I often wonder what a current Amiga would be in order to capture the qualitative jump the original offered when it was launched, and somehow preserving some of its identity.
• platform where "indie" creativity created "AAA" games
So it was mostly an artifact of its time. I don't think you can pack exactly these things in a single device any more. Maaaybe if there was a next-gen console, but with an open OS and hackable hardware?
But graphics are reaching diminishing returns (RTX is nice, but not a leap like going from cyan-pink CGA to HAM). Audio is good enough. Hardware for games has been mostly commoditized by big game engines. If you want to reinvent UIs or games, you can do that on any hardware now.
Demoscene was cool because it was pushing limits of the hardware. For a while now the hardware has been powerful enough that these limits aren't that interesting any more. Demoscene now thrives on artificial limits, like Pico8 or 1/4/64K demos.
Having grown up using a VIC-20, C64, and Amiga 500, I've had similar thoughts.
There was something magical about the innovations in the hardware and software on the Amiga platform. Seeing the bouncing ball demo running was cool, but dragging the Workbench screen down to show the ability to multitask was awesome at that time. Using Deluxe Paint to render animations and record them on VHS using a cheap genlock was fun.
It's that intersection of accessible magic that makes me nostalgic. My most recent experience of that feeling was playing Breath of the Wild on a Switch hooked up to a TV a couple years ago. The opening scenes where you look out over the Great Plateau for the first time really took me back to thinking anything is possible.
People at the time thought computers were "good enough" as well. Part of Amiga's influence was its ability to show us what computing could do in our day to day life (games, video, etc.) that we didn't even know we wanted until it was there. So I have to think there's something that could come along and capture that essence again. I'd say the iPhone represented a similar qualitative jump, though by that time Apple had lost the identity of David to the industry's Goliath.
I lack the creativity to guess what the next thing might be, but if I was put on the spot, I'd say perhaps VR. Some device/software combo will come along and make VR accessible and sensible for the masses.
> People at the time thought computers were "good enough" as well.
I don't think that was true. People thought some computers were powerful but we were always aware of their limitations. We just never imagined those limitations would go away as spectacularly as they have.
I also don't agree with the iPhone comparison. Maybe smart phone (generalised) but the smart phone idea was about long before Apple entered the market. Whether it was PDAs (which I owned), Blackberry or Palm handsets (which I had as a work phone) or feature phones like Sony Ericsson handsets that had the web, maps and games (written in Java). For me, the thing iPhone and Android changed was the UI from being a physical key or stylus interface to a multi-touch glass screen. But there are some lost benefits to this (precision with the stylus and tactile buttons are faster to type on than touch screen) so, for me at least, the transition was bitter sweet once I'd gotten over the honeymoon period of owning a shiny new gadget.
I think you're right about VR being one of the next big leaps. AI/ML definitely feels like another one of those "wow" techs. That last one leads to greater autonomy (like self driving cars) which definitely feel like science fiction. But for me, the most exciting innovation yet to happen is augmented reality. I mean sure, we had some products that fizzled out (like Google Glass) and some cool phone apps that use AR. But I think wearable AR will take off again in our lifetimes and that will be as monumental a culture shift as the rise of the smart phone.
The original question was: "what a current Amiga would be in order to capture the qualitative jump the original offered when it was launched?".
There were computers before the Amiga as well, but it represented a shift from computers as a business tool to a general purpose device.
What the iPhone did was introduce a whole new way of thinking about the phone -- as an entertainment device -- in the same way that the Amiga changed the paradigm of what we expected from computers. As the next comment pointed out, that change is not coming on the desktop PC again. It has to be something that really shifted the paradigm on computing and I think the iPhone did that. I owned a PocketPC and a Palm Treo, but those were both productivity tools and the iPhone was something entirely different in the same way Amgiga was a shift away from the PC as a business tool.
What the I think the "next big thing" will lack is the second part of the question: "and somehow preserving some of its identity." I don't see another plucky upstart shifting the hardware paradigm of computing. Though that might be because I lack the creativity, skill or vision to see what that might be.
> The original question was: "what a current Amiga would be in order to capture the qualitative jump the original offered when it was launched?".
Yes, but you drifted off that topic a little and I followed your tangent further. That's how conversations organically flow. ;)
> There were computers before the Amiga as well, but it represented a shift from computers as a business tool to a general purpose device.
Computers were already a general purpose devices when Amiga was released (I remember that well because I was doing exactly that with computers prior to Amiga). I don't disagree it was the best computer on the market though.
What the Amiga represented for me was a shift from a text orientated interface to graphical interface. Amiga wasn't alone either, you had Atari ST, Acorn Electron and the Apple Macintosh (though they weren't as big in Europe as the other 3). I never really considered Windows part of that shift because it wasn't really until the 90s when Windows started to add any significant value over DOS -- which was nearly a decade after their competition was released.
> What the iPhone did was introduce a whole new way of thinking about the phone -- as an entertainment device
I'm going to have to disagree with you there as well. I was using phones as entertainment devices long before the iPhones launch. The Sony Ericsson handsets I described were specifically sold as multimedia devices. The N-Gage was a hand held games console come mobile phone which capitalised on the success of gaming on phones and that was somewhere in the region of 5 years before the iPhone was released. I was playing even playing Tomb Raider 1 and 2 on my PDA long before iPhones release.
What Apple did with smart phones was make them "sexy". But that's purely marketing.
> I owned a PocketPC and a Palm Treo, but those were both productivity tools and the iPhone was something entirely different in the same way Amgiga was a shift away from the PC as a business tool.
Palm Treo and Blackberries definitely were business tools. But PocketPC was a lot more versatile. I used mine mostly for gaming and listening to music (I'm pretty sure I was running Winamp on that device). PocketPC definitely wasn't "sexy" though.
> Amgiga was a shift away from the PC as a business tool
I mean sure, if you ignore all the 70s and 80s 8 bit micros bought for kids playing games. In fact that was basically what kept Commodore afloat before they released the Amiga because their business-orientated machines (like the Plus/4) didn't sell well, unlike the C64.
Gaming on the Amstrad CPC 464 was so successful that Alan Sugar released a dedicated games console variant (it even supported cartridges).
Then you have the Sinclair machines like the Spectrum and ZX80. Clive Sinclair purposely built cheaper machines and went after the lower end of the market to attract family homes rather than businesses and because of that an generation of kids grew up playing games on them.
Acorn's BBC Micro was aimed at schools so is as much an educational machine as it is anything else. A great machine it was too. That and the Amstrad CPC 464 are probably my two favourite machines from the pre-ST/Amiga days.
> I don't see another plucky upstart shifting the hardware paradigm of computing.
Commodore wasn't a plucky upstart when they released the Amiga. They already had close on a decade of computers on the market. Some successful and others weren't. Not to mention the electronic hardware they sold prior to their 70s entry into micro computing with the PET.
In fact Commodore were older than most of the competition: Apple, Sinclair, Atari, Microsoft, Acorn, Amstrad (so many companies starting with the letter A!)
Though I will admit Commodore prior to the Amiga was reportedly a very different company (didn't the technical teams and some leadership effectively trade places with Atari? But I wasn't working for either company so I can only go by what I've read on that particularly point)
Going back to your point though, I do see the hardware paradigm shifting. I'd already mentioned augmented wearables. The next stage after that is augmented implants (though that is a long long way off). Smart phones are convenient but we're already seeing a shift away from them with smart watches. Google couldn't make Glass sexy but that's mostly a marketing problem and we do have a whole new generation who've grown up with Facebook et al and thus who many don't have the same privacy complaints that us grey beards do. So there is a culture shift there waiting to happen.
Do we really want MultiTasking? This is a question that I have been pondering for a while. What made the Amiga / ST / Archimidies special was that all that computing horse power, for the era, was dedicated to a single 'user' task. Today we have powerful hardware that doesn't seem to live up to its potential. I have no data but one wonders how many cache misses of a foreground application are the result of a background application invalidating cache lines? No, I have not totally convinced myself of the argument, but I do think, that when we look back at the golden age of the home computere, we should at least recognize that the operating systems in play were not the multi-user, multi-tasking leviathans of today; it was a simpler time and perhaps we could do with a little more simplicity in our lives.
The OS was part of the "wow" factor, especially ability to have multiple applications with different screen resolutions at the same time on the same monitor.
Amiga had some important software like Deluxe Paint, Pro Tracker, LightWave 3D. You could develop games on it, not just play them. Cult of the OS lives on in AROS and MorphOS.
Building a bit on that, I'd imagine fluid multitasking with imperceptible latencies. A unique programming model or language, say, an OS written in Rust and, relying on that, extensive multithreading and async calls everywhere.
A lot of that is in Haiku, but I'd expect more, adapted to heterogeneous cores.
• stunning graphics, audio, GUI, and multitasking
• demoscene community
• platform where "indie" creativity created "AAA" games
So it was mostly an artifact of its time. I don't think you can pack exactly these things in a single device any more. Maaaybe if there was a next-gen console, but with an open OS and hackable hardware?
But graphics are reaching diminishing returns (RTX is nice, but not a leap like going from cyan-pink CGA to HAM). Audio is good enough. Hardware for games has been mostly commoditized by big game engines. If you want to reinvent UIs or games, you can do that on any hardware now.
Demoscene was cool because it was pushing limits of the hardware. For a while now the hardware has been powerful enough that these limits aren't that interesting any more. Demoscene now thrives on artificial limits, like Pico8 or 1/4/64K demos.