Viva Amiga! Watch a documentary about the best computer

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/09/viva-amiga-watch-a-documentar.html

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Amiga really as the best computer. Then again Betamax was also technically better.

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Except that I’ve made my wife sit through both of these recently:

Another computer-y documentary might require some convincing.

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murdered by corporate mismanagement

Good title to a song…

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@beschizza at least one Amiga Power journo is a BB reader…

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I had three Amigas, starting with the original A1000. I still have my A2000HD.

I don’t recall ever screaming in incoherent rage at an Amiga the way I do at Windows and OS X. Even though the A4000 came with an intermittent fault in the motherboard which eventually made it unusable.

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It’s starting to sound like, “back in my day, computers were cooler.” And our grandchildren will tell us shut up, they’re trying to skoob the wepnet.

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it was the only computer on the market that gave people seizures.

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but they’re good computers brent

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That’s totally a Dead Kennedy’s track

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my amiga is my 5th machine , i have a 1000 with a ’ sidecar ’ memory module , used as a pseudo floppy , almost a ssd ~ when macs and ibm clones were monocolour , i had lots of colours !! and , multitasking ( although the gui itself was not re-entrant ) never did get myself a video toaster though - - -

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Hello Everyone,

I watched Viva Amiga unfold in terms of the production end of things over the last few years.

Viva Amiga - Title Page for Interview - SEND!.png3840×2160 2.22 MB

The documentary is a fantastically acceptable viewpoint on Amiga computers and their legacy.

Zach Weddington and I did an interview on Viva Amiga before Christmas, which is located here:

Please show the podcast some social media love by reposting and retweeting. it is great to help promote this community driven film where possible.

Episode 6 also includes an interview with Dave Needle, who went on to co-design the Atari Lynx and 3DO console with RJ Mical after he left Commodore.

The article I wrote on the Amiga and its legacy can also be found here:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?filter%3DAND(p_IS_Number%3A7478484)&refinements=4226442253&pageNumber=1&resultAction=REFINE

Always great to see the cultural memory linked to Amiga technologies is still strong!

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Amiga was my life back in the day and I finally gave up around 1997.

I still have my Amiga 1000 and Amiga 4000 (With Toaster and Flyer)

Hell, I have a few toaster boards lying around.

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I used an Amiga once. Back in 86. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t.

This is the computer that changed the world:

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Wait, Only one thing is allowed to change the world? Both were computers with small but passionate user bases that changed media.

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Does your computer have a graphics coprocessor? Thanks, Amiga!
Does your computer have a sound card? Thanks, Amiga!
Any other co-processors to offload common tasks like I/O? Thanks Amiga!

When IBM was putting 16 colors on the screen,
and Apple was still black and white,
Amiga was painting with 4,096 colors.

Full preemptive multitasking.

AREXX, a Basic like programming language that used other applications like functions, puts AppleScript to shame. There was even a compiler for it! I remember writing an AREXX program that would take output from a spreadsheet program, use the values in an array of cells to color an image, and then map it into 3D and spin it around and add it to a video.

Ah, fond memories of my 2000 & 4000.

One of the few TV ads I ever saw for the Amiga, instead of talking about “modernizing” traditional activities like using spreadsheets for doing payrolls or using a text editor to enter your recipies, was focused instead of doing things at home that you could never even imagine before. Want to be a musician and create an album? You can! Want to make a movie? You can!

And the people involved…

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Do you remember when you could get away with using a passive heatsink?

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Also it had both a DOS line command and a GUI interface. It was a short reign, but really for awhile there they were the best computers for computer graphics, next to something like a Unix based SUN station. Several effects houses used the Amiga, and the Video Toaster was the go to in early video production. And the games were just unreal in their quality.

Sadly it wasn’t to last. I still have floppies with 2D assets, and maybe some 3D Wire models.

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