256 color mode only really made sense when coupled with a powerful enough CPU which had enough oompfh to update each pixel each frame (for instance Doom's recommended spec was a 486). For some 2D graphical effects, the Amiga could do much more with much less hardware power and for a much lower price.

But where the Amiga really was ahead was in software, it took the PC until Win95 (arguably, until NT4) to implement 'proper' multithreading and to finally get a desktop UI that wasn't a complete joke, and the Mac only got preemptive multitasking with OSX in 2001. Amiga was basically the poor man's UNIX-like workstation when you couldn't afford to shell out somewhere between 10k and 100k for a NeXT, Sun or SGI workstation.

And how long did apps & games take to make full USE of SVGA/SBlaster on DOS vs Windows?

The FULL experience of Wintel was definitely 10 years behind the full experience of an out-of-the-box Amiga.

The Mac II (1987) had 640x480 256 color non-interlaced graphics. Multiple display support (which I don't think the Amiga ever had). And square pixels!

Much more expensive than the Amiga 1000 of course, but those capabilities had moved way down the Mac line by 1990-1991. And by that time the high-end had 24-bit color, much higher resolutions, accelerated graphics, and laptops (something else the Amiga never had).

The software had moved on too (eg TrueType, QuickTime, AppleTalk).

It was obsolete as soon as the 486 was released, pushing 386 (especially 386SX) systems with SVGA into a lower price tier. Commodore's answer, the Amiga 1200, was released too late with too little (late 1992 with AGA graphics and no changes to the sound, plus no fast RAM?)

I stuck with the Amiga platform until 1994, then I got a cheap 486 after the Pentium was released.

I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems.

Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.

It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw

In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.

Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.

The keyword being latency.

Even a powerful PC, such as running WinNT or Linux on my 9800x3d, doesn't feel as tight as my pretty basic Amiga 500 does.

It's the difference between a RTOS proper (AmigaOS, QNX, BeOS) and a toy (Windows, Linux, MacOS).

Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today:

1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes

2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)

3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties

> 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes

Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor').

Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked.

What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems.

> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions

AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.

> 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode)

But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.

Implementing mouse cursors as a hardware sprite isn’t that uncommon for 2D accelerated graphics, albeit later than on the Amiga. Something like an ATI Mach32 has one for example. About 15 years ago I had a crappy Dell whose Radeon card would randomly glitch the cursor, so it survived at least until then in newer systems. The extra responsiveness is more of an Amiga thing though.
> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes

Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.

I would not be who I am if my father didn't buy an amiga 1000 for my bigger brother. I was around 7 years old, I still have a few memory frames of the original package unboxing when it arrived. I was too small but I remember the feeling, after that I merged with computers.

the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works.

thank you commodore, thank you dad.

and thanks for this time traveling post!

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game.

The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.

The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”).

The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?

What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.

The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas.

In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.

That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.

In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.

I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine.

Different times...

> The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K

Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!

I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be.

However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.

When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985."

Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.

10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X
When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could.

It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined.

What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability.

It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.

I thought “I think I have an Amiga 1200 in the garage in a box.”

Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.

Terrific, but not sure about the ten years ahead.

Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.

> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic.

Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

In the early 90s I had an elementary teacher who was an amiga nerd and had a couple for us to play with. Best class ever.
Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.
I wanted one, but unlike the C64 I could not afford it.. but I wanted that and a Video Toaster.
I'm an Amiga diehard from the start but the industry caught up in a lot less than 10 years. Also, the amazing X68000 was a thing in Japan as of 1987.
One of my game's main characters is an Amiga fan and the Amiga vs ST rivalry has small cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...

Unrelated fact: My German Amiga 1000 keyboard has a serial number that ends with ... 00012. loved memories.
Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.
I own The Amiga /AmigaOne /HombreOne . I open source it. Proof ask Gensia they just didnt want to hurt anybodies feelings.. f it. Im RHRH Constantine XII -Amigaman. Base it off of Aros or something. Amigaone model name will be x86 compatible. Hombre will be RISC/ARM compatible. Proof .. how in the heck do u think u got all the Amiga OS on aminet ,and avaibole to u. Plus to boot the hardware that is open to u now. I know Dave and Karl. I know them ALL. People, should check instead of beLIVING liars illumanti stool pidgins like rj and david pleansance, bill, coloanto, so called commodore, and any other so called amiga company. So contact I if u want to see and get that Open source Amiga that u really have.. search my name.
The PC made it. Decisively and on all accounts. Save one. You Amiga nerdlingers got adequate enough hardware in them nice wedge-style keyboard computer cases (i. e. not counting Amiga buckets).

AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)

Great article overall!

But:

>"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable.

But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue."

Not true!

Well, not entirely true...

Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding...

I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience!

Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's.

The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc.

Any program could crash any of those.

So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...)

If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day...

Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it!

So, to the Author, I say "well done!"

An excellent article overall!

That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!

wow