One of the Great All Time Home Computers I wonder how many people are around before there were home computers? I am one and I remember how incredible it was when my first home computer was delivered. When I got it, I realized you could hardly do anything with it. It had a tiny memory of 1000 bytes and the most it was capable of doing was create a clock with one hand. While I was disappointed in its capabilities, I was still fascinated with the concept. I was able to connect it to a television which was used as a monitor. Computers kept getting better and after owning three or four others, it finally happened, a computer came out in the 1980s that was incredible for the time. There had been nothing like it before and it even blew the Apple computer away. It was the Amiga computer. Clubs sprang up everywhere and there were also the shows. My Amiga buddies and myself went to as many computer shows as we could get too. It was all very exciting. This machine was the best game machine of its time. You could also buy and write programs for it that were actually useful and could expand the memory enough for most tasks. Office programs came out for it and some became very big at the time. The interface was similar to today and was graphic with a mouse as the controller, but like today there were plenty of other devices available to use if you didn’t like the mouse. I tried using a track ball, but soon found out the mouse was much handier. The mouse we used in those days was not the same as it is today. It was not optical. It had a ball on the bottom and the computer gauged the position of the cursor on the screen by the movement of that ball. There was a problem however with those mouses. Lint would build up from the mouse pad, yes, we needed a pad, and the ball would get stuck and we would have to take it out of the mouse periodically, clean it off and clean the lint from inside the mouse. This did not dampen our enthusiasm for the incredible machine. A sort of cult grew up around the Amiga and anyone who was around then and owned an Amiga could probably tell you some very interesting stories about it. It had a special sound chip and another for colors. No other machine at the time could equal the output of these two chips. While the original Amiga could create 4096 colors and put 256 of them on the screen at any given time, the Amiga 1200 which came out a few years later increased the number of colors it could put on the screen to 262,144. There was just nothing else like this around. Not only that, but the machine was released for a reasonable price. I have written about the Amiga computer before, because it is a subject dear to my heart. Not only was it a great computer, but the people who were attracted to it which I met were great people and we all had the same powerful interest in the machine and this led to different social gatherings. Some really great programs for the time were released for the Amiga which took advantage of its abilities. The movie industry realized the computer had the ability to replace some equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars which was used for special effects and a version of the Amiga was born called the Toaster. Suddenly movies and television shows were using graphics created on the Amiga. One example is Babylon5, a famous science fiction show from years ago. Amateurs started to create their own effects and put them on the early internet. I became a programmer, not professionally, just as a hobby and released some programs into the public domain. There were some incredible software released for the machine and as I said it was not only games. In 1985 a drawing program was released which took advantage of the Amiga’s abilities. It was Deluxe Paint by Electronic Arts. People could now draw and paint using the entire palette of the machine. One could now do 3D modeling on their Amigas with Maxon Cinema 4D. A copy program which became very famous was X-Copy. Almost everyone who had an Amiga had it. At the time, there was an industry standard word processor known as WordPerfect along with others. Amiga users were fascinated with games and we had plenty of good ones. At the time most of the people I knew had the game Lemmings. It was made by a company known as Psygnosis and released in 1991. If I remember correctly you had to stop the lemmings from following each other off a cliff. Who could ever forget Formula One Grand Prix? It allowed you to race your own car in a graphic filled race. The Amiga allowed pinball machines to come alive on your screen and Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies. Before I forget, the Amiga had monitors which could enhance your experience. Commodore the manufacturer of the earlier Vic 20 and Commodore 64 had made a monitor for the older machines that I still have today and it still works. The monitor is about 40 years old or a little older. Many people have asked the question, if the machine was so popular at the time, why did the company go out of business? A movie could be made about this and it would be about shortsightedness, over extension, taking money from the company and in general bad decisions. One of the things Commodore did after a while was instead of coming out with new models for Christmas, they would come out a month or two later after the holidays when people had already purchased computers for presents. Another thing they did which seemed incredible to we Amiga owners was announce a new model and when it finally came out was the same as the old model with the number pad eliminated. There was all sorts of talk about money being taken out of the company and it was a sad day for we Amiga owners as we watched a cutting edge computer, we all could afford, die. Other companies were rumored to be working on bringing the Amiga back, but nothing seemed to ever work out. One company even took advance orders and those who put up advance payments all lost their money when that company went out of business before producing any Amigas. Today, there are still some people buying old Amigas who long for the old days.
|
