YouTube: Amiga as Workstation in 1986

[tschak909]

After more than four years of trying to gather bits together, I have started a video series showing the viability #CommodoreAmiga as a workstation.

This set of videos are placed in the historical context of the Amiga roughly a year after launch, in the summer of 1986, eventually comparing context to other workstations of the time.

In this video, we show initial first impressions of capabilities using a base system and viewing the demonstration programs, while providing context on how each demonstration program worked.

The system at this point is an Amiga 1000, with 256K expansion, and two disk drives.

Since workstations were used primarily for scientific and engineering tasks, with the expectation of developing custom software for a given task, this is what the series will ultimately focus on.

#retrocomputing

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It is early 1986, and we've received our development disks from #CommodoreAmiga. We set up our compiler disks, compile a couple of test programs, and run them.

Hard disks couldn't arrive soon enough.

#retrocomputing

[tschak909]

Amiga as a Workstation: Part 2: Adding RAM.

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We add more RAM to our #CommodoreAmiga using a schematic we found on Fred Fish disk #27. Once added, we add a couple of tools from the Amiga Macro assembler disk to allow AmigaDOS to see the RAM. We then copy our tools and code into the RAM: disk, and observe the massive speed increase.

[slaapliedje]

Awesome! I have wanted to do something similar with a series on alternative platforms and productivity software. I just need to figure out how I want to approach it.

[tschak909]

Amiga as a Workstation Part 3: Adding a Hard Disk

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In the previous part, we could use the extra RAM in our Amiga to vastly improve compile times by using the RAM disk. In this video, we add a Tecmar T-Card and T-Disk, which gives us 20 megabytes of storage, move our environment onto it, and test it.

[hammer]

If I'm a business customer, the demos shown are not ready for business out of the box.

I didn't see a "workstation" with ready "day job" applications.

[tschak909]

Originally Posted by hammer

If I'm a business customer, the demos shown are not ready for business out of the box.

I didn't see a "workstation" with ready "day job" applications.

I very much appreciate your snap judgement for an ongoing series, which does not, and will not focus on business uses at all, that's not what workstations were used for.

As this progresses, while I will be doing simpler demonstration application development, the point is to show how the system, as we build it up, was comparable to the 680x0 based workstations that dominated the field in the mid 1980s, and how the Amiga did handily do those applications. I am speaking as someone who was there doing it.

-Thom