The impact of the Amiga 500
Part 3— A look back at my life with computers
Amiga 500
Aside from the Spectrum 128K, the Commodore Amiga 500 was my 2nd computer, and my first next-gen upgrade.
Computers and phones can do so much today that we take for granted, but these features were released and iterated on over years of microcomputer development.
I’m not even talking about the Internet here, just basic, basic stuff like running more than one program at a time.
Workbench
Whatever your phone or laptop of choice there is always an OS, an operating system. Whether it be on a MacBook or an iPhone, a Windows laptop or an Android tablet, there is always a system that helps you organise content and run applications.
Technically even the Spectrum had an OS, but it was so simple, and had so few user-oriented features, that it is not easy to compare it to the OSs of today.
In the simplest terms it was just a prompt at the bottom of the screen that you typed commands into. You either typed in a program to run, and it ran it, or you loaded a program from tape. That was it. You want to some quick math on a calculator while you were in the middle of a game? Reset and load a calculator program (or just write some code, or just use an actual calculator). Those early computers could only do one thing at a time.
One buzzword surrounding the Amiga was multi-tasking. This just means that multiple programs can run at the same time. This introduced more complexity in the UX. Now there was need for a way to manage programs; open them, close them, and swap between them.
The Amiga Workbench OS was my first exposure to what could be recognised today as a home computer, with a mouse pointer, windows and menus at the top of the screen like a Mac. They called it WIMP in computer studies in school. Windows Icons Menu Pointer, I think it stood for. Computer Studies in school started as an option when I was in the upper school of secondary, around age 14. I had already been doing most of what we learned in those lessons in my bedroom on my Amiga several years before.
Floppies
Aside from home computers beginning to work in the way we now expect, with all the fundamental features which the Spectrum did not have like multiple programs, windows, some kind of desktop environment, a mouse pointer (and a mouse – no lasers then, just a ball, that ran against vertical and horizontal rollers, which you could take out and clean when it got too dusty): there was also an amazing advancement in storage technology: the 3.5” floppy disk.
We could now save things as well as load them, which was amazing for game saves and content creation. This was so powerful it became the symbol for the save icon.
The little metal part slid to the side to reveal the magnetic, round, thin, flexible plastic disk inside. This is why it was a floppy as opposed to a hard disk, which was thicker and not flexible. (I say this in the past tense because most hard disks today are not even disks, just chips). The outer casing of the larger predecessors to the 3.5” floppy disks were flexible too, to a degree, and made from card, but the more popular version used by the Amiga, the Atari ST, and the new BBC school computer, the Archimedes, had a hard plastic casing. This was initially a source of confusion for me: how could a hard square be called a floppy disk?
I had two big plastic cases full of floppies with various games and things I had made on them. If the internet had existed then I could have shared the art, music, demos, and games I made, but back then my only audience were my family and friends.
Archimedes
The Archimedes was amazing. It had some things my Amiga did not such as drag and drop between applications, vector graphics (like a simple version of Adobe Illustrator), anti-aliased fonts, and a hard drive.
It was many years before I upgraded to the Amiga 1200 and got myself my first hard drive, but until then the floppy disk was my sole way of getting data in and out of my computer, apart from a few fun peripherals.
Atari ST
The Atari ST was utter garbage and no self-respecting Amiga user would touch one with a barge-pole.
Tribalism
Obviously this is a joke. There was always a friendly rivalry between groups of different computer users, in exactly the same way there is now between Mac, Windows, and Linux users. First it was mainly between Spectrum and the Commodore 64. Then Commodore released the Amiga, which because ubiquitous, and it’s only equivalent challenger was the Atari ST, which had a similar form factor, and comparable capabilities. Unfortunately it was not such a popular platform for games, which is where the Amiga shone. It was the computer of choice for MIDI sequencing though, and with its in-built MIDI ports may still be used as a MIDI sequencer by some music producers who like to include some retro tech in their setups.
Peripherals
Not to be outdone, and in my never ending quest for upgrades and expansions, I was able to get a MIDI controller peripheral for my Amiga and connect it to my electronic music keyboard. This worked both ways, allowing musical note info to be recorded in my music editor, and for the editor to be able to play music using the keyboard sounds. Most of the time I was used to using the computer keyboard for music sequencing though.
Med / OctaMED
One of my most favourite programs was Med, literally MusicEditor, a music tracker that had four simple columns of notes entered as text that ran up the screen through a playing row. OctaMED had 8 columns, but the sound quality was not as good because the Amiga’s dedicated audio chip, “Paula”, could only mix 4 in hardware.
As well as the pitch and octave you could also assign each entry a volume and an instrument. With four sounds playable at once, the door was open to much more complex arrangements than the BASIC Spectrum programs I had written using BEEP.
There was another popular music tracker called Soundtracker at the time but it was utter garbage and I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
Your friendly neighbourhood chipset
As an aside, the Amiga chipset was part of its power. The Spectrum had to handle its graphics in a tiny amount of undedicated memory, hence the attribute colour clash, but the Amiga had specific chips to handle things. They had people’s names; Paula for audio, Denise for graphics, and Agnus for memory – later upgraded to Fat Agnus for handling twice the memory.
Agnus also had sub components called blitter and copper. These helped to deal with memory and video in efficient ways. Blitter Objects (Bobs) were small graphical elements that could be moved around the screen quickly because of this hardware. More famously at the time, copper (co-processor) could be used to make so-called Copper Rainbows, which was a fast way of getting more colours on the screen as each horizontal line was drawn. Both were used to make many games perform well and look great, and were a big part of the Amiga’s success and the growth of the UK games industry.
I am sure there was a chip called Gary too, but perhaps I am imagining it.
Samples
That’s enough of Denise and Agnus, back to Paula. Med/Octamed could use synth sounds, which you could edit yourself, but most of the time everyone used sound samples. You could get disks of sound samples on magazine front covers (cover disks) or copied from friends. Two great peripherals for this were my sound sampler, which could record audio input via an aux cable, and an external floppy disk drive.
Amiga Computing
Every month I used to walk to W H Smiths to buy the latest issue of Amiga Computing, which always had a cover disk. This was my source of news, information, content, and inspiration.
There was a similar publication called Amiga Format but it was garbage and … you get the idea.
Pre-internet
It was a different time in the days before the internet and smart phones. Radically different. I may have been mired in technology during my childhood, but mine is the only generation that had a childhood without the internet, and an adulthood with it. I literally first went online at university aged 18, but that is fast forwarding too far.
My son who is now 18 himself had an early childhood free of smart phones and tablets, which respectively distract parents and entertain toddlers today. The iPhone was released in 2007. But that is fast forwarding way too far.
Development
Next time I will rewind and talk more about some of the things I learned and made, and some of the games and other things on my Amiga 500 and 1200 that ultimately inspired me to study Computer Animation at university and go on to a career in software development.
