November 1, 2008by Chris

THE MACHINE WAS AHEAD of its time. Way ahead. Geeks witnessing the infamous Boing demo left their jaws on the ground -- the demo utilized a clever color-cycling scheme and did not actually render texture mapped polygons, but none-the-less, the huge blitter ball smoothly navigated the screen in bouncy wonder. Pared with a rich audio sample this amazing demo overpowered the senses with pure Amiga awesomeness.

The Amiga.

Commodore dropped a nuke on the public with this baby. Displaying up to 4096 colors in HAM goodness at resolutions reaching 640x480 (Denise chip), sporting 8bit (and even quasi 14bit) digital audio (Paula), the Amiga was a quantum leap in technology. It had one of the very first multitasking GUI operating systems where the user could pull the whole screen down to review different layers of processes; it lacked the elegance of Windows but it paved the way.

Various flavors of the system were released, initially with the Amiga 1000 and then focused on the home computer market with the Amiga 500 and then, later on, forged models with advanced chipsets such as the Amiga 600, the 3500, and the "MicroA1 - "C" and "I" (Teron Mini)' PowerPC" Amiga (2004)

Popular gaming titles were released from Electronic Arts, CinemaWare, Sierra, Team 17, Discovery, The Bitmap Brothers, Titus, Firebird, Silent Software Inc, General Action, Atari, Rainbow Arts, Bethesda Software, Infocom, Ocean, Sega, Psygnosis, and many many more.

Because it was from the future, it was only natural for Amiga to venture into CAD/CAM. Rendering a single frame would take all weekend however, but the Amiga helped the industry take the next step into 3D modeling with raytracing software from NewTek (Lightwave) and Maxton (Sculpt 4d).

The sci-fi series, Babylon 5, generated its initial CG renderings on a network of Amigas equipped with the Video Toaster and Lightwave from NewTek.

Amiga is truly a shining gem in the backwaters of cool technology.

CS 11-8