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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 01 2021, @06:07AM   Printer-friendly

How the Commodore Amiga Powered Your Cable System in the '90s:

In terms of planning our lives around what our TVs spit out, we've come a long way from the overly condensed pages of TV Guide.

In fact, the magazine was already looking awful obsolete in the 1980s and 1990s, when cable systems around the country began dedicating entire channels to listing TV schedules.

[...] But before all that was the Commodore Amiga[*], a device that played a quiet but important role in the cable television revolution.

The Amiga was a much-loved machine, huge among a cult of users who embraced its impressive video and audio capabilities, which blew away every other platform at the time of its release.

As a multimedia powerhouse, it was ahead of both the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC by nearly a decade at the time of its 1985 release, and its launch price was a relatively inexpensive $1,295, making the computer a bit of a bargain at launch. And seeing as "Amiga" is the Spanish word for friend with a feminine ending, it was also friendlier than its office-drone competitors.

[...] For cable providers, the Amiga's capabilities for displaying content on a television were a bit of a godsend. Previous offerings, such as the Atari 800, were able to put messages onto a television screen, though not without much in the way of pizzazz.

As a result, the Amiga quickly became the cable industry's computer of choice in the pre-HDTV era, especially after the release of NewTek's Video Toaster in 1990. Video Toaster, which at first was only compatible with the Amiga, made it possible to do complex video editing at a small fraction of the cost of specialized professional video-editing platforms, and that made it popular with public-access TV stations.

[*] Original link (to a link-shortened, out-of-stock product listing on Amazon) replaced.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday June 01 2021, @09:39AM

    by Rich (945) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @09:39AM (#1140704) Journal

    I would have expected to find the word "genlock" in the text, which is what enabled the Amiga to pull off such tricks in the first place. The "Agnus" video chip could be synchronized externally, which meant that the Amiga could with little effort overlay computer graphics on a given analog video stream. Its abilities to lock on to a running NTSC or PAL stream remained unrivaled, and in this field it persisted much longer than it was of use as a general personal computer. I think that only died off when network internal media moved to digital.

    The story is bit like the Mac got a head start on laser printer availability, together with suitable software and marketing got an early foothold and henceforth ruled the publishing scene for 30 years, or how the Atari ST was dominant for early techno music because of its built-in MIDI ports. Had Be and the BeBox been a success, it may have gotten the automation market because of the "GeekPort"; that now is being served by the Raspi.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dltaylor on Tuesday June 01 2021, @10:02AM

    by dltaylor (4693) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @10:02AM (#1140705)

    In school "way back when" the instructor said that it would be easiest for him to score our projects if they were turned in on MS-DOS diskettes. Since the PCs of the time were barely functional piles of excrement (Apple IIs were much more useful), I bought an A1000 and the PC software emulator. Included was a 5-1/4 disk drive and MS-DOS 3.3. It was not much slower than an 8088, since the Motorola 68000 was a much more powerful CPU. Finished that professor's project and mostly put the PC stuff away.

    The bridgeboards (actual PCs windowed in the Amiga display) came later with the A2000/A2500. Nicely you could have both a CGA and MDA, each in its own window, so run a debugger in MDA and an application in CGA.

    I remember AT&T having A3000s in their trade show booths when SVR4 was released, and, much as I liked many of the features (Streams, in particular), I had a BSD variant running already.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by black6host on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:04AM (6 children)

    by black6host (3827) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:04AM (#1140710) Journal

    I had worked with various computers back in the 80's and in 1986 I decided to spring for a new one. I was looking at an IBM PC clone and the Amiga. They both were about the same price and I was torn about which platform to jump on. I chose the PC clone and eventually taught myself Clipper (along with playing copious amounts of Wizardry). From there I jumped careers to professional programmer for hire where I remained for many years. Different languages of course...

    I wonder how my life might have turned out had I chosen the Amiga? Would I have become a musician? A different type of programmer, say game development instead of business analysis? What else might be different about my life. I suspect the choice of computer had a greater impact on the rest of my life than say... butterfly wings?

    I wonder...

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:37PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:37PM (#1140736)

      You probably would have bought a PC after it became obvious the Amiga platform was dead, and you would have learned to program in a mainstream technology. The boring truth.

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:48PM (1 child)

        by shrewdsheep (5215) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:48PM (#1140762)

        Mainstream technology was available on the Amiga. The Aztec C compiler was excellent with a nice debugger. The graphical toolkit (Intuition) introduced OO concepts (implemented in C) that predated (and inspired) modern toolkits, notably OpenStep/Cocoa. My path was Amiga -> NeXTStep -> OpenStep -> Linux. During the transitions, I took my code with me, which got retired after serving on the new system.

        To me, the video part was always the weak part about the Amiga. While you could use a TV, you had an interlaced 50Hz (PAL) output. My brother had an Atari ST and the 60Hz black-white monitor was a bliss compared to my "monitor".

        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:04PM

          by hendrikboom (1125) on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:04PM (#1141019) Homepage Journal

          I remember a Lattice C compiler... Never heard of the Aztec one.

          I was on an Amiga for a while, appreciated its OS and user interface, and later went more or less directly from Amiga to Linux. The linux was dual boot, because other family members were still using PC-based games and other software.

      • (Score: 2) by dltaylor on Tuesday June 01 2021, @09:11PM

        by dltaylor (4693) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @09:11PM (#1140851)

        My first PC was self-assembled with an AMD K5 PR100. My built-up A2500 was still usable until then. so I skipped the '286 fiasco, held 68030 ahead of the '386 and about even with the '486, before the Amiga could no longer handle my needs.

        Professionally I used, and did a bit of maintenance, on VAXen, AIX application and kernel work on the 370 and PS/2 (IBM PC, not Playstation), and a lot of embedded. PCs always (still) seemed like a sick joke compared to what they might have been with Z8000-family CPUs, which were engineering's original choice, rather than the Intel crap that was so bad they ere going out of business (so IBM got them really cheap). Even after the long-term deal with IBM gave Intel the chance to survive and prosper, their chips were so pathetic that NEC, and later AMD, make socket compatibles that performed better.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Tuesday June 01 2021, @10:51PM

      by crafoo (6639) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @10:51PM (#1140877)

      Display lists with the Copper were pretty fun and is what got me into assembly language. The amiga was just a really fun computer to write assembly for, with a real vsync, the copper, agnus, and 68k. bitplane memory for graphics was a bit annoying but not that bad. My understanding is that the Atari 400/800 core team did the Amiga for as well. If you dig down into the hardware of the Ataris it makes sense. Many of the same cool features.

      And well, on the other hand, I always envied PC for Wizardry.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 03 2021, @02:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 03 2021, @02:03PM (#1141450)
      Probably not much difference - you'd likely still end up working with PC stuff. The difference is you'd probably be more disappointed with how little real progress there has been.
  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:05AM (5 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @11:05AM (#1140711)

    They mention how Amigas were used for cable system's Preview Guides - I remember a few times when I would turn to that channel and see the Amiga's famous "Guru Meditation Error", the equivalent of a BSOD, sitting on the screen.

    • (Score: 2) by Acabatag on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:35PM (4 children)

      by Acabatag (2885) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @03:35PM (#1140757)

      The BSOD screen has actual debugging info on it. Not sure if the Amiga core dumpdisplay did.

      • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday June 01 2021, @04:21PM (3 children)

        by looorg (578) on Tuesday June 01 2021, @04:21PM (#1140773)

        You had to run some other actual debugger if you want more in depth information on the Amiga, something like Enforcer or Barfly, about why some specific software or hardware caused a crash. The Guru Meditation is mainly a system for telling you or pointing you in the general direction of what system, or part of system, failed and crashed and what was the last thing that got trapped. The message is basically divided into groups that you can read out from a table in the manuals and various books to see what crashed or system it was and the last part of the message is the memory location. It's not totally worthless information but I wouldn't say that it's debugging information as we know it today.

        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:05PM (2 children)

          by hendrikboom (1125) on Wednesday June 02 2021, @01:05PM (#1141020) Homepage Journal

          True. But it was probably useful for initially classifying bug reports.

          -- hendrik

          • (Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 02 2021, @02:07PM (1 child)

            by looorg (578) on Wednesday June 02 2021, @02:07PM (#1141035)

            It was quite useful in regards that most people that did programming back then at least knew more about hardware and what they where doing. So for them to know this it was a crash in this or that system might have been enough to point you in the direction of knowing what caused it or at least where to look. But I am not sure it would qualify as debugger info by the standards of today.
            Also it was by no means guaranteed that the last thing captured before crashing was the actual cause of the crashing. I want to recall there was also a generic error message, address pointer, which wasn't that uncommon when the system crashed but nothing was captured that if you decoded the address pointer from numbers to letters spelled out HELP or something such. So they had a last ditch catch-all function, even tho perhaps not very helpful. Sort of on the same level as helpfulness as that classic error message telling you there is an error cause there was an error and then nothing more, I want to think it was a Mac error message but can't recall for certain.

            • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday June 03 2021, @09:42AM

              by hendrikboom (1125) on Thursday June 03 2021, @09:42AM (#1141409) Homepage Journal

              The IBM Fortran H compiler on the IBM360 had am error message:
              IEH999I INVALID MESSAGE NUMBER
              It always boggled my mind that they couldn't be bothered to tell me what the invalid message number was instead of replacing it with 999.

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