[wkjagt]

The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing. Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It’s amazing to think that the Amiga series is only one generation newer than the Commodore 64/128. There were also a lot of good games for it, so the game developer community must have embraced it too.

[jug]

Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI and all.

I had to wait another nine years for that to come to Windows in Windows 95.

At least as impressive (now in hindsight that I understand the added effort that comes with this) was drivers were fairly plentyful and I could buy a random HP printer and just start printing documents. It just worked. Besides the printer of course. Inkjet printers in the early nineties were no joke.

[ForOldHack]

It was a lot more than just a 7Hmz processor. The graphics and sound chip made it head and hands above anything Mac or PC, for years. I programmed on it, and when I read how easy it was to access everything, my friend who owned it, just went out and bought the programming manual. We used the word: "Superlative" a lot.

[dansalvato]

> Yes, it's so weird how that 7 MHz thing ran a perfectly usable graphical environment with a command line shell within the GUI and all.

Perhaps not as advanced as AmigaOS, but Commodore 64 famously had GEOS for a good few years in the second half of its lifespan, which ended up being very popular for that machine. On a 1MHz 6502! Although I don’t know if it came with a command line.

[sillywalk]

The 'magic' chipset[0] helped a lot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Original_Chip_Set