Amiga tribute thread - 25th Anniversary

[MikeB]

libellule said:

MikeB said:

Sadly the management didn’t realize what gem they had acquired. Big C= was a PC manufacturer too and using off the shelf part combined with cheap clunky flawed MSDOS this looked less risky to them, not realizing (like Apple and IBM) multi-media like the Amiga was capable of was the way of the future. Amiga designers hid easter eggs in AmigaOS like “We made Amiga, They fucked it up” (1986).

Which is part of the story, the head of technology engineering at Apple in the mid 80s till 90s did understand the potential:

"When the Amiga came out, everyone was scared as hell. No one could figure out how they packed so much power into its off-the-shelf parts." Apple's Mac was still black and white, cost more, and could only do one thing at a time. But, Apple advertised; Commodore didn't. "We [Apple] were really scared of the Amiga. Fortunately, Irving Gould [CEO of Commodore] helped Apple by running Commodore into the ground."

He later tried to mimic AmigaOS with his company Be Inc, once a company worth a billion dollars. But Microsoft blocked PC manufacturers to bundle Windows as well as BeOS with systems eventually running the company into the ground. Microsoft in the ended up paying 10 million dollars to stockholders while persisting on admitting no wrong droing.

He was right to be scared, even in the mid 90s when my Amiga saw ever fewer software support due to C='s demise, my Amiga was able to emulate 68k MacOS faster than the fastest 68k Macintosh could. Handy in such times and I could even multi-task!

you know, I think I got the "big picture"

but I fail to precisely see the "timing" and the "real" moves

OK, APPLE was dominated but advertised better
but what about PC and windows ?

On the PC MSDOS pretty much dominated until the release of Windows 95 (finally multi-tasking, but much worse than on Amigas, Apple took even longer perform real multi-tasking) which released more than a decade after the release of the Amiga 1000 and 1 and a half years after C= declared bankruptcy. MSDOS was a very flawed operating system, it's an actual code level copy of CP/M but with more shortcomings. Microsoft bought the (stolen) QDOS and rebranded it MSDOS and partnered with IBM, I think it's one of the most limited and flawed operating systems ever created.

Apple used the Motorola 68k series CPU, this is why Amigas were so well suited to emulate MacOS through simply an emulator program such as Shapeshifter. The x86 CPUs provide a much less modern architecture with lots of core flaws, emulating the architecture required a lot of performance because it is so different and obsolete, upgraded Amigas were fast enough though to emulate MSDOS/Windows3.x through software (such as PC Task), but for a 7 Mhz Amiga to emulate a x86 PC you would need a PC board which basically had a x86 CPU on it. Still a nice option for some as you could have a PC as well as Amiga in one box and you could have MSDOS run inside an Amiga window, so using both operating systems simultaneously on 1 screen.

The other way around for a PC to emulate classic Amigas took a long time to develop, UAE stands for UNIX Amiga Emulator, although the "U" originally stood for "Unusable" as in 1996 on a 90Mhz Pentium the emulation was still about one third as fast as a 7 MHz A1000 from 1985. UAE has meanwhile been ported to many systems including Windows.

Nowadays emulating classic 68k Amiga software generally provides a pleasant experience, although you may endure some sound stuttering here and there or less instant responses times than you would with a real classic Amiga. There are also advantages and UAE has also become an important emulator for running old software on AmigaOS4.x, but it runs more transparent, you can for example simply double click a game icon and the game boots (from the user's perspective) as a normal game.