[karlgkk]

How revolutionary can something be if its impact is relatively limited, it was released for a style of game that was being supplanted by 3d, and all of its major titles were rereleased within years for commodity x86 hardware (due to the rapid advancements in cpu technology)?

The Amiga, as a general purpose computer, was a bright vision in a world that was already leaving it behind.

[tadfisher]

The Amiga shipped in 1985, a year after the black & white Macintosh. The world took the better part of a decade catching up to it.

[bluescrn]

Most Amiga users - at least the home computing/gaming enthusiasts - never saw a big-box Amiga back in the day. To most users, 'The Amiga' was the A500, which released in '87 and reached peak popularity in the very late 80s/early 90s.

And to most Amiga gamers, Doom was where it became clear the PC had overtaken. Amiga game developers also got obsessed with trying to build a Doom clone for the Amiga, repeatedly showing how futile that effort was* , and much talent was wasted in that pursuit rather than making more good 2D games.

But by the time Doom arrived, the SNES had already been out for a couple of years, too, and despite a weak CPU it absolutely destroyed the Amiga in terms of 2D graphics performance (multi-layer parallax, loads of sprites, loads of colours, and 'Mode 7' effects)

(*ok, maybe not entirely futile if you've seen Dread/Grind which are super-impressive, but it took until the 2020s to pull it off, with an engine that seems about halfway between Wolf3D and Doom in terms of capabilities)

[technothrasher]

Eh. When I saw the Macintosh II demoed in 1987 compared to my Amiga 2000 which was released at basically the same time, I already knew the Amiga was screwed.

[tdeck]

Looking at the UIs for early Macintosh vs. Amiga Workbench it feels like Amiga didn't put much thought into aesthetics. Just look at the color scheme they chose for the desktop UI:

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10

It seems they had at least 64 colors to choose from and they went with... Orange and white on blue? They also decided icons should be able to be arbitrary sizes for some reason, a feature I haven't seen in other GUIs.

Here's workbench 2.0, which is better but still pretty unappealing.

https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work...

Scrolling through I thought "wait, that one doesn't look too bad" and then realized I was looking at a screenshot from Windows.

[zozbot234]

That color scheme was allegedly picked for visibility on very low-end TV sets. (The Amiga palette colors could be chosen arbitrarily from 4-bits per channel RGB, so that wasn't a constraint.)

(The icons weren't just arbitrary sized, they could have different pictures for the selected and unselected state. You see this with the open vs. closed drawer icons (drawers are like "folders" in other OS's) but many app icons also used this effect.)

[tdeck]

Be that as it may, if you look at C64 GEOS which ran on consumer TV sets and with comparatively primitive hardware, the UI looks so much nicer in GEOS to my eye. Even the Apple II GEOS makes Workbench look like a hot mess.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/geosc64

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/geosapple

[jboy55]

There weren't any 'default' icons, so the workbench didn't show you everything on the disk, only programs with ".info" files which had the icon. You had to drop to the command line to do most low level things. Of course, Workbench didn't really matter when you were playing games.

[zozbot234]

There was an option to show everything - with default icons. (Not very useful ones since notions of document ("project") file types were not used all that much, so every file showed as some sort of executable. But the option was absolutely there even though it wasn't the default.)

[jboy55]

Only on WB2.0+, for a decent number of years we didn't have that.

[antod]

At the time though it didn't seem any worse than the Mac though, and it had colors - even if the defaults weren't great, any colors seemed better than none.

Or at least that was how tasteless teenage me saw it.

[ekianjo]

the mac 2 was like ten times the price of the Amiga.

[jboy55]

The Mac barely survived Wintel, so its not that apt of a comparison. If Microsoft didn't port Word/Excel over, I don't think we'd have many options now.

[scarface_74]

This is also not what happened. Office was available for the Mac first in 1989 and later came to Windows.

PowerPoint was original a Mac app that was acquired by MS.

Word was available on the Mac in 1985.

What you are probably thinking about is the deal that Jobs brokered when he came back for MS to continue supporting the Mac

[kalleboo]

Excel was also originally written for the Mac. Microsoft's DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan, and was an also-ran next to Lotus 1-2-3.

[ekianjo]

are you rewriting history out of thin air?

[karlgkk]

The Amiga got completely creamed by x86 and was a footnote by 1994, when it was cancelled. It's best titles were ported to other platforms or forgotten. The people who succeeded the strongest on it moved on to other platforms, but its architecture really didn't live on in any mainstream descendants.