Around 1991, in Ohio, I was at a computer expo where Disney demonstrated much of what you see in this video. It may have been at the University of Akron. It was to a large audience, and it was either on a really big TV or a projector (can't remember which - but I do remember being able to see it clearly). One of the amazing things was the Disney artist demonstrating the software did some drawings of classic Disney characters... with a mouse. And not only that, he apologized because he was right-handed and was using the mouse with his left hand so he could better face the audience and talk to them as he was demonstrating. Of course the drawings looked perfect, and to this day I've never seen anyone draw free-hand with a mouse with that amount of skill.
PowerAnimator was used to create the water creature in the 1989 film The Abyss, as well as the T-1000 character in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, at a cost of $460,000 per minute. It was also used heavily for the many visual effects of the 1996 film Independence Day. PowerAnimator also served as the solution used to produce South Park episodes digitally before production was moved to Maya. The title sequence of Disney's One Saturday Morning was created using Alias Wavefront Power Animator.PowerAnimator was also used in game development, in particular as a part of Nintendo 64's SGI-based developers kit. It saw some use for modeling, texturing, animation and realtime effects for other titles and platforms as well. Notable titles: Crash Bandicoot[3] Casper[4] Wing Commander 3 Wing Commander 4[5] Quake I on the movie The abyss they use the cube map for the reflections
It's really amazing. Just 6 years before, they were dealing with pixalated green on black terminal machines with only floppy A and floppy B data entries. Then in 1990, they are dealing with 3d objects and video on a color gui.
Apple was the exact same, just in 1984. Apple went from a primitive 8-bit CPU to a 32-bit. Windows 3.0, released 1990 did the same for PC users where most DOS programs were character-based.
It actually amazes me how advanced the Amiga and Atari ST were upon their release dates in 1985. Sure, the Amiga 1000 was pricey, but compared to a Macintosh, it was still less expensive, but way more capable. I used to have a Macintosh emulator on my ATari 520ST FM, but it was 10 percent more powerful, plus had a higher resolution display. Decent PC windows, Window 3.0 was years later...
Yeah, but the Macintosh was really engineered to be a very cost-effective all in one computer. The target price for the original Macintosh was $999, but Sculley thought it should be $2499. Disagreement over that was one of the factors Steve Jobs quit or was fired from Apple in 1985. Also, it's the reason it didn't become the market success it could've been.
The problem was that at the time, 1985, they had a very bad selection of programs. When their program library was starting to grow somewhat some years later, Apple had already released the much more powerful and color capable Mac II:s (relased the same year, 1987, as the Amiga 500). Both the Amiga and the Atari ST were mostly seen as gaming computers (especially the Amiga) here in Europe. Ok, the Atari ST was also recognised for its midi capabilities and working as a sequencer and maybe to a lesser degree somewhat also in Desktop Publishing, but not near as much as the Mac or the PC (later on). As is also spoken of in this video. As late as in 1990 the amount of programs for the Amiga and the support was still on the lower side.
@@gregorymalchuk272 GEOS was a cooperative multitasking system, and that ran on a Commodore 64. I had to create a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS (limited OS - but an OS) as a senior project. Trust me that it's really not that hard to do in a very small space. Pre-emptive just requires an interrupt to fire off, in that interrupt, you save the state of the program that was (at that time) executing by saving all the register values of that program, then you swap in all the saved off register values of another program, then exit the interrupt. It's not difficult at all. Memory management can be a little tricky though for various reasons, and if you don't have virtual memory, all code running has to be doing branches - no jumps, because everything is relative to a point, you can't load a program in a specific location in memory.
This was how small productions got made in the 90s... with the Amiga 3000 and Video Toaster. they did come out with some updates. You could later add more ram, better storage and faster CPUs. The Amiga 4000 was the end of the line in 1997.
Wow, I came across this video and it brought back so many great memories. I grew up using the Amiga in the late 80's early 90's and again a few years later when I attended college as the entire 2D animation lab was based on the Amiga. Truly ahead of its time able to perform functions that Windows and Mac machines either couldn't do or struggled to reproduce the same results in the Amiga heyday. I still remember how the Amiga was panned in the US as a gaming computer, again being ahead of its time. Today, gaming in general is big business to the tune of billions of dollars. Not only could the Amiga run good games back in those days, it was robust in actually creating games, animations, multimedia, video production, sound and music...good times man, good times.
Why is it that 1987 to 1991 or so has the most concentrated 80s feeling, despite being at the very end of the decade and a year or two into the 90s? Having been born in '88 I never realized just how 80s the period from 1989 to '90 or '91 really was.
I used the Amiga 2000 with the Video Toaster ($10,000) in a Community TV studio when it first came out, and I could do WAY more from the keyboard than a $300,000 editing and control room of regular analog TV equipement, plus 3D rendering and TONS of stuff that nothing else could do!!! So far ahead of its time professional video people did not know what it was. I could replace ALL the equipment and I could run the whole studio durring a broadcast, live, replacing everyone but the Director, 4 or 5 other people!!! I quicly replaced the VCR opperator as well as doing titles, what they bought it for. I was a computer geek with a modded Atari 800, 256K, with 128K for a ram drive and task switching with cut and paste between as many windows as I wanted and and it blew the doors off the PC XT with paper white monochome monitor and no sound I got later. I very fondly remembet the Computer Chonicles, I doubt I missed many episodes! Thank you for posting these!
@@IkarusKommt It certinaly does if you are using a modded DRDOS I think it was. You might not call it task switching, but there were multiple programs loaded in RAM and I think ALT-TAB would switch between them. It worked. You might not know that the 6502 supported memory bank switching either, how else could the Atari 800 have 16K ROM and 48K RAM and still have 2 16K ROM cartridges installed. Or the Apple IIIc, Atari 1200 and others had 128K RAM. The bios, which may have been modded as well, I cant remember now, was bank swtiched to RAM. Each 'instance' if you want to call it that could be as low as 16K RAM, enought to run an app.
@@rodneyinvancouver7204 DR-DOS was a 16-bit OS that didn't work on Atari 800, and the 6502 lacks a MMU completely and certainly doesn't support any bank switching. Atari 800 also doesn't have any bank switching circuitry, having at max 48k memory.
@@IkarusKommt The 6502 was max 64K - RAM and ROM yet Apple, Atatri and Commodore all had 128K systems, so how did they do that? What I did was replace the memory controller chip on my 800 with a 256K controler and 8 256K RAM chips on a small board, which plugged into the old Controller socket on the motherboard. Voila, a 256K 8bit system!
I love how they had a segment on computer calendars. That was really a thing back in the day. Part of the appeal of buying an expensive computer was to keep track of your day.
oh the irony of the interview talking about the amazing Toaster and the text on the screen is generated by a Chyron or an Aston which cost 100 times what the Amiga 3000 cost
I was so happy to finally get an Amiga 3000. I remember drooling at this machine in high school. But man was it expensive at the time. This machine blew everything else out of the water. If only Commodore management marketed it properly.
I remember hearing about the in-tor-webz in 1991 and also of VR. Now I have both! The in-tor-webz has turned the entire planet into easily misled morons and VR is just not that fun!
Awesome collection dude! I want get another Amiga one day. Loved that computer from the late 80s through early 90s. I wanted one of the original Amiga 1000 when Commodore did not own it but wine up getting an Amiga 500 then a 2000 later.
My friend had the Amiga 1000, I would go to his house and play Sword of Sodan, my parents bought me the Amiga 500. I went into broadcasting and the first TV station I worked at had the Video Toaster on the Amiga 4000.
Loved Sword Of Sodan! I could never convince my parents to buy me an Amiga, but I had one to use at school. In 1992 I bought an Amiga 1000, which I still have... and it still works. I just need to find the keyboard. Loved that little machine.
Allen Hastings the creator of the award winning Lightwave 3D (and later Modo) software makes a cameo in the opening footage of the Amiga user group footage! Back when he had hair! ;)
The Amiga was way ahead of its time, especially when equipped with the Video Toaster. I remember when Pixar was threatening to sue individuals that were making animations similar to theirs using the Amigas back in the days.
@@alecton Yah there was an animation made on the Amiga of the Amiga ball juggling some unicycles that was similar to a Pixar animation. The Amiga was quite capable back in the days and could do what graphics workstations were doing at a fraction of the cost. Loved my Amiga and looking to go on ebay and buy another one for nostalgia.
My first ever home computer was an Amiga 500. I used it for programming and music mostly..I still have a tape with all the songs I wrote..using the wonderful 4 track MED sequencer and later on 'Octamed' the eight track version.
The prices in the video are insane relative to today. I remember buying and soldering a 512k(Half of a megabyte) chip onto the board in my Amiga 500(Was 1988) and it cost $150 just for the memory. You had to drill a hole in the case of the Amiga to attach a dip switch which you could flip on or off depending on what you were doing. Some games and applications wouldn't load if the extra memory was running so you had to turn it off. For an example one of those games was Silkworm.
Back ibn the 90´s I had Sierra Space Quest III and it was supposed to run on Amiga 500 using the 512K ram. It did not, because I had external floppy drive, that consumed the memory somewhat that the game did not run. learned this phenomenon only lately.
Roosendaal wrote the first source files titled “Blender” on the 2nd of January, 1994, still considered Blender’s official birthday. Originally, Blender was planned as an in-house application for NeoGeo; it grew from a series of pre-existing tools, including a ray-tracer built for the Amiga. This early version of Blender was intended to address a perennial frustration among creatives: when a difficult client requires multiple changes to a project, how do you implement those changes painlessly? Thanks to its highly configurable approach, Blender aimed at providing an answer. (As an aside: the name refers to a song by a Swiss electronic band, Yello).
While it is a considerable predecessor, we might as well consider the stuff written by ILM for the SGI machines when they were working on Terminator 2.
I still wonder how they managed to do these awesome retro jingles. I was working on TV jingles for couple of years, but some of them never stopped amaze me
Oh, the Amiga 3000...my small town used one for their public access station for well over a decade. I think Babylon 5 used an array of Amigas for their CGI as well.
Only season 1 was done on the Amiga! After that, to further the Amiga's shame, the production switched to Alpha and later Pentium workstations because they were cheaper and far more powerful to render the scenes.
Ahhh. 80's/90's tv news format. A strange void where all is darkness until the lights come up and two formerly empty husks, eyes cast downward, are roused from their lifeless slumber.
As an older person (I’m 61), I am intrigued by your observation. We never really noticed things like that much but you are correct. Today, I notice how every news program is something that ends with “....to keep you safe”. And with Covid, everyone outside 50 feet from somone else is wearing a mask but the people crammed into the studio are not. This is followed by 10 commercials where every single product results in ‘people hugging’. Doesn’t matter if it is a Chevy Suburban or a pair of scissors, it makes people hug.
@@ChatGPT1111 It's very much the timeless marriage of scare tactics and marketing. The world is scary, but Fox News is here to help. Have a warm blanket, we're news you can trust.
23:10 Fun Fact, Tim Jenison went on to create a breakthrough documentary in 2013 called 'Tim's Vermeer', He proved renaissance artists mostly likely used mirrors to create their works of art, especially Vermeer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
I had an Amiga 500. I always wanted a video toaster. In the Uk we used to have a music show called The Chart Show in 1987 That started my obsession with computers and my thus far 27y career in software.
The Toaster really sparked a big wave of budget analog video production. However, by about five years after this, video was moving to digital, and the Amiga couldn’t really keep up. The Video Toaster Flyer was never quite as successful as the original Toaster.
I'll bet that these guys hardly dreamed that by the first decade of the 21st century , people would be editing Independent film complete with CG special effects , and music, on home computer studios. how far we have come in such a short time. . I'm sure our grandchildren will be astounded by the fact that WE did not have sentient AI in our home systems.I can certainly see how all this would have been so exciting to the young people especially of that era . I was a teen from the 70's but did not get my first computer till 1998. It was a windows 98 system. so I missed out on all this early fluff...I watched it , but was not active in it .
The Animation software is pretty damn impressive for the time. Digital painting where barely possible at the time, let alone animation. Still kinda wants it.
27:38 Wait what?? Imagine getting a package from Amazon or something these days and finding it filled with *popcorn* instead of bubble wrap or packing peanuts? Would have been insane if that was somehow still a thing. I imagine issues with rodents, among other issues, would have been why this never caught on
@@Animated__Freak Stop misleading people. The AmigaOne isnt an Amiga. Its just an expensive Power PC board not made by any of the original people that created the Amiga, or worked at Commodore. The AmigaOne has to emulate an Amiga if you want to use any of the games, demos or software that was written for the real Amiga hardware.
@@BoomBox02 No use in buying an actual Amiga machine unless you like to set money on fire. Just the monitor alone costs more than my kids' entire Ryzen PC's. If you've got a half-decent Intel-architecture machine you could emulate the Amiga flawlessly. "Amiga In A Box" (AIAB) offers a full distribution of software for emulators, but it may be difficult to find on the web outside of torrents with private trackers.
@@juansolo1617 Yes the Amiga can now be emulated near perfect on a PC. I use to use AIAB years ago. Its just crazy how much Amiga computers and the commodore monitors to match have gone up in price. The Atari ST is starting to go up in price and the Atari Falcon is as expensive as a decked out A4000 if you happen to find one for sale.
i dont much about this computer honestly as it was before my time...well i was born then(i was born in 1989) but i was a baby when the Amiga was around. I know 90s computers are now clunky slow dinosaurs but man does the Amiga seem ahead of its time...seems like it was miles of head of all the other clunkers....So why is it defunct? Just imagine if Amiga was around today...
+girlstorm09 if Amiga was around apple would be last pcs would be second amiga would be like the big name and high end workstations it went defunct cause of crazy management and doing wrong moves on 1992 for the movie Jurassic Park they used Silicon Graphics for there final CGI scenes and i seem somewhere they used Amiga for some pre render and overlay scenes.
+girlstorm09 Bad business decisions, burnt bridges and poor marketing basically, don't remember the full story but they were never really advertised properly. People back then didn't really understand how powerful they were. The latter models unlike the commodore 64 and PET were more expensive than the less capable competition and didn't effectively target the home audience. definitely ahead IBM clones, macs, etc. The best product doesn't always win unfortunately
+girlstorm09 The biggest reason for Commodores failure was pure and simple bad management. The systems were extremely good for the time (especially the older ones - the later models were released a couple years too late) and their pricing was relatively inexpensive for what they could do. The rise and fall of Commodore is a fascinating story, and there are plenty of videos about it on YT, so I won't go into detail, but in essence it comes down to two word: 'Medhi Ali' - Commodore's CEO at the time of it's collapse. The number of bad decisions the company made, under his lead, could be a comedy if it weren't so sad. There is a great interview with the man who was the head of Commodore in the UK at the time of the collapse, which was done just this year I believe and is available on YT if you have a search for it. It's one of the most fascinating stories you will hear.
+girlstorm09 retail computer tech was advancing as quickly back then as smartphones have in the past few years. i.e. a 1990 top of the line system was a turd by 1993. Bottom line is that the Amiga did not offer any competitive products after the A3000. The A4000 was a miserable failure, largely due to its graphical system, which by 1993 was pitiful compared to PC graphic cards that could do 1600x1200 24 bit color flick-free, when AGA couldn't even do 800x600 256 color flicker free. But anyway, the PC market by that point was unstoppable and the Amiga lost its competitive edge as being the most affordable system as well. I remember ditching my A4000 for a 486dx2-66 that cost far less and never looked back again.
i used disney animation studio on pc in 92. i did not have the book that was used as an authentication mechanism since the password asked for a set of pictures found on a random page of the manual that my uncle had. i was amazed with the software and had a lot of fun with it.
Almost nobody in Germany cared about Apple or PC until maybe 90 or 91 on home use. We all used the different Atari and Commodore 8bit and 16bit models. Personally we had a Schneider CPC (Amstrad), C64, Atari Mega ST1, Amiga 500. Friends also had either Atari St or A500. After that we all went on our first PCs (Basically when 486 and later P60/75 came out).
I owned an Amiga 500, then an A1000, then an ultimate A4000 040 with dual 300mb Seagates. It really cranked. Someone from the ABC bought the A4000 to do editing for the TV station.
I love the 90s vibe from Jeff Berger, dancing around while creating music. I have a friend who works creatively with audio and video, but he is quite static in comparison. He doesn't even get up from his chair. 😂 How I miss this era!
I have an Amiga 500. You can see it in two videos I recorded on my channel from 1988 and 1989 if anyone is interested. Before that I have a Commodore 64 and Vic 20. I even ran an online BBS in the mid eighties.
Aaah yes the BBS was the pre internet/web sites. I use to dial up to a lot off BBS and download nude pics that took about 5mins to download a single pic lol
@@robertdaone Five minutes? What speed modem? I started with a 300 baud 1660 Hayes modem and it would take all night just to download the games to put on one half of a 5 1/4 floppy. Around 664kb total data.
@@robertdaone I remember those days. "Wait... I see the top of a nipple starting to appear now!... Sort of!". Hah. I ultimately graduated to a 1200 baud Hayes 1670, then 2400 baud, then 14,4, 28,8 then 56k, and so on. So surreal watching tech come and go and websites come and go. Back then when you were speaking with someone you could just go walk out your door and meet them because everyone you spoke to was local. Now the people we speak with we may never meet. Technology brings us "closer" but at the same time creates massive distance between people.
@@Del-Canada Yep always wanted a 2400 baud modem but never got one. I did want an acoustic modem also after seeing the moving "War Games". Yah I'm all for advances in tech but I think modern social media has done more bad than good.
My first computer wan a C128 but it was followed up by an Amiga 500 as soon as I could lay hands on one... overseas in Japan in the military, wasn't super easy to get one.
Back when Amiga ruled. Just 2 years later it would get annihilated by the PC. Remember going to my friends house who owned an Amiga 500 just so I could play First Samuari and Moonstone. I never persuaded my Dad to buy me one, but I built a PC in 1993 for Wolfenstein and Doom and figured ... ah well. Got there in the end!
Pretty much the same story as me. Reconditioned office 386 sx25 specifically to run Wolfenstein and Doom2 then sourced a second hand maths coprocessor which allowed me to run 3D Studio. I was living the dream!
Towards the end I was half-expected that the news would report that Riggs and Murtaugh had again destroyed a few cars in a high speed chase, to be honest.
PowerAnimator and Animator, also referred to simply as "Alias", the precursor to what is now Maya and StudioTools, was a highly integrated industrial 3D modeling, animation, and visual effects suite.
Lots of amateur videos taken back in the day that are forever lost now due to lack of archival. That is the amazing thing of what we have now with cheap storage and high speed networks.
I wanted to get either an Atari 520ST or an Amiga back in the late 1980s / early 1990s, but there wasn't any local computer stores that would carry either system. 😢
The Amiga had graphics and sound that made us drool back then. Then IBM came out with VGA graphics and you could buy a sound card which got you close, though still not as good
Awesome computer! The way I see it, the Amiga 3000 could be an affordable substitute to Silicon Graphics computers which cost way, way more at that time. It's capabilities were way beyond the IBM PCs and clones of the same era. It's sad to know that the company does not exist anymore. Who knows what they could have come up with if they still exist today, considering the level of technology we presently have.
Commodore was working on a deal with SUN to use the Amiga3000UX as their low end machines back in the day. Commodore management supposedly blew the deal and it didnt happen.
@@a4000t Marketing and business sometimes is much more important than the actual tech. IBM PCs were extremely lackluster, but they really caught on. Early windows was extremely buggy too. Don't underestimate marketing! Same with people too!
Goddamn I was just going to post this in an alternate dimension 2020 most of us have Aphones that say Amiga instead of Apple! Guess it is true we crossed over then.. I had the 2000HD.. It was definitely better than the 500 I previously had.. From what I remember my dad broke it trying to install the manual HD!! It was a great PC but there’s nothing like the magic of that good ol first one I got in January ‘89
Never would've happened. Commodore did not have a license to the famed ARM architecture and its fabs were dinosaurs unable to produce those types of chips. They would've had to outsource them for production just as any other manufacturer. Meaning, no competitive edge. It's general consensus that CISC based processors had 0% chance in mass portable computing devices. that was just not the focus of Commodore, ever.
used the video toaster on amigas until 1999 in highschool and I know they used it for some years after until after their jason project funding ended and they used all the hardware for their setup, since it was WAYWAY more modern.
I fast-forwarded to the part where he ‘beams’ Stewart into the frame Star Trek-style! Confirms that I did indeed watch this when it aired! Unfortunately I didn’t have a spare $1600 at the time..
