1985: Introducing the AMIGA | Micro Live | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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- čas přidán 26. 12. 2021
- Fred Harris gets his hands on the new Commodore Amiga, a personal computer so advanced that you can let the keyboard gather dust, while you use the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pull-down menus) interface.
Marvel as this multi-tasking monster runs three programs simultaneously, thanks to the awesome power of its 32-bit microprocessor! Behold: more than 4,000 colours on screen at once thanks to its custom graphics chips! Hark, is that the sound of angels? No, it's just the sophisticated stereo sound made possible by its dedicated audio chip!
It's time to make friends with a rich kid...
Originally broadcast 6 December, 1985.
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Instead of simply repeating how much I love the Amiga, got to say what a pro Fred Harris is! What a great demonstration, this was 1985, wow.
yea. He was great. I'f forgotten till I saw this.
Also I love the Amiga 😬😬
The Amiga was an amazing piece of technology, but who remembers having to clean the gunk from the mouse rollers?
God I loved my Amiga. Coming from a spectrum/c64 was like going from a ps1 to ps5 in one leap. 64k ram to 1mb, 68k cpu from a 6502, dedicated graphics and tape to floppy etc. fantastic Times
I bought an Amiga 1000 for Digi-view and Digi-paint. 4096 colours was radical in 1987 Coming from my C64 and Atari 520STM 16 colour pixel art.
Yes and now I am using Microsoft Teams every day and honestly it feels like its older technology than anything on this 1985 Amiga 😅
@@RottenMechGaming I remember using some rubbish on the school PC in 1986, probably Microsoft Word for DOS or whatever, and it was technically quite adavanced but horrible to use and not WYSIWYG etc. At the same time I had the free GEM Wordprocessor that came with the Atari 520STM I got in 1986 lol.
@@madcommodore Yes a generation spoilt by having computers that were far ahead of anything in the workplace. Funny story I worked at a business in 2015 and the front desk team had been on a green screen terminal system since the 1970's. I helped get them onto PC based stuff and half the team had never used a mouse. A bit of a shocker when you think we were using them at home 30 years before. I still think our latest cloud tech with office 365 and outlook is dark age tech. I feel clumsy like an iron age man trying to use flint tools.
@@RottenMechGaming Funny thing is there were some business programs only an Amiga 1000 could do, like a program for an Estate Agent or a used car dealership group. You could have pictures of the inside/outside of the houses or cars for sale in HAM interlace mode to show customers, and if they like the car you could send them to the dealer in the group or get that car brought to your sales lote. Try showing people pictures of cars/houses in EGA LOL About 10 years ago I briefly worked as a salesman for some cowboy software company. They wrote these crap little programs in Visual BASIC and then tried to sell them for £5000. The software I had to become expert in and sell was for packing operations in freight/shipping companies and I could have written that software better for a 1985 Amiga or ST by 1987 with STOS/AMOS lol. I actually left because they lied to me about one of the sales when the manager said "yeah they didn't buy it' but one of the employees rang up for advice how to do something on the system and the receptionist passed them over to me lol clueless or what
Ah the Amiga days. What glorious times.
One of the most powerful home pc ever made. It was a huge cost/value deal for that time. Amiga was supported up until 1996-98. One of the best and longest supported machines of all time!
I still have my Amiga and I'm working on getting it cleaned up and running again. This is a great look back to what is was capable of even in those early days. Those specialised chips made such a difference.
That actual Amiga (Serial no 000026) ended up on my desk a few weeks after this. Still had the BBC Microlive tape on the boxes. They stole the floppy disks. I had to scrounge some software off a famous games writer to be able to use it.
lol
Thanks for that Adrian...do you know what happened to it after that? :) Amazing if we could find it all these years later...
@@YoreHistory It got sent back to Commodore
Very modern looking, although it´s nearly 40 years ago!
Fred Harris, brings back memories.
I recorded this on my parents' VHS machine and watched it back numerous times when it aired. Micro Live was avid viewing back then when computers were so new and so fresh. The Amiga was so ahead of its time you could be mistaken it had fallen through a rift in the space time continuum from the future! Wonderful memories! Sensi'tastic!
Loved my Amiga back in the day. Had an A600 then moved up to the A1200. By the end I had transplanted the entire thing into this massive case from Eyetech, added accelerator board, CD-ROM drive, IDE hard drive, loads of Fast(!) RAM. Glorious!
This clip back in the day was my first introduction the the Amiga. As soon as I heard that guitar riff, I knew I wanted one, but with only earning £5 a week on a paper round I had to wait. After leaving school, I got a position on a local YTS scheme which only paid about £30 a week and some of that went on the train fare. Still, managed to save up enough dough to get an A500. These days, whenever I get a new PC, one of the first things I install is WinUAE.
We never had an Amiga (we were PC-compatible people), but having now learned about them in retrospect like this, I see that the Amigas were a light-year ahead of all other home computers of their same years. Astounding!
I still have an A1200. I love the Amiga.
I can still hear the floppy drive whirring as I patiently wait for a game like Monkey Island to load.
Good times...
I permanently added a USB interfaced floppy drive to my modern Ryzen PC...being brought up in the late 80s and 90s, I put up with the bootup slowdown it causes when UEFI insists on accessing it every time...just love hearing a real floppy disk now and again!
I remember Monkey Island 2 having something like 11 discs. Crazy 😂. Awesome games though.
Only Amiga makes it possible.
BBC used to be great back in the 80's - their coverage of tech and computing was good back then. very educational.
We can thank the Amiga for its sampling capabilities, spawning the creation of music trackers and MOD files.
That was a really really well done presentation of the machine!
Pre-emptive multi tasking. This is what put the Amiga ahead of so many others...about 15 years considering WIndows 95 also used Preemptive multitasking in its OS. Commodore was always stuck with their poor marketing. This could have been a beast in the business world as well as in gaming...what could have been.
About the only thing the Amiga was missing was memory protection, really.
@@HyRax_Aus ....and an attractive UI. Workbench always felt incredibly clunky and amateurish to me
The irony that the company's full name was Commodore Business Machines but apart from the Pet they never really got much into the regular business world.
Fred Harris,come a long way since the play school days,plus he's surprisingly funny in the radio comedy show THE BURKISS WAY.
What a time to be alive - early 90’s, me and all of my friends had the Amiga and our school had quite an impressive underground software piracy ring. 😂
Rarely bought a game, but played all of the classics and one or two duds too. What a computer, I miss it. Happy days.
Way way ahead of it's time, I first saw the Commodore Amiga demonstrated at the Commodore Computer Show in London which I think was 1985, it was jaw dropping to see in those days.
I owned a Commodore 64, could only dream of owning an Amiga. Saw plenty of Amiga screenshots on the back of C64 game cassettes though... 🤣
I had a spectrum and always wished it was a C64.
Then I had an Atari ST and always wished it was an Amiga.
The trauma never really left me.
I have both machines
@@goodlookinouthomie1757 I lived that dream! Looking back, I don't regret owning any of those machines though. Kind of wished I'd kept them all now 🙂
I used to be a manager at an entertainment center that had W-Industries VR units that were run off of dual Amigas. They were top of the line pretty much in the early 90’s. Oh how times have changed!
I remember those Virtuality sets. I played Dactyl Nightmare on the stand up version at a special demo event. It was more of a novelty than anything. Refresh rates and res. were very low, FOV was quite narrow. But the head tracking was impressive back then.
@@twisterwiper Yeah, I remember thinking the same playing Exorex at the Trocadero in London. Aiming your guns by just looking at the target felt really cool though
A3000's?
This stuff was way ahead at the time, amazing! I loved my Amiga lol😂
after the zx spectrum i loved my amiga it was a great computer for creatifs
used to have the same A1000 back then....awesome machine.....Denise Chip...Agnus Chip....Gary Chip...
Fred Harris Legend and this program was one of the reasons I bought my Amiga A500
6:01 We would come to learn Commodore had no bloody clue.
Loved all of my Commodore computers!. Happy, sometimes frustrating days (when the game cassette failed to load or an issue with the floppy disc). 🤣
Amazing stuff. I remember these machines as fondly as I do my old Atari 800 XL. I wish my younger self could appreciate how significant these systems would become in evolving home PC's and gaming.
This came out the year I was born now I'm watching it in the palm of my hand how far things have come so fast.
Still got an Amiga with the big brick hard drive and boxes of games 😊
We've come such a long way in such a short amount of time. I work in the games industry, and seeing this computer just about manage to draw 6 moving triangles is astounding. Nowadays, we have the tech to draw billions of triangles without slowdowns.. Technology is crazy.
Yet games were better back then :)
If we factor in the Moore's law, PC's are literally a million times more powerful now than that Amiga on the video.
Makes me wonder - if they used to spend 5 grand in today's money on those, what would've a modern computer been worth back then...
@@mikitz Moore's law doesn't apply anymore and hasn't for a while but there still are significant improvements.
@@epicon6 I loved them and still like them, even play the old Amiga games from time to time, but let's be honest, apart from obvious technological advancements, game design has improved massively over the years. Most old games are irritating at best, due to dated mechanics, interfaces, weird, unintuitive design choices etc. Nostalgia is great and all, but the industry has matured and it's for the benefit of the gamers.
@ Partly true bu i have to disagree. For the last 15 years i have played more classic games (1988-1995 era) than modern games and i play 15-22 hours a week.
There are still hundreds of games i haven't finished and constantly replaying games i have finished.
Irritation depends on the user i think. Most good classics have great controls and game design.
And to me their difficulty is what's charming about them and that in most games it's not possible to save. Modern gamers and older gamers who don't remember what old games were about will find them frustrating, but they were designed to be played without saves and if they had saves all games would be finished in 20-60 minutes and that would have been it for a 50$ game. Repetition and starting over and over again gave the games their life (hours of content, so the game wouldn't just be rented for a weekend).
Modern games have their benefits of course and i play games from all times but i personally don't find any fault from old games but feel the opposite that they get better over time. I know i'll be playing all the classics daily till i'm old, dead and buried.
Great video. It brings back memories of my Amiga 500.
Ahhh the Amiga 1000 in 1080p :) The most classy computer, compared to its rivals, ever to go on sale.
I remember Fred on playschool and through the round window with Humpty😸
Yes!! Loved Playschool 🙂
Also rag time and choc a block.
@AYTAZED yeah he was chock-a-bloke
I loved this show. I was obsessed with computers and this was my fix.
Imagine the time when you had to explain mouse, cursor, windows and all that GUI stuff… we got a looong way since then! And he‘s doing it in a great way! Thanks for that video.
The only nearly 40 year old computer that has a dedicated magazine that you can buy in shops the Amiga fan base is alive and well in 2024.
Insanely high quality recording for something that aired in 1985, thanks BBC!
The Amiga was awesome - especially Stunt Car Racer
the motorolla 68000 chip is iconic, i think it's as iconic as the SID chip on the C64.
'wimp' lol I love it, great technological satire!
I remember when Fred played the guitar sound on the Amiga qwerty keys and said 'Heavy man' I was like OMG I sooo want one. Why can't they bring Micro Live back. There is so much rubbish on TV today.
Anyone remember playing shadow of the beast for the first time? Wow, what a revelation.
I remember 🙂
Mostly a tech demo. A good one.
"You may be wondering how we get this speed" 😭😭😭 lol 😂
I'll never give up my Amiga addiction / Love using my retro equipment in the shed during the good weather
I noticed how he lifted the mouse a few times to get it to work properly, mine was the same!
Ah the good old days of ('The humble') 'Micro'. It was only ever Fred and Mac who used to refer to home computers as 'Micros'. They would show you something running on an expensive system costing tens or thousands of pounds and then Mac would turn to his BBC-b computer and show you a cut down version of the same thing. Sounds ridiculous but that was such an empowering experience and really inspired me to look into computers with the equipment that I had access to at home and in school.
Let's hear it for the Acorn Electron and its cassette tape loaded programs!
Pretty dope for 1985
The glory days of computers!
I am impressed how they were able to match the refresh rate of the monitor with the shutter speed / frame rate of the recording camera.
Wow. Just wow
*HEAVY MAN*
Who else bought an Amiga A500 around 1989 thinking it was hot stuff, only to later realise it was essentially 4 years old?
Wow, when is the release date and where can I buy one?
Not confirmed yet, but rumors are it is coming early 2023.
Love the COMMODORE 64. and APPLE IIe.
Spaceballs - State of the Art Amiga Demo was amazing on this thing.
Fred and Mac were legends in my day
Didn't have an Amiga had an Atari ST. Going from GEM to MS-DOS in the early 90s with a 286 was like going backward technologically
I liked the mother board and first keyboard work.
I see he's using Kickstart 1.0... Yikes! I had that when I first got my Amiga and it was EXTREMELY buggy. Luckily it was quickly superseded by version 1.1 which was also buggy but slightly better, then 1.2 which was again more stable but not perfect and then the quintessential early Amiga OS, version 1.3. If I remember correctly, I was able to update from 1.0 to 1.3 for free, but there might have been a nominal cost, I can't remember. It's been almost 40 years! Great, great memories.
Impressed by 🎸
Still got my A1200
Dad got an amiga 1000 in September 1985.
That still looks amazing and sounds amazing, too. Amiga was truly ahead. How the hell did commodore screw that up.
Wow this looks old ... it looked old in 1995 too! We have come a long way!
Continuity error: In another show, Fred Harris explains the WIMP acronym as "Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers".
probably he just misspoke as he was speaking about the mouse seconds before and saved it by using Pulldown Menues.
'Each of the programs gets a share of the CPU'.. Imagine showing them a chip now with instead of a few thousand transistors, the 70 billion chips have today!
Best games console ever.
I’m currently developing a ChatGPT app for Amiga and it’s close to release
Eliza
Bit of Deluxe Paint at the end there?
WIMP actually stands for windows icons menus and pulldowns
And this week Fred Harris demonstrates Metro Siege made on the Scorpion engine and next week "Dread"
I have amiga 500 i bought 32 bit machine.......very good machine for music
Too many reviewers knew nothing. Here's someone who just uses the computer and at least recognized the benefits instead of babbling terms they learned on a napkin last lunchtime!
Weird they how they explain wimp when Xerox and Apple Lisa had already been around for more than 2 years. And even GEM was around for a year before.
He didn't mention the name of the custom chip 'Fat Agnus'
Just regular Agnus at this stage :)
OMG, this is the future, hope this catches on , looks amazing, can you imagine what this would be like in, lets say the year 2003?
I have the Amiga A500 🙂🚂🚂🚂
Just needs teams now
W.I.M.P. 😏 😅 nice.
I went from an Atari 800XL to Amiga 500... then OS/2. Always liked the Atari ST despite the limited sound and graphics, but it had the better GUI and user experience, despite lesser multitasking ability. (The Falcon was way too late.) The Mac emulation was pretty sweet too...
I loved my Amigas. But can they run Crysis???
dude has ear lobes for days
Where does this Amiga come in line of other Amigas, i had a A1200.
Released in 1985 for £1,000. The original Amiga 1000 with the OCS. Your 1200 was released in 1992 and was a proper 32 bit machine with the improved AGA chipset.
@@david-spliso1928 thanks david.
I wonder what first IPhone in 2007 in London was like when you everyone get there iPhones in London
The Amiga was so vastly ahead of the competition and Commodore squandered it. At the time of the Amiga 1000, it should have absolutely annihilated the IBM PC and Mac that were both vastly more expensive and less capable.
Micro = Personal Computer or just Computer?
Grateful to have grown up as a kid of the 80's. LMAO.. now you have Twirking in TikTok. !!! Oh Technology!! LOL.. I just sit back and laugh..
Yes there is only TikTok and nothing else 🤦. Let's forget that there's millions of other things kids can do if they want to in 2022: BBC Micro Bit, Raspberry Pi, Python, Minecraft, Roblox, just to name a few. Yes, there is only TikTok.
Had an A1200, was a decent machine but could not compete with 386 and 486 PCs. As soon as DOOM was released on the PC the Amiga's end was in sight.
So the Amiga was multitasking? My Atari ST wasn't 😦
Not preemptively but the ST could tick share multitasking to an extent.
P stands for pointer
can't wait till this comes out , will put ps5 to the test
Omg! So many processes, its gonna crash!
Before the days of Windows
Microsoft Wimp
well windows 1.0 released same year
32 bit micro processor? 🤔
"WIMP stands for Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pull-Down Menus."
No. No it doesn't. It stands for "Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers." Four *software* concepts that combine to produce an intuitive (hopefully) graphical user interface.
Substituting a specific hardware device for M makes zero sense. Doubly so when you don't necessarily need a mouse. You could just as easily use a light pen, a track ball, or, these days*, your finger.
* Capacitive touch screens were actually invented in the UK back in the 1960s.
(and yes, I realise I'm a bit late with this.)