How many years was the the computer really set back...
- Thread starter ndoogoo
- Start date
Not really. There were upgradeable Amigas, and if Commodore had known their heads from their asses, they'd continued in that direction whilst promoting the Amiga as a serious working computer in addition to the multimedia/entertainment side. They could have produced more advanced versions of AmigaOS alongside more advanced versions of the hardware, but they never had any clear strategy unfortunately. Bleh._xxx_ said:
Really? Only time in my life I tried an archimedes it stopped responding whilst producing garbled screen output and crashed inside of five minutes of me just clicking around randomly in the GUI. All it ever had going for it was a (relatively, for the time) brute-force CPU, there was no hardware acceleration or anything.nutball said:
It also had no marketshare whatsoever, which is what really counts.
Nonsense, the ACORN was a british product, the predecessor of the ARM processor. IBM had nothing to do with it.
http://atterer.net/acorn.html
Reading about RiscOS, it sounds like crap, particularly for 1998 when it stopped being developed. Almost as bad as MacOS-9.
http://atterer.net/acorn.html
Reading about RiscOS, it sounds like crap, particularly for 1998 when it stopped being developed. Almost as bad as MacOS-9.
Guden Oden said:
You could upgrade _some_ minor stuff with Amiga, but it was nowhere near the upgradability of the PC, even back then. My uncle had one of those old IBM AT's (or was it XT?) and even back then he upgraded his RAM, HD, and gfx card regularly. Amiga's upgradability was laughable in comparison and let's not even start with Commodore.
If Amiga continued to live on, it would have become just like Apple Mac, I guess. And we would have games like in 1993 and 'puters like in 1995 today.
EDIT:
I just can't get over the fact that BeOS died, it would have made PC into a much nicer experience in every regard.
Um dude, PCs HAD no built-in gfx, so of course you needed to upgrade it. Besides in the XT era the PC had nothing that touched the Amiga gfx-wise so why would you need to upgrade? There were plenty of HD/RAM upgrade options for the 2000-series Amigas even early on. GFX options became available around the mid-90s for the Amiga, but lacking proper operating system support from Commodore it wasn't really possible to realize the full potential of a VGA-class accelerator. Like I said, if Commodore had had its shit together, things would have been much different. Unfortunately with coke-boss Irving Gould and general bastard Mehdi Ali, as head honchos, nothing happened. All they cared about was scamming the company out of as much money as possible. Fucking thieves and con-artists they were, people tried to sue after the bankruptcy but of course the cocksuckers walked scott free and probably laughed all the way to the bank._xxx_ said:
Anyway, you don't seem to know a whole lot on the subject of Amigas, so I'd be quiet from now on if I were you.
I owned and used an Amiga from 87 to 97, so I have "a bit" of experience you might say... Captain Chickenpants
Regular
mito said:
I guess I never realised that perhaps most of the rest of the world are not familar with Acorn Computers. Whereas many British people of my generation would be.They were predominantly used in schools in the UK. My first ever programming was on an Acorn BBC model B. There was even a tv program tied in to it called Micro Live where they showed you what you could do with the computer I seem to recall that transmitted a program that you could save onto a cassette and load on the computer.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=29
CC
Guden Oden said:Um dude, PCs HAD no built-in gfx, so of course you needed to upgrade it. Besides in the XT era the PC had nothing that touched the Amiga gfx-wise so why would you need to upgrade?_xxx_ said:
...
Anyway, you don't seem to know a whole lot on the subject of Amigas, so I'd be quiet from now on if I were you.
Heh, I owned the 500 back then when it came out. It was good for games and nothing else. By the time the 2000 came, PC's were waaaay beyond that already. So I really don't know much about anything after the 500, but then why should I?
WhiningKhan
Regular
Guden Oden said:
Ghah- the first time I touched an Amiga 500, I managed to move the mouse a few centimeters (not even clicking the buttons) and it Guru'd. So forget that comparison.
Useability-wise, ST was teh rokk, as noted by the early pro-musicians and publishers.
Now, on the original question, I'd say that Amiga made a few years worth of forward leap on technology in a single shot, but it couldn't have brought us to the level we are now if it had killed the PC market - simply too limited modularity and, ironically, not enough demand for improvements as the basic machine had enough features for many purposes.
RussSchultz said:
This is probably fair in 1998, but RISCOS didn't really develop a great deal over its lifetime. When it was first released it had a number of features that it's taken years for others to catch up with (particularly font handling, it had the equivalent of on-the-fly anti-aliased TrueType fonts).
ARM was a lovely chip to write machine code for.
Yep, the Beeb model B owned for the time. I remember begging my mother, who was a teacher at the time, to bring home her school's Model B for the summer holidays - it was amazing! It even had a floppy drive, which was undreamt of for a home computer at that time. The best thing about the BBC, though, was the fact that you could play the original Elite on it - now that ownedCaptain Chickenpants said:
Captain Chickenpants said:mito said:
They were predominantly used in schools in the UK. My first ever programming was on an Acorn BBC model B. There was even a tv program tied in to it called Micro Live where they showed you what you could do with the computer I seem to recall that transmitted a program that you could save onto a cassette and load on the computer.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=29
CC
I liked the game where you had to operate a canal lock for the little narrowboat. I was about 5 the first time I used that.
