Amigas were clearly light years ahead of virtually all other personal computers at the time -- with the arguable exception of the Atari ST, which had the reputation of being better for music. But the Amiga was better for games and had better graphics. As a hardcore gamer, I knew instantly that the Amiga was what I wanted. Somehow I convinced my parents to get me an Amiga 500, as my second computer (after the TI99/4A) and spent a lot of time collecting games and demos, and connecting to BBS'.

Somehow the rest of the world didn't really see the clear superiority of the Amiga, and stuck with their boring IBM PC's and Macintoshes. Commodore collapsed, and virtually every other personal computer became extinct, as most people just wanted to buy whatever they had used at work (IBM PC) or school (Apple). This was an early lesson for me that superior technology does not always win. In fact, it's often the inferior technologies that win, for a variety of reasons -- especially marketing.

I kept my Amiga for a long time, but eventually migrated to Unix (SunOS, Irix, Dec Alpha's OSF/1, and Solaris), and eventually to Linux on a PC. It had become increasingly clear that newer tech had left the Amiga in the dust. Some people still stuck with the Amiga long after I stopped using it, but I donated mine long ago. Sometimes I wish I'd kept it, so I could bring it out for nostalgia's sake every now and then, but it's a lot of equipment to lug around.

I often wonder how the personal computer landscape would have changed had the Amiga won. Back then, it seemed like Microsoft, the IBM PC, and Apple have kept us back 10 or 20 years with their dominance.

I followed another path, settling on Windows, after a decade of UNIX.

The UNIX culture never seemed to be much welcoming to the demoscene culture, which had more points of contact with the gaming culture on Windows.

For a while in the late 90's there was a website that tried to be Poet for GNU/Linux. They never managed to have more than a few demos there.

As for the whole demoscene thing, i am not surprised given that it grew out of the cracking scene on micros. By being more elaborate versions of the intros cracking groups added to games (and those seems have made something of a comeback as cracking groups have to provide their own installers because games rarely ship as complete ISOs these days).

That said, i never got the impression that the demoscene was much interested in the PC platform once it started sprouting soundcards and graphics accelerators. I guess it just became hard to judge the prowess of the demo developers when the platform was not a fixed package.

http://iquilezles.org/www/material/nvscene2008/nvscene2008.h...

I'm not so sure it's that so much as the demoscene is not interested in Linux. I've tried to drum up interest on pouet in creating demos for Linux, and no one seemed interested, and some were even hostile to the idea.

Demoscene conflates with gaming culture, no one is religious over APIs, rather over computer systems, e.g. Atari vs Amiga.

What matters is becoming the master, able to show that demo that everyone though impossible, streching that specific OS/machine to the max, on the big screen.

Sharing code, talking about hippie ideals of having APIs that would make all hardware systems look the same, without that special touch what means to own an e.g. Amiga, are not well received.

For GNU/Linux users there aren't special computers, with its differentiating architecture and special features that make them unique, a special flavour, all look like an UNIX clone.

So one gets two communities talking past each other.

Then please explain why the most popular demoscene platform is Windows, which is about as generic as it's possible to get.

"Demoscene conflates with gaming culture, no one is religious over APIs, rather over computer systems, e.g. Atari vs Amiga.

What matters is becoming the master, able to show that demo that everyone though impossible, streching that specific OS/machine to the max, on the big screen."

So demoscene guys/gals usually have no quibbles using something like DirectX, or using features for which one requires a specific GPU model.

Also many on the demoscene are also game devs on AAA studios, or have been hired by them, with access to console devkits, which are also only available on Windows.

Linux, by being in the end open source, puts all that in the open, and that is for said "ninjas" boring.

Demo scene and game cracking is after all joined at the hip. Both of them spring out of bored kids with massive amounts of time to stare at decompiled binaries.

I used to think so, too. However, the Amiga might've just been a fluke. The very architecture that made it unique and so far ahead of its time also was its limitation in terms of technology. There wasn't really a way forward beyond the AAA chipset, which never even made it into production. Hombre, the proposed next generation of the Amiga, was supposed to be very different from and mostly incompatible with previous Amiga computers.

The software had serious limitations from today's point of view, too. There was no memory protection and no multi-user capability. Adapting Amiga OS accordingly would have taken serious effort, perhaps to the point it wouldn't have been recognisable anymore.

So maybe, while a truly awesome machine the Amiga sadly enough was just an outlier of computing technology that was the right thing at the right time but wasn't viable in the long run.

This made the platform frozen from the moment it shipped.

In contrast the PC was less rigid, and only really had the x86 ISA and the BIOS memory map in common (and even the latter is falling by the wayside in recent years).

There was also the whole clone aspect. The Amiga stood and fell with its parent company, Commodore. Once Compaq and the others cloned the BIOS chip, IBM could belly up and the PC platform would barely blink.

I have to disagree about the OS being limited, even by today's standard. It was sort of cobbled together under the hood, but the end result was unbelievable when you put it next to a PC or even Mac of the mid 80's to early 90's.

Even in 1990, when I was finally able to buy my own Amiga it was like alien technology (even compared to a Mac Plus, which was completely unaffordable).

Commodore did not market the Amiga in the USA, and the PC Clones caught up in 1987 with VGA and Sound Cards. When Windows was preloaded with a mouse on PC Clones nobody needed the Amiga. The Amiga was cheaper than the Macintosh, but PC clones were cheaper than the Amiga.

Amiga had mostly video games, and Commodore could not get business apps written for it to compete with PC Clones nor get many computer dealers to carry them as Jack Tramel burned computer dealers by putting the Vic-20 and C64 in toy stores and discount stores.

HTTP Error 503: Have you the ability to read quickly as the light?

PS: The video is actually hosted on Google Video. Copying the relevant Google Video URL from devtools network monitor allows youtube-dl to fetch the video correctly.

The Amiga was a fabulous game machine and a great computer.