Want
March 22nd, 2012 - 4:46 pm
I shouldn’t have joked earlier about the Commodore Amiga — because it’s back.
Big price, big specs. Not sure what I’d do with it, or even if Commodore’s “Vision” OS is any good. But it sure feels good just knowing Amiga is back out there again.
It’s a flavor of Linux, so you can go back to joking about it.
Joking? Linux cleaves to the same *nix heritage as OSX.
Very libertarian.
AmigaDOS was always a flavor of Linux. Why it was a true multi-tasker rather than multi-swapper.
AmigaDOS was never a flavour of Linux, in fact it predates Linux (nee 1993) by nearly a decade. What they both have in common is being true multitasking 32-bit OS’s with a *NIX style commandline. Linux however is a Unix clone where Amiga never was.
Hey, if you’re feeling nostalgic, there’s always the Commodore 64x. At least it looks like the venerable C64.
You can duplicate the hardware for a lot less than $2499.
For $2499 you can get an entry-level Mac cheese grater and have a serious computer with a real OS.
You mean if you put Ubuntu on it?
I should see if I could get my TRS color computer up and running. Still have a cassette player. . .
Didn’t the Video Toaster grow out of the Amiga? I’m not too surprised to see the Amiga itself return as a brand name.
IIRC, the Toaster was originally an add-on card with accompanying software. Eventually it evolved into a standalone product, but with an Amiga still hidden inside.
You’re right, the Toaster was originally a card for the A1000 from NewTek. Anyone remember Kiki Stockhammer, the NewTek Girl? I had a friend in collage that did CGI on the first season of Babylon 5. Visited him once and he showed me the room where they kept the server farm full of Amiga 1000/Video Toasters they used to create the show.
Impressive stuff for the early 90s.
Actually, it was a card for the A2000, not the A1000. I really wanted a Toaster, but couldn’t justify spending the money for one. I think I probably still have a copy of the NewTek Video Toaster Demo tape hanging around in the garage, though.
Back when the Mac was new and PCs were still running DOS, the Amiga was the best personal computer available. (I bought a Mac.) But there was little or now software for it. Except, it came with a DOS card so you could run DOS software on it. I suspect it died because the Commodore 64 (my daughter had one) was regarded as a toy.
Glad to see it back. Don’t know what to do with it.
Didn’t Dell buy some rights to the Amiga OS some time ago? What happened to it?
If I remember my computer history correctly, the Amigas of the time could run interpreted Mac OS faster than the Macs themselves did natively. They had the same core CPU (68000, IIRC), but the Amigas had dedicated DSPs that crunched a lot of the interpreted code and made it blaze. I had a friend who used both machines and he’d run some games side-by-side to show me.
Pretty cool.
Agnes, Paula and Denise. I miss those chips, they were great.
I was at USC’s mainframe services at the time. All the nerds there where drooling over the Amigas. Why I bought one.
What we used to do was install the Mac emulator on the Amiga then install Apple’s DOS emulator on that. And it’d still run faster than any other machine we had.
Good times.
I wouldn’t bother with those. A better way to go is the Amiga One X1000, running AmigaOS 4.1:
http://a-eon.com/x1000.html
I don’t think the price is going to be any better, but at least you will be getting the real Amiga experience.
But will it run Eric Schwartz animations?