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A short history of the Amiga, mine and Commodores. The Amiga came out in the mid 80's amid the wreckage of the post C-64 era. It had amazing graphics and sound and a WHOLE MEG of memory (a big deal back then).
I had been writing a drawing program for our C-64 when my family bought my Amiga. I Immediatly abandoned the 64 when I saw what could be done. The first program I used was Digi-Paint a HAM mode drawing program. While most of the computers ran 16 colors I got to play with 4096. It was very cool.
The C-64 had been the computer of choice for a lot of people. For a little bit of cash you could play games or simple word processing or business. It could do everything. So could the Amiga. But by the time the Amiga came the market for computers had changed.
I noticed right away that color was easier. If you made a mistake it was fairly painless if you saved an earlier version. That reduced the complexity of using color in a drawing. I didn't have to worry as much that I would screw up the color balance, getting a certain yellow too dark right off the bat. After Digipaint I bought Deluxe Paint III, which had some great features.
From the late 80's on people who wanted to play games bought a Nitendo, those who wanted to do business or word prossesing bought Macs or PC clones. The managment at Commodore didn't realize this. They were stuck in the 70's, trying to take the same approach to selling computers that had worked with calculators.
After mastering the programs I really recieved a shock. I really couldn't do anything with what I had done. At every job interview, the job was only open to people with experience with the one certain art program that was being used there. It was no use explaining that they were all basically the same (even GeosPaint, which ran on the C-64, has similar features with the latest Photoshop running on 300 MHZ pentiums).
The Amiga still had it's strength's, true multi-tasking chip set, astounding graphics, and great sound but the owners blunderd and eventually went bankrupt. After some bouncing around, Gateway finally bought the Amiga technologies. It will be interesting to see what they do with it.
I had decided I needed more than one meg, no hard drive, etc.. After checking around I realized that it would cost basically the same to upgrade my 500, buy an amiga 1200 or buy a low end IBM. What finally convinced me was when a local software dealer had me try a copy of Deluxe Paint IV, an upgrade that would allow me to use the HAM graphics mode. My Amiga did not even have enough memory to properly run the program. Now I have a Pentium. I still miss my Amiga.
It was very cool.
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