Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[LocalH]

There were plenty of free tools pretty far back that could change the screen font to any 8x8 font. The earliest one I found in the Fred Fish collection was on disk 41, from November 1986.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by LocalH

There were plenty of free tools pretty far back that could change the screen font to any 8x8 font. The earliest one I found in the Fred Fish collection was on disk 41, from November 1986.

I talked to my dad this evening and told him about this discussion. He wanted me to convey that he always loved the Amiga and that the question I had asked him was why didn't the Amiga take off?

Here was his follow up after I disseminated some of the points made in this conversation:

It's 1985. You just plunked down what amounts to $4,000 in today's money on an Amiga. What are you going to do with it? Be specific. What productive work would you'd do with it in 1985/1986? Because that's when it was released and that's when it was being "defined" in the market.

My dad expected to use it to do the kind of work he would do on an Apple II plus take advantage of the power of the Amiga. But in 1985/1986 it was a step down from the Apple II for doing word processing and spread sheets. The only app he remembered being interesting was Deluxe Paint. The rest were games (Balance of Power, Marble Madness, Defender of the Crown, Faire Tale adventure, Mind Walker, etc.). $4,000 is too much for a game machine.

He still has the machine and by 1988/1989 he was using it for video editing (he did a side gig for fun doing credits and other video work for local companies using his Amiga). And he still has it to this day "somewhere".

But when it mattered, release and shortly after, the Amiga was a great tech demo with nothing to do with it other than be a very expensive game machine.

For HIM, (not me, I was a kid) he said a dedicated text mode would have at least made it useful as a productivity tool.

But his message to relay, stressing that he is probably *literally* one of the oldest Amiga fans alive, is this: It's 1985. You just spent $4,000 in today's money on Amiga. WHAT specifically are you doing with it? Something that could be scaled out to a business or enterprise?

[grond]

I used my Amiga do play games, watch demos and write code. Very little productivity. Later on I used PCs to write my theses. If I had been older, I would have used my Amiga for that.

The real problem of the Amiga isn't the lack of a dedicated textmode, it is being tied to 15kHz screens. This was already a noticable limitation at the time it was developed (200+ lines) and it meant the Amiga was supposed to go to the living room (where the TV was), not to the office. If the Amiga had not been designed for 15kHz, it could have done a 640x400 monochrome (or rather two colours) graphics mode which certainly would have been better for text editing, coding etc. than 640x200 four-colours. The 15kHz stuff was "corrected" with ECS but then there already was a huge software catalogue (well, games) that were hardcoded to run on 15kHz. Adding colours would have been easier if the Amiga had started out on 31kHz than it was to add vertical screen resolution.

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by Frogs

But his message to relay, stressing that he is probably *literally* one of the oldest Amiga fans alive, is this: It's 1985. You just spent $4,000 in today's money on Amiga. WHAT specifically are you doing with it? Something that could be scaled out to a business or enterprise?

This is a great point, thanks for starting this thread. As a child my first amiga was the A500+ and Deluxe Paint 3 was what I really wanted from a computer. Workbench 2 looked professional and worked very well as an operating system. There was Productivity mode if you had an expensive monitor. So from that perspective it is baffling why the Amiga wasn't a huge business success.

Of course your father offers the perspective of a user at launch, when none of this was available. This is a hugely valuable insight. It's much clearer to me now why the Amiga was largely ignored by business (except as a graphic workstation, a niche) and only became a successful toy computer in europe.

[chb]

@Frogs: I think there's a slight misunderstanding what the term "textmode" stands for. It just means that the screen content is represented in video ram as characters and not as individual pixels. It doesn't imply any specific resolution, neither given in chars (e.g. 80x25) nor in pixels (e.g. 640x200).

On the original IBM PC standard textmode was 80x25 chars @720×350 pixels (MDA, same for Hercules), so individual chars were 9×14 pixel. But CGA and a lot of other systems (C128, Apple IIe 80 column card) used 640x200 in textmode, with 8x8 chars (also 80x25). That's exactly the same resolution the Amiga has in HiRes.

So yes, text would look better on MDA or Hercules than on the Amiga, but CGA or C128 would look exactly the same - it is even possible to connect a CGA monitor to every Amiga (there's digital RGBI out). While it is more practical to use 16 color text on CGA (it's dog slow on the Amiga, esp. without fast ram), programs at that time rarely used all of those colors - a lot of people had only B/W screens, and four shades of grey is probably the maximum you can discern with ease in a GUI. Just look at some DOS Wordperfect screen shots. And a bitmapped display has no trouble showing things like bold, italic, underscored, strike through or proportional fonts in different sizes.

Oh, and MDA and Hercules had 50 Hz refresh rate, while CGA and Amiga NTSC had 60 Hz, better suited (yeah, not by that much) for black-on-white. MDA for that reason usually was white-on-black (or rather green-on-black) where flicker is less perceptlble.

But I agree, Topaz was neither a very beautiful nor very readable font, and that probably was part of the problem. And the Workbench designers had a quite special sense of aesthetics, to say at least.

[LocalH]

Topaz 1.x was nearly a carbon copy of the IBM PC BIOS font. It wasn't any less readable, and I'm sure there were quite a few businesses using PCs on CGA monitors, which would appear on screen almost identically to the Amiga equivalent, in terms of the font itself.

The Amiga's bitplane setup didn't help with text scrolling. I'm sure many of us remember the color flashes in CLI windows if any color other than the default text pen was used.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by LocalH

The Amiga's bitplane setup didn't help with text scrolling. I'm sure many of us remember the color flashes in CLI windows if any color other than the default text pen was used.

That's down to a lack of double buffer in Workbench, so you can see the colours as the individual bitplanes are redrawn.

[LocalH]

Originally Posted by Foebane

That's down to a lack of double buffer in Workbench, so you can see the colours as the individual bitplanes are redrawn.

Of course. But it wasn't just Workbench that exhibited the issue. I remember seeing it in some graphical word processors, for example, depending on the colors in use. Never saw it in "standard" situations, like normal CLI text or black text on white paper in a word processor. Only when color was used. So at least the system was optimized for the most common scenarios, in that sense. Such double buffering would have also consumed additional chip RAM, which was in short supply at the time.

Honestly it was down to a lack of software in the earliest days. WordPerfect made an attempt at having a presence, but didn't make the best use of the Amiga's advantages. The Amiga also didn't get the defacto "standard" of the time that WP5.1 became (I think there might have been a 5.0 alpha, but what I remember having from back then was 4.2). Like it or not, the PC was already somewhat established in business by that point thanks to MDA and being IBM, and much of that software was just not available on the Amiga (sure, there were equivalents, but if someone wanted to run 1-2-3 they'd get a PC, not an Amiga with a different spreadsheet).

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Except, the Amiga didn’t have a text mode. So, yes, the 200 vertical resolution nattered.

NTSC actually supports 724x241 in full overscan. Don't know if that's available on OCS, though. It's based on what's available in Workbench 3.0 on an A1200, so perhaps that won't work (although I fail to see why).

Would be nice if someone could check or confirm that it does/doesn't work.

[LocalH]

For what it's worth, DPaintIV in max overscan on NTSC reports 736x241 for hires nonlace. Tested on WB1.3

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Thorham

NTSC actually supports 724x241 in full overscan. Don't know if that's available on OCS, though. It's based on what's available in Workbench 3.0 on an A1200, so perhaps that won't work (although I fail to see why).

Would be nice if someone could check or confirm that it does/doesn't work.

WB1.x supports overscan in the WB, but there is no preferences editor for it. Probably because it can't be applied without a reboot in 1.x, every other preferences setting can. At least 1.2 and 1.3 will handle this if you edit your system-configuration with a hex editor. :-) Anything older, I'm not sure. I sure hope everyone upgraded to 1.2 as soon as possible back then, as the previous releases were so buggy.

The textmode requirement is a relevant one: the Amiga's graphics are quite slow to scroll a screenful of text compared to the hardware text modes of the time on much slower machines. Not to mention that with window decorations on a standard non-overscan 640 wide screen (which is what you got in WB in 1985) does not fit the full 80 chars horizontally.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Jope

The textmode requirement is a relevant one: the Amiga's graphics are quite slow to scroll a screenful of text compared to the hardware text modes of the time on much slower machines.

Most PC programs did direct screen access because DOS was too slow, whereas most Amiga apps went through the system to use fonts and windows etc. This makes the Amiga much slower than it could be.

For a quick comparison test I 'type'd a large text file in DOS 3.3 on my 25MHz 386-SX with on-board VGA. It took 108 seconds, with the text whipping by too fast to read. I then 'type'd the same file (reading from floppy disk) on my stock Amiga 500 in a CLI window on the WorkBench screen, and it took 323 seconds - which is almost exactly 3 times slower (and slow enough to read).

Finally I copied the file to RAM: and displayed it with MuchMore (which opens its own 4 color 640x256 screen), hitting page down occasionally to keep it scrolling up one line at a time. It took 95 seconds, 14% faster than the PC.

Not to mention that with window decorations on a standard non-overscan 640 wide screen (which is what you got in WB in 1985) does not fit the full 80 chars horizontally.

Same problem with a PC too if using Windows, but you only lose 1 character so it's not a big deal (just means scrolling the window sideways a little to see that last character). An Amiga program can always open a custom screen with backdrop window and use the full width if it wants to. So yeah, best not to mention it...

[Frogs]

So I spent a couple hours playing with my Amiga 1000 today. I usually use my Amiga 2000 since it had a HD and a GoTek drive on it.

It is shocking how bad Topaz originally started out. You can experience it today. https://fontstruct.com/fontstruction...55/amiga_topaz

You can also compare it to the fonts on IBM PCs at the time. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

It’s weird that until this thread I never realized that the topaz font, the original one, was so low resolution.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xruwt6hfag..._1171.jpg?dl=0


PC MDA:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bdicvjwq2iumhc7/IMG_1172.jpg

The Amiga could have had a better font, even in 1985.

The other thing that you have to experience first hand is having to load Kickstart before loading Workbench. That is what we would call today, friction to use.

None of this takes away from how amazing it still is, even after all these years. I was showing my own son how much it was doing with 512K of memory including multitasking. And the Amiga workbench screen isn't bad looking even at 640x200 on a Commodore 1080 monitor.

But outside a few games and Deluxe Paint, there wasn't much to do on it and this situation lasted almost two important years.

By the time the 500 and 2000 came out, the market had moved forward and the Amiga was better suited as an excellent console and creative workstation. Even then, of course, even SGI ultimately didn't survive.

This brings me back to my own opinion on "what ifs" which is that the Amiga could have thrived as a "console plus" if it had focused all their energy on the Amiga 512 and followed it up with Amiga CD32 and recognized it as a console plus.

What using my Amiga 1000 today made me think mostly was that it was a sneak peek of the future. Multitasking, a really good UI, a really nice file system setup, etc.

[Foebane]

I have to admit, I don't really care at all for the Amiga 1000, it was a dry-run, a prototype, an initial basic version that was overpriced and underpowered. It looked ugly and cheesy with that keyboard storage thing, and even the keyboard didn't look like the final version.

No, to me, the REAL first Amiga was the A500, an improvement in every single way possible.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by LocalH

For what it's worth, DPaintIV in max overscan on NTSC reports 736x241 for hires nonlace. Tested on WB1.3

Thanks

Originally Posted by Jope

WB1.x supports overscan in the WB, but there is no preferences editor for it. Probably because it can't be applied without a reboot in 1.x, every other preferences setting can. At least 1.2 and 1.3 will handle this if you edit your system-configuration with a hex editor. :-) Anything older, I'm not sure.

Thanks

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Concerning 80-column text, I'm reminded of the Atari ST, which had two issues

Frogs is putting the lack of text mode into his (or his Dad's) focus.

Maybe someone very business oriented with a small or large company would have that as focus, and also that a specific version of a specific piece of software must be available before spending ~$2000-2500.

The big numbers, early adopters and computer buyers in general, if the price is within reach, would not.

A1000 cost too much, and was not considered by anyone but these few. With the A500, the big numbers were coming in.

Originally Posted by Frogs

Except, the Amiga didn’t have a text mode. So, yes, the 200 vertical resolution nattered.

80x25 = 640x200. It could do absolutely anything any text mode program on any competing platform could do. Plenty of competing platforms had this exact text mode - 80x25. The Amiga never got text mode, just like all the other new computers. It was a clear sign of what would come, and was already in these new computers.

Originally Posted by Frogs

Out of curiosity, when did you first get an Amiga?

It shouldn't matter - if you're just curious. No, really. If you present a claim, and are curious about whether it's true or not, you must either accept others' criticism and take it on board.

If you're trying to prove the claim, very knowledgeable persons could make all the false criticism, claims they want, and it's still just on you to show your claim true. (And this is very hard even if "you were there" and have all the facts on your side!)

You weren't there, and two claims (Amiga didn't thrive, Amiga didn't have 80 columns) you focus on are demonstrably false.

We don't know why (American) buyers didn't flock in big numbers to a certain brand. I suggest some ideas, but I have no theory to shre until I can support it.

Originally Posted by Frogs

was a $1,200 computer (in 1985 dollars) without a monitor. It wasn’t marketed as a toy but as a better, less expensive alternative to the Mac and PC. But you couldn’t use it realistically to do the things people wanted to do on a Mac or PC.

Sounds about right, and yes it was. In fact it was demonstrably a better Mac and could do much more than the PC could in 1985. What could the IBM PC do in 1981? Absolutely nothing no other computer could. Here's the verdict on its 80x25 text mode from those who were there.

This is why a theory must explain early adopters. These buy computers that are fresh out, not because they have a "killer app" built in on launch date - in fact exactly zero of them did - but because they seem better than what they have.

As for killer apps, those who would reap the rewards of their choice (whatever the brand) would have to wait a little over two years for the killer app to be published. We know this. On launch, computers don't come with a suite of killer apps. I have to think that if your Dad had waited just 1 year longer, he might just have become a long-time fan and scratching his head like the rest of the world why the Amiga didn't get the sales numbers in the USA of all places.

[Frogs]

@Photon I asked when you first used an Amiga because you don't seem very knowledgeable about the early Amigas. I don't mean that as an insult, but it would explain why you don't seem familiar with what it was like to actually use a new Amiga at the time when compared to other options. I'll take your non-answer as confirmation that you weren't an early user of one.

The discussion on text mode wasn't about 80 columns. It is a straw man to suggest otherwise. It was about the readability and usability to read, write and edit text on an Amiga 1000 in 1985 compared to the Macintosh and various IBM types of the time -- which is 1985 not 1982 or whatever arbitrary pre-Amiga date.

You never explain what, specifically, you could do with an Amiga 1000 out of the box in 1985 that you would want to do on an Amiga 1000 versus a Mac or PC of the time. If your answer is "play games" then it was a very very expensive Marble Madness / Archon / Defender of the Crown machine.

I think we can assume we are all fans of the Amiga here. I have a 1000 (and in fact am having some trouble with my 1MB sidecar not being recognized). I used it today. It's an unmodified 1000 right down to Kickstart 1.1 and Workbench 1.1 with a Commodore 1080 monitor. I can literally compare it side by side with a Mac 128K and an IBM AT, all of which were around at the same time and confirm that as awesome as the Amiga was from an audio and graphics point of view, it was not a terrible useful machine at the time and is a big problem when the asking price was around $4000 in today's dollars (once you add the monitor and an extra drive).

The Amiga wasn't competing with the 1981 IBM or the 1984 Mac. It was competing with the 1985 versions.

It isn't a question of a "killer app" because no third-third party software could have made the Amiga as useful as a PC or Mac when it comes for word processing or spreadsheets. And unfortunately, given where technology was at the time, I don't even know what kind of killer app could have been made for the Amiga in 1985/1986.

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I talked to my dad this evening and told him about this discussion. He wanted me to convey that he always loved the Amiga and that the question I had asked him was why didn't the Amiga take off?

Here was his follow up after I disseminated some of the points made in this conversation:

It's 1985. You just plunked down what amounts to $4,000 in today's money on an Amiga. What are you going to do with it? Be specific. What productive work would you'd do with it in 1985/1986? Because that's when it was released and that's when it was being "defined" in the market.

My dad expected to use it to do the kind of work he would do on an Apple II plus take advantage of the power of the Amiga. But in 1985/1986 it was a step down from the Apple II for doing word processing and spread sheets. The only app he remembered being interesting was Deluxe Paint. The rest were games (Balance of Power, Marble Madness, Defender of the Crown, Faire Tale adventure, Mind Walker, etc.). $4,000 is too much for a game machine.

He still has the machine and by 1988/1989 he was using it for video editing (he did a side gig for fun doing credits and other video work for local companies using his Amiga). And he still has it to this day "somewhere".

But when it mattered, release and shortly after, the Amiga was a great tech demo with nothing to do with it other than be a very expensive game machine.

For HIM, (not me, I was a kid) he said a dedicated text mode would have at least made it useful as a productivity tool.

But his message to relay, stressing that he is probably *literally* one of the oldest Amiga fans alive, is this: It's 1985. You just spent $4,000 in today's money on Amiga. WHAT specifically are you doing with it? Something that could be scaled out to a business or enterprise?

Bunch of blurb.

Point is what what you do with a 1981 PC, 1984 Mac, 1985 Amiga.

And if the answer is "80x25 textmode is not enough" that answer is just plain wrong. None of the REAL competitors in 1985 cared about terminal applications anymore. Because all the computers in existence could do it.

The real reason why Americans didn't go "Fuck, yeah!!" over the Amiga like Europeans did is still withstanding.

I got my A500 really early, and as I said company=expensive computer=special-purpose.

Too bad your Dad got an Amiga, didn't get it cos he was stuck in the old, and then abandoned it before it got killer apps, and then thrived compared to any brand of computer. Tell that to him and then get back to me.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Photon

Bunch of blurb.

Point is what what you do with a 1981 PC, 1984 Mac, 1985 Amiga.

And if the answer is "80x25 textmode is not enough" that answer is just plain wrong. None of the REAL competitors in 1985 cared about terminal applications anymore. Because all the computers in existence could do it.

The real reason why Americans didn't go "Fuck, yeah!!" over the Amiga like Europeans did is still withstanding.

I got my A500 really early, and as I said company=expensive computer=special-purpose.

Too bad your Dad got an Amiga, didn't get it cos he was stuck in the old, and then abandoned it before it got killer apps, and then thrived compared to any brand of computer. Tell that to him and then get back to me.

I am not sure what you mean by "terminal" apps.

What people did care about in 1985 (and still today) is being able to read, write and edit documents and spreadsheets. This isn't something that was practical on a 1985 Amiga for the reasons endlessly discussed during this thread.

While the Amiga got some "killer" apps like the Video Toaster later on, that is, at best, a niche and had prerequisites (much, much more RAM, hard disks) that weren't realistic in a 1985 era machine.

The Amiga faced the classic problem: It was too expensive to compete as a console and it didn't have the features necessary to do the kind of thing people did (and still do) with computers when it launched.

If there is some killer app, even a theoretical one, that could have run on the Amiga 1000 in 1985/1986 I very much would like to know what you think it would be.

Too bad your Dad got an Amiga, didn't get it cos he was stuck in the old, and then abandoned it before it got killer apps, and then thrived compared to any brand of computer. Tell that to him and then get back to me.

I think he would laugh.

[Minuous]

It's enough for 80*25 text, the same as what an IBM-PC could do, but that somehow isn't "practical" for word processing or spreadsheets? What nonsense.