I'm trying to explore an alternate history (via emulation) where I got an equivalent A500 system from my parents for Christmas 1989 instead of the Macintosh SE (20MB HD, 1MB RAM) I got that year.
What magazines can I look for on archive dot org or elsewhere online to find hardware prices and bundles for that year? Any idea?
@RL_Dane Wow! I am you in that alternate universe.
My parents bought an Amiga 500 for the family for Christmas in 1989 (or maybe it was 1988). I loved that Amiga but nowadays I live and work primarily on the Macintosh platform so I often wonder what it would have been like had my parents bought a Macintosh instead. (1/2)
@RL_Dane for the US try Amiga World and Amazing Computing. For the UK/Europe try CU Amiga, Amiga Format (if you can find it) and Zero for 1989. In 1989 in the UK you would've most likely got a pack with a bunch of games - the ads for a company called silica will give you a good starting point. You'd most likely get a 512k or maybe 1mb a500 with workbench 1.3 (2.0 wasn't out till 1990). If it was late 1989 you could've had the Batman pack https://www.pczone.co.uk/back-to-the-amiga-500-batman-pack-30-years-later/
Basically, I've always been curious about the #Amiga platform, and I've never spent more than half an hour with an Amiga. So I'm trying to imagine that I got an A500 as my home computer for high school instead of a Macintosh SE. What kind of hardware bundle would I have gotten? What kind of software would I have discovered? What would the experience have been like? How would it have formed my mind and viewpoints differently?
@RL_Dane you are Welcome. The price you found feels about right, iirc IT was a bundles together with the TV Adapter, though I think I paid it in German Mark back then.
Bought mine in at a store called Brinkmann's in Mönkebergstreet in Hamburg. My dad drove to IT after I nagged him for days. ;-)
Didn't Commodore make a monitor for it? I'd imagine viewing it on a TV would be a very sub-par experience, especially if you were trying to write school papers. ;)
And yeah, the TV Out Pictures was notoriously subpar. A while later a good friend of mine soldered a Monitor to SCART cable for us. I think he had found the how-to in a Amiga Mag.
About writing school papers... We mostly played Games first, started to make music and the only real Homework I did was for chemistry when I drew the while citrate-cycle in DPaint for a presentation.🤣
Oh man, SCART was legendary. The closest we got to that in the US was the commodore luma-chroma "component-ish" cable, which was electrically the same as SVideo (which came later).
The mac had some pretty sweet games for a monochrome system, but its word processing was super solid.
Your explanation is probably why I didn't get an Amiga. lol
But dude, those 4096 colors... I literally dreamed about having an Amiga when I was a teenager.
@RL_Dane HAM/Hold and modify, the 4096 colour mode was "special". But Iirc it was interlaced and too slow for everyday use.
The UI usually ran in 4 colours, later with Magic Workbench in 8 colours(640x200 for ntsc and 640x256 for pal) Screens with 32colours usually were 320x200 or 256. Another special mode was the extra halfbright mode with 64 colours.
Much later, the AGA Machines were able to have a 256 colour mode, like the VGA modes in PC.
@Tionisla@RL_Dane AmigaOS also was unlike anything else. Great multitasking, built in speech synthesis, named disks (refer to GAME: and it will prompt you to insert that disk, not any other disk). Also instead of (say) /lib or DH0:lib, you use LIBS:, which could be assigned to any folder or disk that stores your shared libraries. The named disk feature was great when using a stack of floppies, as it avoided confusion. If you had multiple drives, it would immediately detect which drive had the necessary disk and prompt if missing.
@RL_Dane@Tionisla I had an A500 around 1990, maybe 89. Eventually added a GVP hard drive and 80286 card. Don't remember ram capacity. Funnily enough i didn't care for the other Commodore computers.
Nice! MacOS had a lot of those things, but definitely not the preemptive multitasking.
I feel like the Macintoshes graphics library (QuickDraw) was far ahead of its time* (even if the graphics hardware absolutely was not), but the Amiga multitasking was way ahead of ITS time.
*Based on code efficiency and mathematical sophistication/trickery
I was able to "monkey patch" a WB 2.0 look into a Part of the Kickstart 1.2's intuition.library, iirc or to divert syscalls to my animated mouse pointer routine. Not to mention adding songend to binary music replay routines in memory for eagleplayer (All you needed was a memory pointer, check for an opcode you can inject your jsr myhackysongend; afterwards ;-) Wild Times.
@Tionisla@RL_Dane One of my favorite capabilities was a utility that allowed me to highlight and copy to clipboard any text, in any font, in any window, button, or title bar generated by any program. It would identify the bitmapped font in use and essentially did lightweight OCR with 100% accuracy. I've never found anything comparable since (macos, windows, or Linux).
@royal@RL_Dane for me it was wb2.0's introduction of datatypes: essentially a plugin system for mimetype handling/converting within apps, so e.g. if you add a gif datatype to the system all programs handling DT/images were able to read it or save it. On the fly de/compressing, new fileformats, etc
KIO or gstreamer comes to mind, but DTs were more general.
Oh, and MagicWB was just gorgeous.
One other thing was lowlevel access to all hw components which benefitted the Demoscene.
Bill Atkinson actually created a feature like that for MacPaint but decided to remove it only because he didn't want people to think it was a word processor. Basically, once you finish entering text into MacPaint, it becomes a bitmap and isn't editable again. He created a system that compared the bitmap to the fonts in memory and re-created the text entry field.
It's OCR, but not the computationally-intense OCR that's used on scanned documents. The fact that the fonts on these early systems were bitmapped actually makes the job a lot easier.
Hoping to find some price lists with bundles to find a similarly-equipped system. I'm guessing an A500 with a nice monitor and a small disk would probably cost right around $999 or maybe a little more. IIRC, the Mac SE they got me was around $1099 with the University discount.
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