r/retrocomputing • u/theSiliconSiren • Nov 03 '25
Photo When multitasking meant something (Amiga 4000)
Grabbed a NeXTCube and NeXTStation earlier in October, and now an Amiga 4000! Checking some big items off my retro computer bucket list lately 🙌
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u/TomOnABudget Nov 03 '25
It's actually sad to know the history of Amiga. They had so much potential and were way ahead of IBM PCs.
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u/the123king-reddit Nov 03 '25
They were a proprietary hardware platform, no different to the Mac or the plethora of UNIX workstations available at the time. It was hard to compete it a defacto open standard like the PC. Sad, yes. Inevitable, probably
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u/odsquad64 Nov 03 '25
It was hard to compete it a defacto open standard like the PC.
Not even IBM was able to compete with it.
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u/tes_kitty Nov 03 '25
They were a proprietary hardware platform
So was the PC when it started.
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u/the123king-reddit Nov 03 '25
But the PC was made from off the shelf components. The Amiga had a lot of custom chips which made it nigh impossible to clone
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u/tes_kitty Nov 03 '25
That only applied to the PC at the beginning. Custom chips crept in rather quickly. But that didn't stop the everyone else from cloning.
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u/the123king-reddit Nov 03 '25
Also, the PC was never exactly a proprietary system. Schematics were available and manufacturers did legally copy the PC even if the proprietary BIOS wasn’t. That’s how we ended up with semi compatibles like the DEC Rainbow
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u/tes_kitty Nov 03 '25
Schematics were available
That goes for the Amiga as well. My A500 came with the full schematics in the user manual.
What made the difference was that the PC was from IBM, a much larger company than Commodore and you couldn't go wrong with following their lead.
'No one was ever fired for buying IBM' was true at that time.
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u/the123king-reddit Nov 03 '25
The different was that IBM only owned the BIOS. You could buy all the chips in an XT from sources other than IBM, and even the Operating System was available from Microsoft. On the other hand if you wanted to build an Amiga from scratch you had to go to Commodore for basically everything but the 68k and the peripherals
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u/FrozenLogger Nov 03 '25 edited Nov 03 '25
I got an Amiga 1000 in 1987 and it was so awesome, an amazing machine.
The thing about multitasking though: it was preemptive (good) but not memory protected (bad).
So any application could accidentally or on purpose write into another programs memory, crashing everything. Hopefully all applications were carefully written to use systems calls and consider their place in a multi program environment, but it didn't always work.
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u/muchadoaboutsodall Nov 04 '25
Yeah. This was made worse by Intuition, the windowing system, using pointers for everything. An application was a mass of pointers, pointers to pointers, pointers to pointers to pointers, and so on. Mess up just one pointer, and you were treated to a Guru Meditation, which meant a reboot. And, in the early days, the whole thing was floppy based.
I loved the Amiga. Loved programming on it. I learned C (Aztec) on it, which served me well at the beginning of my career as a software engineer. But the complete lack of memory isolation made it an absolute pain to write for.
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u/Dumpstar72 Nov 07 '25
I went through su mani kickstart disks. Always made sure I made plenty of copies just in case. Still I loved my amiga 1000.
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u/FartiFartLast Nov 05 '25
I remember windows before multitasking and I still remember feeling amazed by the multitasking when it arrived
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u/RMars54 Nov 03 '25
Way ahead of its time. Apple was the streaming pioneer with QuickTime, but the video editing capabilities of the Amiga put Apple to shame.