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For a long time now, the Amiga has looked like another candidate headed for the good-technologies-that-might-have-been pile. Like the Betamax videotape format and, to a lesser degree, the Macintosh computer, the Amiga is seen by devotees as a superior technology betrayed by the commercial success of inferior competitors, poor management, market vagaries, and other mysterious technology forces.
But last week, the Amiga underwent another of its periodic rebirths, which seem to date back to the debut of the original Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985. Amiga Inc., the Gateway subsidiary that bought the rights to the system's patents last year, took the opportunity at the World of Amiga conference to officially declare itself open for business. A Web site provides information on plans for a fall revival for the operating system some had given up for dead. And as Gateway quickly discovered, this revival already has a captive audience.
"We got tens of thousands of email, faxes, (magazine letters), saying 'What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?'" said Amiga Inc. spokesman Bill McEwen. "There was this huge community [Gateway] didn't know existed.
Gateway saw, he said, that these users had "an amazing passion for what this device could have been and should have been."
Loyalists' devotion to their machine is almost eternal in computer years. Known for power before the word even began to be applied to personal computers, the 1985 Amiga sported advanced on-board processors -- in addition to its Motorola 68000 CPU -- for image rendering and sound generation. In the pre-PC era of the mid-80s, the Amiga was combining images, animation, and video with stereo sound, making it a pioneer in the then-unheard-of field of multimedia.
Built around an architecture originally meant to drive visually-rich video games, the Amiga had a latent graphical power that its savvy users and developers quicky sought to tap.
"Among people who care about what their computer can do, it's a very popular machine," said Mathew Ignash, leader of the Amiga faction of the Michigan Computer User Group.
The computer also won accolades for its efficient use of memory and drive capacity, operating features that are prized to this day. Still relatively new for today's computers, 32-bit, "preemptive multitasking" has been part of the Amiga's operating system since Day One. (While Windows NT has always featured preemptive multitasking, the mainstream version of Windows didn't fully support it until Windows 95.) "The OS was written very efficiently and is way ahead of its time," Ignash said.
Under the Hood
The Amiga's platform is a model of efficiency. Ignash provides an example: Running on only a 7-MHz processor (today, even a 233-MHz machine is starting to look a little slow to high-end users), Ignash said he browses the Web with the machine, "with graphics on."
But how? "The OS was written from the ground up to be multitasking," Ignash said. "It wasn't trying to be backward compatible to an OS like MS-DOS, which is a single-tasking system."
Another example is the use of so-called "shared libraries" -- reusable program functions that different programs call on to do common OS tasks. Windows 95, for example, knows these as .DLL files. But the Amiga's handling of such libraries is unique.
"When [the Amiga operating system] loads up shared libraries, it only has to load them once," Ignash said. "It doesn't have to load them at boot like the Mac. It just loads them up as needed then flushes them when it doesn't need them any more."
Proof of the Amiga's unparalleled technological prowess came with its early success in video. In the early 1990s, when the average PC couldn't display, let alone edit, video, producers quickly took to the still-available Video Toaster, a specially adapted Amiga, getting high-end, high-quality video compositing and editing capabilities for a comparatively inexpensive US$6,000.
Suddenly video artists had dream capabilities within budget reach. "We were one of the first places to buy one," said Kate Johnson, president of EZTV, an avant-garde video production company and digital art center. "We used it mainly for its computer graphics capability. It's fast, it's easy to use, and it does a great number of things in real time that takes other programs a long time to do. And it's fairly crash proof."
The list of Amiga credits goes on. A file system that was ready to manage disks with gigabytes worth of data on them -- this when a 30-megabyte hard disk was considered big. Also, video capability demanded drives that could be accessed quickly: Thus, many Amigas had fast drive ports built in (so-called "wide" SCSI ports) where the drive controller was located near the processor, circumventing "bus" circuitry that would otherwise slow them down.
"On the PC, some of these things have just become popular in the last two years. Well, they were on the Amiga in 1985," Ignash said. "They [the Amiga's creators] were always forward-looking when they were designing things."
The Underground Amiga Road
With all of these features, the platform has seen some prosperity in spite of hard times. Companies such as QuikPak and Index have continued assembling Amiga motherboards and hardware, while software support has thrived online.
The Amiga Web Directory is one site rich with evidence of a platform far from its deathbed: Companies offering hard-to-find Amiga books, CDs made by Amiga-using composers, German vendors of Amiga CD-ROM software, Amiga-oriented Internet service providers, software and hardware dealers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Perth, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Finland, and Moscow. A company called Vaporware develops software to keep the Amiga Internet-ready: connection utilities, chat applications, Telnet software.
"What they've done as a community is pick up the ball where the corporate entities have failed," said Amiga Inc.'s McEwen. "There are over 30 monthly publications. They have a global following. They are everywhere."
Now What?
This is all well and good, but can McEwen's company succeed in taking the Amiga to the next stage after so many others have failed?
"They definitely seem serious about it," said Ignash. "They've invested money in it, they've put together a professional team, they've been very open to licensing other parties to make things happen for them."
Ignash sees one hopeful sign in third-party Amiga development. "I've noticed that since the Gateway purchase, there have been a lot of licenses from game companies and various applications being ported to the Amiga." Games, the Netscape source code, Quake, Myst, and a lot of the popular shareware have been ported over, Ignash said.
In another sign of forward momentum, last week, the makers of the Opera Web browser said they would develop a version of their increasingly popular alternative Web software for the Amiga.
Meanwhile, Amiga Inc. has major changes in store for its newly adopted platform. The company plans a wholly new multimedia-intensive operating system, Amiga OS version 5.0, due by the end of 1999. It will run on a new, as-yet-unnamed "multimedia" processor (already earning the nickname "mystery chip"). This system would finally take the Amiga beyond the outdated Motorola 68000 line that dominates today's surviving hardware.
Indeed, the company is promising that this processor will be so capable, integrated, scalable, and efficient that it will achieve performance and price breakthroughs. It is expected to run five to 10 times faster than today's PCs, while featuring 3D support capable of handling the display of 400 million pixels per second, playback of up to four simultaneous MPEG video streams, and high-speed Internet connections.
Amiga Inc. sees some versions of the new hardware selling for under $500. And some "digital appliances," such as set-top boxes, could be cheaper than that. If that's not enough, the company also envisions backward compatibility for the operating system throughout.
In the next 30 days, the company expects to announce a key operating "kernel" for the Amiga OS. Speculation includes the possibility the company will try to wrap in all or part of the Linux or Java operating systems.
But other aspects of Amiga Inc.'s plans have some users concerned. Until the wholly new Amiga OS and hardware architecture is completed, the company plans to provide developers (and maybe consumers) with a "bridge" system by this fall that will be based on conventional Intel processors including the Pentium.
That has some folks raising eyebrows over what's percolating behind Amiga Inc.'s doors.
"At this point, I'm somewhat confused about this," said Amiga user Alexander Dorn via email. "I know that if Gateway intends to release a stock PC with an Amiga label on it ... it won't go over well with the masses of Amiga enthusiasts out there."
Still, Dorn said, he is very excited about where the company may be taking his platform of choice. "If they do intend a new platform, based around some new 'mystery chip,' that prospect seems extremely exciting."
"There's the possibility of the Amiga once again becoming the computer pioneer that it was at its conception."
