Part One: </B>The Amiga's Development, The A1000, and a Reflection for the Situation of the Present...
To examine these early days of the Amiga, we must look way back to the early 1980s, when the IBM PC and just come into production, and the home computer market was awash with various 8 bit 'micros'. The 'father of the Amiga', Jay Miner set up the company Hi-Torro, along with R J Mical, Dale Luck and Dave Morse, with the mission to design the best games machine ever. To disguise what they were working on, all the chips were given girl's names; that's where the chips Paula, Denise, Agnus, and so on, got their names from. The company was renamed Amiga Inc, and the project became Project Lorraine.
The AmigaOS was developed by Metacomco, based in Bristol. In 1984, Amiga Inc was bought by Commodore, to provide the funding required for the project (in fact, it was almost bought by Atari!).
The Amiga 1000 was unveiled to the world June 1985, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. Regarding that day, to quote INFO magazine, 'it is the day that IBM's PC, Apple's Mac, and scores of silicon marvels of our decade became obselete'.
So what was the specification of this first Amiga? It was based around Motorola's 68000 CPU (released in 1980), clocked at 7.14MHz. It had only 256k of Chip RAM, but its power lay in the operating system, and the Chipset. Although both the Apple Macintosh, which had been out for a year, and the Atari ST came with an 8MHz chip, they had no chips to handle graphics or sound, and so they were in fact slower for many tasks.
The OS made the Amiga the first computer to offer both a graphical user interface, and a command line interface. It offered true pre-emptive multitasking, and a 'plug and play' Autoconfig expansion system (you know, those really new developments that you can get with Windows 95...).
Back to the chipset, this gave the power to animate, unlike no other home computer of the time. With a 4096 colour display palette, it far superseded the two colour Mac, and the four colour PC. And although 16 or 32 colours were the usual maximum, special modes provided 64 and even all 4096 colours at once; I sometimes still use HAM myself <I>today </I>even.
Sound was offered by way of four channels, capable of playing 8 bit samples, at a time when sound cards were nowhere to be seen, and all a PC could do was beep at you.
Other features were the 3.5" disk drive, allowing 880k on one disk (another first - better than 360k), and expansion was via an original Zorro slot.
With a price tag of #À1,500, however, the A1000 was not a mass market machine, but was still a ground breaking machine, to pave the way for the success which was to follow.
<HR>
<B>Next </B>month... it has to be the A500, along with the A2000. But for now...
<HR>
Looking at the release of the A1000, we can see what features made it ground breaking. I think that today, with the situation as it is, we need something equally as ground breaking.
An interactive TV device (ie, Viscorp's ED) would be very important; if it succeeds, it could place an 'Amiga' in thousands (millions?) of homes. But that does not mean we must wait years to make a comeback this way; the answer could be sooner, with that elusive RISC Amiga.
When Commodore first talked about this, they perceived a machine based around the HP PA-RISC CPU, with no chipset, running Windows NT. Now what would actually make that an Amiga? Surely it would be the same as any Windows NT clone?
Anyway, the future now most likely lies in the form of the PowerAmiga, thanks to Phase 5 rather than Viscorp. I believe that they have the right idea.
Due to the lack of development over the last couple of years, the Amiga has inevitably fallen behind in various areas, the principal being speed. Sure, a 50MHz '060 may be fast (<I>very </I>approximately equivalent to a P90, I think), but not fast enough for a top of the range machine, and also too expensive. There's also the range of the machines; to get an '060 (or anything above an '020 in fact) requires buying an (overpriced?) A1200, and upgrading it (hardly cost effective), or buying a ridiculously priced A4000T. Having a PowerPC CPU (120MHz 603) as standard would cure these problems.
The AGA chipset, although still reasonable, is in need of an update, especially for top range machines. Some have said: Oh look, PC graphics cards are much better than AGA. Future Amigas should not have a chipset, but have slots for graphics/sound cards instead. They may have a point, but the reason AGA is behind <B>is because of lack of development! </B>There is no reason that a new chipset should not do just as well as, if not better, than PC graphics cards (just as when the A1000/A500 were doing 4096 colours compared with 8 bit EGA graphics). It should be a case of not wanting PC cards, because the chipset is so much better. I would have thought that, although a chipset requires additional development costs, the unit cost would be cheaper than an add-on graphics card (just as it's cheaper buying a computer with a particular CPU in, rather than accelerating up to that standard). That's why I'm so glad that Phase 5 intend to include a chipset - not AGA! - one that features true 24 bit graphics, 16 bit sound, MPEG and 3D hardware support, 1600x1200 resolutions, and so on.
As for the OS, although it's lost much ground to MacOS and Windows, it's still ahead in my and many others' opinions. The Phase 5 clone will feature a PowerPC OS that is compatible with the AmigaOS. I'm not sure how similar that means it will be to the current AmigaOS, but hopefully it will be very similar - but - better; certainly an improvement on OS3.1.
The final point is of course price. It would be typical of the events of the past year to release such a machine at a ridiculous
price (say #À2000-#À3000?). The intended price is currently #À1400 for release sometime next year, which seems fairly reasonable.
I hope Viscorp let Phase 5 go ahead with this model, and that they and PIOS produce similar machines. In the meantime, I hope that Phase 5 release these PowerPC boards for the A1200/A4000 as soon as possible.
<HR>
Of course, these are just my opinions; what do you think? If you haven't seen the <A HREF="VisNews>News</A> section yet, there are details about the Viscorp campaign, to tell Viscorp what <B>you </B>want. And how about letting us know at DoubleClick!, via the <A HREF="Forum">Forum</A> page? If we get enough responses, I might write to Viscorp direct to let them know! So <B>write</B>, and have <B>your</B> say in the Amiga's future!
