The Future Was Here

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1. vidarhJul 2026
   I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.

   My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).

   My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.

   My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.

   I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.

   I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.

   I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.

   (Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)

   [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/

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2. scrapheapAug 2025
   For anyone interested in this I can recommend the book, The Future Was Here. It really explains the Amiga hardware and how it was used. It even goes into how the bouncing ball demo works, and once you know all the tricks it could use on the Amiga, you can see why other computers of the time had to work so hard to recreate it.
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3. vidarhAug 2025
   Seconded.

   I also like the Brian Bagnall books (beware: There are two multi-volume editions, the second edition is far larger which is good/bad depending on how interested you are) but they are much more for those already interested in Commodore, though "Commodore: The Amiga Years" on its own is worthwhile for people interested specifically in the Amiga.

   Maher's The Future Was Here is much more accessible to people who has want a lighter read and/or don't have a personal relationship to the Amiga and Commodore, though.

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4. vidarhJul 2025
   It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.

   > at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

   And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.

   Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.

   EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.

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5. TMWNNApr 2023
   The Cuckoo's Egg

   More Jimmy Maher, beyond The Future Was Here: <www.filfre.net>. He and Chet at CRPG Addict are doing the two most important computer-game projects, each for more than a decade.

   The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO. Not because PLATO was super-influential on the later industry—far from it, with only minor exceptions—but that doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve examination.

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6. G3rn0tiJan 2022
   If you’re really interested in what made the Amiga so great back in its day, checkout this book:

   The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga

   https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i...

   Unlike other books about retro it does not only try to trigger your nostalgia but is an actual deep dive into the history and the technology about this machine.

   For example: It explains in detail how the famous „Boing Ball“ demo used all of the Amiga‘s custom chips to keep the CPU almost idle while running. This was important for showing off the preemptive multitasking capabilities of the Amiga OS.

   It also includes a thorough look into the implementation details of Deluxe Paint I and how the IFF format came to be.

   I loved it!

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