I think it's very telling of how humble Gary Kildall was where he watches a whole demonstration of the Atari ST without mentioning that his company Digital Research developed it's graphical user interface - GEM. Neither does he bag out it's competition in the Amiga. He interviews these people like he's not seen either computer before.
It's possible he wasn't aware of journalistic ethics given his background, which is to either be up front with his involvement (and profit) from that contribution, or to recuse himself completely. Or it's certainly possible he let the showrunners know and they kept a close eye on him being neutral during the interview.
@@Elbas_Tardo I ALWAYS like to point to AMIGA braggers that the AMIGA is and always will be originally an ATARI PC . As for multitasking , the AMIGA always had problems with multitasking . I don't know what you're talking about envy .
@@Thiesi I think you know if you have the Amiga bouncy ball as your image lol. If not it was a great computer that came out in the mid 80's that was far ahead of any other home computer. Sold by Commodore.
I have mine hooked up to an old CRT, and I upgraded it massively. It now has a Turbo Card (clock speed of a whooping 14Mhz, and 2MB of additional RAM), a hard drive (I replaced the SCSI with a SCSI2SD-Adaptor, though) and even a laser mouse, lol.
@@maarkaus48 yes. people may laugh, but the design of the machine fascinated me from day 1. I always fall in love with beautiful tech devices, today thats true for Apple Macbooks
@@michaelheinrich44 I think the same. I know its not popular but I bought some Lenovo's on the recommendation of a friend of mine and I am amazed at how they're made. Modern computers have come a long way, but I still love this era in computing. It was like a new frontier. I had an amiga, by brother in law chose an Atari st line, and we would compare notes on which was better. Meanwhile my dad had an Apple IIgs. Too much fun back then.
The C64 and Amiga got me hooked on computers. I tinkered with it when I was a young boy and learnt MC68000 assembler and C. It was an amazing feeling being able to write your own software! It was a revelation - like opening a door to a mysteriously new world. When that happened I knew what I was going to do in life and I went to university and became a software engineer. Now I’m running a department of software engineers myself, working on cloud applications in the health care industry. All thanks to the accessibility of the C64 and Amiga back in the day. The guys who developed those machines will always be my heroes. I still have those old machines in my attic. Someday I’ll pull them out of storage. The C64 bit the dust - that much I know. Probably fried a circuit. I hope it can be fixed somehow.
jay oh No, as much as I love the Amiga, I wouldn’t start with it today if the intention is to learn programming. Things have just changed too much for that to make sense.
jay oh Oh yes, it benefited me a great deal! It built my understanding of binary arithmetics, memory maps, cpu registers and other close to silicon programming concepts. So it definitely formed a good foundation for the journey. But if I was to learn programming today I wouldn’t pull out a dusty old Amiga. Software development is much more high level today than it was back then (except if you are an embedded or driver programmer). Today everything is built using existing frameworks, libraries, SDKs and so on, so the building blocks have gotten a lot larger, so to say. Back then, you had to build almost everything from scratch.
I did the same thing but started with a trs-80 coco then on to Atari’s. Back then it was not cool to know what computers were and by the time I was graduating from high school someone that knew electronics and computers was in high demand. I got a job fixing mainframe computers at McDonald Douglas right out of HS and never looked back. Never had to go to college. I did have to take a pay cut often because I didn’t have a college degree. That always kind of pissed me off cuz the guys with the degree sucked and weren’t really interested in their work.
And even today, 36 years later we get official OS updates for the Amiga. And there's more hardware than ever produced for it. imagine if anyone would've said that in 1985... :D Mindblowing!
Yeah but wasn't that thanks to the Apple OS emulation and Cubase? Indeed it was very good, I had an Amiga with Music X and it was not so reliable, it had lag and spikes.
A MIDI interface was available on the Amiga (via serial port) for $50, offering 1 in and 3 outs. I used the Amiga exclusively for music production in the early 90s.
There are an interesting fact. This episode start with Atari 8Bit and Commodore 64 as rivals and indeed it was. But about the next generation on both brands, had a secret twist (at the time.. later on Internet times was know) Atari 8bit was designed by Jay Miner, later he left Atari and started his own company to create a 68000 microprocessor based console, later turn to Amiga project. Then in short the history, Amiga was the evolution from the Atari 8Bit technology or architecture on 16Bits. About Commodore 64, after somethings inside Commodore company, one of the leader Commodore 64 designer left the company and went to Atari, and help to design the Atari ST, so Atari ST its something like C64 evolution to 16Bits era. Just making a very short history about those machines.
The Atari ST project was led by one of the key engineers (Shiraz Shivji) for the 16-bit Commodore 900. Shiraz Shivji followed Jack Tramiel's exit from Commodore. After Commodore purchased the Amiga, Commodore canceled Jack Tramiel-era 16-bit Commodore 900 development.
The Amiga is - in my opinion - the absolute greatest Home computer ever made. Especially that sound chip...used it in the 90ies extensively....the Turrican soundtrack from part one and two still remains unbeaten. Many great games too...the Nintendo only came out for Square soft titles like Final fantasy and Secret of Mana...
OK, the Atari ST was a very powerful home computer with great hardware and nice games. I still own many of them and it was my first ever 16bit home! But the Amiga....was a machine from an other planet....! We love them both!
The ST was great, I had one as a kid. But the Amiga really was incredible. A better machine in most ways. I remember playing Stunt Car Racer PvP over a crossover cable between my ST and my neighbour's Amiga! Incredible times.
No, I was happy to have an Acorn Archimedes soon after having an amoeba with its atrocious joke of an OS, slow and bugged to death, called 'workbench'.
@@Archimedes75009 Sure a very hard to program machine, with very litle software, show us where is slow and bugged to death the workbench. I wait for your video comparison.
@@hooankee Do you want a video showing you can't even create a directory using the WB, but you must use the CLI ?. Fortunately there was an empty folder on the WB disks, you could copy this one, how convenient ! ROTFL. There are enough videos on YT for whoever isn't an amoeba freak. WB is ugly, non user friendly, slow, with an even slower filesystem, and bugged to death. I got an amoeba then I got an Archimedes with RISC OS, it was night and day. WB is POS by any possible comparison.
I clearly remember the day mom coming home with the amiga/monitor and two of my favorite games. My brother was the one whom convinced her to get it for me. I remember the feeling of dying and have gone to heaven. I was beside myself being an owner of the most powerful home computer to date. I cherish those memories until the day I die. I wish I have kept my beloved Amiga,
I was 14, and began my personal debate about which one to get. I already was a huge C64 fan (I hacked the hardware to give it stereo sound--followed by giving a cool CCUG demo at 15y/o.). I chose the Amiga 500. Still have it in my basement with its 85MB hard drive that sounds like a jet engine. I powered it up a few years ago and it was like finding a time capsule; exactly where I left off in the early 90's when i switched it off for a 20 year long nap. The 80's were a glorious time for a computer kid (and thankfully I had good access to pirated games, let's be real). Footnote, it's hard to tell if this early EA guy had given his soul to Satan yet, like all must do now at that company. So innocent with their Deluxe Paint.
We owe both Atari and Commodore a debt of gratitude. Not only were they lightyears ahead of the bigger companies in the home but they went to war with them in pricing. This invariably helped to drop those costs considerably. If it was 1985 and I was looking to buy a new computer it would be one of these machines. I wouldn't even look at a 286, Mac, or even the new 386 that launched in 1985. Those two computers could at the time go toe-to-toe with most of the best custom built, sprite throwing monsters in the arcades that Sega, Data East, Nintendo, Konami, Capcom ect...built. Most cabs in 1985 had a Zilog Z-80 8-bit processor in them. The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were rocking the mighty 16-bit/32-bit Motorola 68K processor. Here's the question- How did they financially pull it off in 1985?! These were custom built machines that were built to run fast in 1985. How did they get the parts so cheaply? Were these machines subsidized like the console business? As in they sell their hardware at a loss but make it back in licensing fees and program/game sales? I just don't get it?
I would love to see a documentary about the age when having the fastest computers made a business have a huge advantage and then when it all got to the point where everyone had fast computers at work, and then the PC was born. and really did become a machine that can do business and also play great fun video games. either in the office, or at home. A was a baby when this all happened so I didn't get to experience the business computer race. I just remember being a few years old, my brother got a brand new Sega genesis and sonic the hedgehog was my first hands on experience with the power of computing. How did businesses handle the rapid growth of computers when the companies had to shift their market to family homes. I would LOVE to see some of that history!
Fascinating these episodes. We had an Amiga 2000HD at home up to 1991. Personally, I've had mixed feelings. Could be a very frustrating thing by its throwing Guru Meditations all the time and it was extremely highly perceptive to viruses. The screen resolution and colours actually available for games weren't all that on par to VGA (1987 PS/2). In 1988 we also got a colour PS/2 (supplied by dad's office). Of course the PS/2 was very expensive if not supplied by a business, so on the other hand, when all was set up just right the Amiga was a fantastic thing for gaming, DPaininting, music and media thingies, as well as word processing with WP, databasing with Superbase (lots easier to use and more powerful than Dbase). Great for us kids. It was later extended by a Bridgeboard and VGA card because Lotus 123 and WP 5.1 became needed and better resolutions and so on. By that time, it was clear though that the Amiga was at a dead end, certainly when Windows 3.11 came about, CorelDraw, etc. Both the PS/2 and Amiga went out the door, being replaced with two similar 486 towers with SVGA. Total cost was no more than one Amiga 3000 which still was hardly improved. If only Amiga had paid high attention to standardisation of programming and the GUI from the start, staying far ahead by development, at least on par resolutions and realtime colours etc. But that wasn't to be. From my understanding, CBM was corporate nothing more than a cash cow sqeezing every penny out of it for its owners with its financial HQ incorporated on the Bahamas... Sadly.
I am with you. The problem is that the Amiga kept its 1985 heritage right up to the end. The low graphics resolution, while great for gaming at its time since computational resources couldn't drive high resolutions like today, is the major reason the computer was not accepted by business users and so software companies were not going to port over mainstream packages. The original chipset could not even do 640x480 flicker free , the standard resolution for PCs at the time. Then when the AGA chipset came out, the best it could do was 800x600 but at a crumby 60Hz - if you wanted 72 Hz you were once again locked in 640x480. At that point in time in 1992, the standard PC was doing 1024x768 and higher end systems could drive 1280x1024 and even 1600x1200. So the Amiga pretty much locked itself out of the business world and imprinted itself as a gaming machine. This was fine, of course, for gamers, but Commodore didn't sell these as gaming systems, they sold them as complete computers and that was not viable enough to survive. I know C= had grand plans with AAA graphics and what not that never materialized, which may have made a difference, but too little too late.
@@oldtwinsna8347 640x512 maximum standard without overscan. Amiga 1200 was launched too late and with same sound , cpu so low, must be a 68030 and 16 bits 8 channels sound.
Well, it wasn’t the same in America but these two were the ONLY choice for the serious computer/game enthusiast in the late 80s for us in the UK. Sure we had Sega and Nintendo but they were toys ....
Yeah, 80s kids in the UK found it nearly impossible to convince parents to spend that much money on a console toy when the games were so expensive too. At least a computer had some educational value in theory.
The commentator George Morrow (Morrow Designs aka ThinkerToys) was intellectualy pretty sharp. I worked there in SF bay area in early '80s. Impeccable schematics, excellent designs. Thanks George.
at my family we got an atari 800 xl at 1985 or 1986. Few years later we got an atari 130xe (still 8 bits) and I was almost the only one using it at home for several years. Great times. Never used a more current computer until 1998 at the university when I went to study computing. I wasn't famliar with the hard disks and folders and with windows back then but very soon I was rehipnotized.
George Murrow calls it. Software developers were focusrd on the PC, the Apple II and the Mac. Not a lot of productivity software was going to be written for the Amiga or ST. Despite their technical abilities, both the Amiga and ST were relegated to being seen as high-end video game machines.
The amiga was so far ahead of it's time when released, still got all my amiga kit, a few A600 & A1200 machines. Can remember the first time I turned the A1200 on after fitting the Blizzard 1260 accelerator,t alk about a speed boost! Would love to have all my amiga gear set up if I had the room, although the boards would need to be recapped first.
What is interesting about this show that is not revealed is that the GEM interface used on the Amiga was a product of Digital Research. Digital Research is the company created by Gary Kildall sitting right at that table.
@21:18 "It is our assumption that the best way to do that is to go to a hardware interface and someday the Commodore Amiga will do that as well" Yup like with the KCS Power PC board or the A2000 Bridgeboards
The most impressive feature in this programme is that guy's comb-over. In the UK, comb-overs disappeared with the Hamlet advert, but looking at modern US tv, they still seem to be a thing, along with wigs.
24:50 Did the Cauzin Softstrip ever take off? I saw it mentioned in 3-2-1 Contact magazine with a sample scancode but then I never heard of or saw it again.
@@jhillestad There was only a 20% greater difference. There was a year when they were at the same price, Atari bought ram chips in Asia and one of those factories had a fire and the price went up, Commodore manufactured himself in USA and was not affected. When Atari added blitter and 4096 colors, the Amiga had also dropped, but it still did not have sampled sound, nor the more big resolution nor the DMA channels nor the multitasking operating system, etc. That's why Atari always sold little. The problem of adding better features years later was a mistake because they were almost always made based on the least powerful model, the same case as the c64 and c128, zx 48k and 128k, etc. etc
it would seem that amiga's OS is still alive... sort of. there's an x86 based rewrite of workbench called aros. i've been messing around with a distro, and some distros support emulating various 68k applications and even DOS
I bought the Atari 1040stf in 1990, by then it had a mature library of software games and applications but was already showing signs that it wouldn't be able to hold back competition as PCs were getting faster every year. By the mid 1990's the average PC was much faster than the Atari but the wide software library of the Atari extended its life and the wide pool of users including hackers provided hacked software to a significant base of users who might not have bought the computer otherwise. In those days software was ridiculously expensive.
I have an Atari 800 computer and I wanted to get the Atari 520ST computer too. However I wasn't able to get the 520ST because no local computer stores would carry it. 😢
@7:56 Floppy Drive: "Buzz Buzz, whirrrrrr, buzz, buzz, buzz" Steve: "Rick you gonna show us, uhh, what goes on here while Tim talks?" Tim: "Yeah, uhh, we're still loading" Gary: "Yeah, Chill Stewie, it's 1985, programs take much more time to load. Go back to 2023 if you dont like it!"
Yes you can see what Gary was thinking as he was comparing the ST with the Amiga and was wondering what now??... obviously the Amiga had a lot more features going for it like the custum chips as C= was a maker of silicon dies, compared to ST chips but both computers were more or less equally matched mostly as regards to popularity of users ... I know I had both models myself back then as a programmer. I think Atari’s GEM TOS was a lot more stable than the Amiga’s early 1.2 workbench which had many issues I think personally. But I don’t think it was like 8bit wars of the early 80s with the world of Acorn BBC and Sinclair spectrum or even C= 64 when the 64 dominated the sales of 8 bit lines
'Nickel and diming you to dxxth" had a really foul connotation in decades past, so developers designed a new term with the same meaning: "microtransactions".
A lot of employees of Amiga and Atari later moved on to Apple and the Mac. Amiga was very impressive, a full decade ahead of the IBM competition. Still useful today. But business is BUSINESS, and Atari was bad at it, Amiga got squeezed out by it, and PC Clones dropped in price.
SeaJay Oceans I dunno if I agree. Jack Tramiel is a proven businessman and the ST initially did well. Problem is that the ST didn't have the graphical ability of the Amiga, which eventually lost them most of Europe as developers went there. The American market and even the European business market was locked in by IBM. Atari should have released the STE as the ST to try to hold onto the games market. Commodore, on the other hand, was incompetent. Other than Tom Rattigan (who was the only CEO other than Tramiel to have any business acumen) the execs were dumbasses, and Chairman Gould was more into stroking his ego than pushing the Amiga. The Amiga was a supreme graphical and creative powerhouse that should have wiped the Macintosh off the face of the earth. Amiga OS should have been the UI that brought GUIs into the mainstream, but by not bothering to upgrade the system frequently enough, they let IBM clones with Win 3.1 and improved graphics hardware pass them by as computers, while the Super NES and Megadrive overtook the machine as a games console. Give Tramiel the Amiga and things would have been different.
That is revisionist history. The Atari ST outsold the Amiga by more than 2 to 1 from 1985 through about mid 1989 -- The Amiga flopped at launch and it took several years before the Amiga 500 computer received the price drop needed to salvage the brand. Atari ST's are still used to this day by musicians for its MIDI interface that was standard on every model. It's laughable to say that Commodore was better run by Atari since the same guy ran both companies.
@@LakeHowellDigitalVideo Also remember that the Amiga 1000 was severely held back by it's 256 kB RAM memory, when the Atari ST (520) had 512 kB. Plus that the first versions of Amigas OS:es (kickstart and workbench) were really buggy. The machine was really, really unstable later on too when it became the Amiga 500 with the very common "Guru Meditation" message appearing all the time(=A bluescreen in Windows when a machine freezes).
12:12 "Do the same sorts of things you would do with a word processor. You can time sync the music or transpose it..." Umm, I don't ever recall time-syncing a word processor or transposing some text to a different key. Mainly because neither of those things makes any actual sense with a word processor. What the hell was he even talking about?
*Chalkboard at* 3:45 Amega Computer $1295 Amega Monitor $495 Sony Monitur & Remote Control TV $605 156k Ram Expansion $195 External Disk Drive $295 All systems include free "spam" suscription
@8:03 "we're still loading files up..." (from a very slow 3-1/2 floppy drive). Commodore didn't offer a hard disk drive until a year later, in the form of the Sidecar. I owned an Amiga 2000 back in the late eighties and enjoyed it very much. Then it was dark times ahead with compatible PCs for several years. Finally, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel and switched to a Mac. It was like getting an Amiga all over again (almost)!
In these days, computers were not able to multitask(Alt tab) , which is why he kept the ball thing. However, the super art was pure show off, since no games even had these kinds of graphics in those days. Most likely a well-chosen image with colours reduced scheme
We could be running Workbench 12 right now instead of Windows 12 if Commodore's management understood what they had and weren't so busy robbing the company blind.
Sheesh, they were so dismissive of the older home computers like the C64 at the start. "People going back to their VCRs". After much saving up I finally managed to get a C64c (C128 look model) in 1987 orso. Before that they were just to expensive for a 13 year old kid. I played games on that for years before I could afford to buy a second hand Amiga 500 from someone (who was into graphics and genlocking wanted to switch to an Amiga 2000 cause he needed the Zorro expansion slots for graphics cards and the like).
Not sure where you are, but by and large, that's exactly what happened in the US. From the end of the microcomputer boom to the IBM PC, computers weren't really thought of as serious home devices, as they required way too much internal understanding to make software for, and too little non-gaming software that was of quality. After 1984, the home computer was found to be more trouble than it was worth. From around 1985 to the mid 90s, people in the US mostly played "Nintendo" (shorthand for game consoles older people would use during this time period), and did their serious work on an IBM compatible.
@@jesuszamora6949 I'm from europe. And 8bit micro's where incredibly popular, and widely used including is schools and businesses. I never understood why american's where blind to the benefits of these machines. ANd yes there was plenty of software like wordprocessors and the like for these machines. I used to write my school reports on a C64 with a dotmatrix printer. But then again, software piracy was rampant in europe. One of the appeals of these machines for a teen from a poor family was the ability to copy stuff from schoolfriends. Which I think helped boost the popularity of the machines in Europe a lot. Anyway looking at all the retro computer channels like Nostalgia Nerd, 8-bit guy and the like. These machine seem to have been gaining some popularity in the US in the last couple of years. I guess people finally figured out they were good machines, and way better then the IBM compatible PC's of that era. As for Nintendo. Overhere that was considered a toy for younger kids by most of the teenagers of that time. 8-bit home computers and to a lesser extend the early Sega consoles (Mega drive aka genesis) were much more popular then the original NES consoles. Imho Nintendo didn't really conquer the european market to as big an extend as the US market until the hugely popular gameboy was released.
Might have also affected that it was technically easier to export systems from Japan to North America, as they shared the same video standard NTSC vs European dominant PAL. If a Japanese console came to US by a year or two delay, there would typically be at least another year or two before it would be brought to Europe. By which time the device might already have begun to age up. NES started to be more videly available in Europe only by well after mid 1980's, by when the markets were readily saturated (and parents reportedly felt buying an 8-bit computer would be more educational than a console...). In addition the 1983 video game crash never happened in Europe, but in US it purged markets not so long time before release of NES. On the other hand, computers used in Europe were often also manufactured in Europe still in 1980's. I believe for instance all Commodores (mainly C64s and Amigas) I've handled are labeled: "Made in Germany". Apples never become popular here either, and there were lots of local computer models that were never heard of in US. Likewise European software was apparently rarely exported to US, yet lots of US software was widely available in Europe, so in a way an European home computer user had better options available as well. IBM PC compatibles become a thing only by 1990's really. Overall, computer (and console) situations were quite a bit different in 1980's in comparison between Europe and US (or North America). At least for me it took relatively long afterwards to realize it. Not to mention that for several parts there were also big differences between different European countries, even if Iron Curtain effect is ignored.
@@HabadzaKalfa It really had nothing to do with NTSC vs PAL, every difference between the regions really comes down to a simple matter of economics. Europeans had way less disposable income back then and the European consumer electronics market was tiny in comparison to the U.S. and Japan, which made it an afterthought for foreign companies looking to expand. For example much ado is made of the Master System's rousing success in the U.K., but that console actually sold half a million more units in both the U.S. and Japan despite being considered a massive flop in both markets. Cumulatively the SMS sold less than 7 million units throughout the entire European continent which is a drop in the bucket compared to the 20+ million Famicoms sold in Japan alone. You can see the same thing with the Amiga. Yes more of them were sold in Europe overall, but they were almost all heavily cutdown budget model A5/600's and the bulk of them were sold between 1990-92 when the hardware was already half a decade old. Meanwhile virtually every high end "big box" Amiga ever sold was in the States. This is also why Apple machines never caught on in Europe as you mentioned, they were simply far too expensive for the average consumer there.
