The Amiga was a legend, the sound, graphic and gaming capabilities were truly awesome. Just when the Commodore 64 started to become a bit long in the tooth and the company’s future seemed uncertain, Commodore acquired a startup company called “Amiga” and voila – one of the most iconic, stunningly multimedia-capable computers of the 16-bit era was born. And I had to have one.
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…and one I got. Originally I wanted an Amiga 1000, but that model was really expensive so my first was a used Amiga 500. It was a compact model where the computer, keyboard and floppy drive were one unit. With my previous computer I used an old black-and-white portable TV as display, (with a typical 70s shagalicious bright red plastic casing, yeah, baby, yeah), but the higher resolution of the Amiga demanded something more advanced, so for the first time I had an actual computer monitor on my desk.
Audio-Visual Revolution
One picture representative of the graphic capabilities of the Amiga was the Tutankhamun image, which was also the cover of the Deluxe Paint software package (the “Photoshop” of its day). It’s hard to describe the wow factor that image had back then, when to today’s eyes it’s merely some quaint retro pixel-art. We are now utterly spoiled, having millions, nay billions of colours, HDR and the likes, but to geeks of the time where PC users where happy to get a measly 128 colours, showing off Amiga’s HAM mode with 4096 colours was like showing a caveman a Renoir.
The Amiga was the only 16-bit computer of its time with custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites and a blitter, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system that didn’t really have a name at first, because it was split into Amiga DOS and the GUI called “workbench”. Later iterations were named AmigaOS, but that name wasn’t in use during the high time of the Amiga (with the A1000, A1200, A500, A2000 models).
The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody – including Commodore’s marketing department – could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, it’s obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas.
— Byte, August 1994
Warhol had one, too
One of the cooler PR stunts Commodore was able to pull off was recruiting Andy Warhol as a brand ambassador for this revolutionary computer. Warhol even did a live demo painting Debbie Harry (“Blondie”) on the Amiga.
It isn’t prominent in the video above, but the whole demo was made possible through technology that caused yet another revolution. The Amiga chipset can genlock, which is the ability to adjust its own screen refresh timing to match an incoming NTSC or PAL video signal. In the video above, I think it was used to capture Debbie Harry’s image to the Amiga. Genlocking also allows an Amiga to overlay an external video source with graphics. This made it possible to do character generation and CGI effects with the Amiga far more cheaply than earlier systems.
The NewTek Video Toaster was was a combination of software and hardware. It made the Amiga 2000 the default machine for video titling and budget CGI effects for quite a while. Most people are not aware of this, but the computer graphics in Babylon 5 were made on an Amiga.
Programming, Second Attempt
I still was fascinated that (in theory) you could tell a machine what to do and it would do exactly that in all its multimedia glory. So once again I tried to get into pogramming. Although many more approachable languages like Pascal were supported on the platform, most demos and games were written in C, C++, and also 680×0 assembler. I tried to learn C with some tutorials on public domain floppies and gave up in record time. It seemed too cryptic to me. It’s not like today where you can get 4932 different free online courses for programming in C and C++ with the click of a mouse, along with a free GNU compiler. That’s not how it worked.
Don’t forget that the Internet didn’t exist yet, VHS was the latest and greatest to watch movies at home, audio CDs were common, but data CDs weren’t a thing just yet (no computer had a CD-ROM). The DVD was still to be invented. If you wanted to learn more about your computer of choice, latest developments and software/games, there were tons of magazines, and lots of floppies copied and physically snail-mailed around all over Europe. If you wanted to learn a programming language, your best bet in Germany were books from Data Becker.
Almost DTP
The DTP revolution happened on the Mac for various reasons – still my first encounter with desktop publishing in the remotest sense was on the Amiga. The machine had scalable fonts, and some programs would allow you to do basic page layouts. Scalable vector fonts would print out at fairly high quality at any size. However, laser printers weren’t a thing yet, so dot matrix printers eventually failed to impress, and without support for PostScript and laser printers the Amiga never really became a viable solution for serious print jobs.
Games, Games, Games
Let’s be honest – one of the main drivers of home computer sales were and still are: games. That was true for the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum and the Amiga. Concerning the Atari models of the time I think a large part of their user base claimed to be musicians, because the Atari had MIDI ports built right in, but there were a ton of games published for the Atari as well, so Atari users, don’t you pretend you’ve been productive all the time, I know you’re lying.
Addicted
I recall getting so hung up on this machine that I eventually decided to sell it and have no computer for at least a year, because I felt I really needed to get a life. And a life I got, attended the Basel design school, had several bands (I was enthusiastically playing the drums), grew my hair long, well, because, rock ‘n’ roll, duh, and basically sketched and painted a lot.
So after a self-induced abstinence of all things computers for one or two years, I had a relapse to my old addiction. Looking at the best machines to do multimedia stuff, the Macintosh looked mighty good, but was also mighty pricey. The second choice was the Amiga which was still great bang for the buck to do multimedia, so I bought a used Amiga 1000 from a friend (that must have been ’91/’92 ish). That system was a beast with a memory expansion of several MB RAM (I don’t recall if it was 5, 7 or 8 – either way more than enough memory at the time).
Wither Amiga
For a long time the Amiga was my favourite computer, it really delivered incredible bang for the buck: a preemptive multitasking GUI based system for a fraction of the price of a Mac. I still think it’s such a shame that companies like Commodore and Atari who developed some of the most advanced GUI systems apart from Apple all went the way of the Dodo not because of technical shortcomings, but mostly because Commodore treated their dealers like crap and the management were a bunch of bean counters who didn’t understand computer culture or how to sell these technical marvels they had. They all pushed these multimedia very personal creative machines “for business”, totally missing the point they could’ve marketed these as the actual personal computer to be put in every home (that’s who they sold them to all the time anyway – how didn’t they notice?). It’s also amazing that Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore and later CEO of Atari Corporation basically ruined two of the best computer companies single handedly.
Once Commodore and thus the Amiga went onto life support around 1993 onwards there was somewhat of a vacuum in the homecomputing area in Germany, (IBM-)PCs running DOS would feel archaic to a GUI user like me (Windows 1, 2, 3.x was really a joke, Amiga, Atari ST and Mac users alike sneered at it). Multimedia capabilities on DOS and early Windows machines were a total hack and rather rudimentary. Even the early Soundblaster cards sounded crappy compared to Amiga’s 4 voices using logarithmic samples.
However, even the Amiga 2000 was still running on a chip two generations behind the latest Macintosh models, on top of this Apple was also just getting ready to leave the whole architecture behind moving to a more advanced RISC chip, the PowerPC which would play a big part in Apples resurgence in the late 90’s.
When I started studying Typography in Freiburg in 1993, Mac Quadras and a little later the first PowerMacs were my workhorses, and I soo badly wanted one myself at home, but that is another story…
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