The Computer Chronicles - Amiga 2500 (1989)

[@SeaJay_Oceans]

Way ahead of their time - Amiga was the front runner of technology we still use in many products today.

[@MaYeRsDz94]

like ?

[@SeaJay_Oceans]

@@MaYeRsDz94 Apple... to name one you would know...

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

When would you say was their “time”?

[@SeaJay_Oceans]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Amiga was 13 years ahead of everyone else... late 2000s level technology in the early 1990s. What killed off the home computers was POOR data storage. Imagine if the Amiga and Commodore 64 and Atari 128XE all came with a 1.44 MB floppy drive ? Now we know hardware needs to come with a suite of software out of the box... New improved Linux Distros replace new hardware today. Although Raspberry Pi and other build it yourself kits are a great deal of fun !

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@SeaJay_Oceans The first Amiga came out in 1985, and did not significantly improve from that.

[@shmehfleh3115]

I still have a working A2500. It's a great old computer!

[@AlyxxTheRat]

This actually makes me wanna get an Amiga for retro gaming.

[@jesuszamora6949]

You're better off just setting up FS-UAE with the system roms and OS disk images.

[@raulcortes937]

@@jesuszamora6949 BULLSHIT. Nothing beats the real thing.

[@ShamrockParticle]

Nothing beats the real thing, more accurate colors and sound, but fully working units will cost more due to being harder to find... Emulation can accelerate easier, so Elite Frontier II will really fly

[@argebarse]

They're super expensive and hard to find in working condition now. But they're awesome and worth it.

[@wolfgangricklefs5781]

Still have my extended Amiga 1200 and love it.

[@datashed]

Ahh, I adore The Computer Chronicles! Memories of watching this show with my dad on Saturday mornings, and lusting over all the awesome new hardware.

[@CorporalDanLives]

11:37 “These are just games and they’re not important”, as a kid I was always like “STFU STEWART” and my dad was like “Why are you yelling at the computer show again?”

[@worldofretrogameplay6963]

Bring this show back! You could upload new episodes to KZbin.

[@bcgibson22]

Pretty please!!!!!!!!!

[@kathrynradonich3982]

Stewart talked about wanting to do it several years ago but came to the conclusion they couldn’t do it properly because it requires too big of a budget and he’d want to do it as a big professional production.

[@sluggotg]

I was stationed in the Bay Area when this show was running. Loved it. Stewart was always the easy going, "What is the newest/coolest thing", Gary.. he hated Commodore and Atari. I don't know why Gary hated Amigas in particular, but he did. As for me... Mega Amiga/C64/Atari ST fan.... It was truely the Golden age of home computing. Deluxe Paint 3 was light years ahead of any Paint program in its price range.. (as in ... it would cost you thousands to do better). Things like Video Titling etc were in the 6 figure range. Shortly after this, the Video Toaster for the Amiga, (hardware/software created by Newtek, (With the sexy Kiki Stockhammer as the spokesman), came to the Amiga, (only). A $5000-8000 Amiga could out perform a $250,000 graphics work station for Video Production. I really Loved "The Computer Chronicles"!!!! It is totally cool to see them on KZbin.. they are a significant part of history!

[@kathrynradonich3982]

You have to remember when this was filmed he was less than 2 years away from selling Digital Research to Novell. Was a pretty bad time for him and was under a ton of stress. It’s a damn shame so many people don’t know who he was. If it wasn’t for him we probably wouldn’t be where we are in software today seeing as CP/M was the basis for DOS. Not to mention his companies investment in multitasking with MP/M, Concurrent CP/M-86, ConcurrentDOS 386, and DR-DOS with taskmax. Still to this day I use DR-DOS 6 for my DOS machines as I find it superior to the Microsoft offerings of the time.

[@medes5597]

Gary thought amigas were more like art tools than computers and he didn't why they covered them. He thought it was like covering a Quantel Paintbox of something - not relevant to most users. Very weird attitude but it's how Stewart says he felt.

[@Conradlovesjoy]

He hated Atari but put GEM on it? Source?

[@LordHorst]

Battle Chess was one of the coolest chess programs ever. Albeit a bit slow because it always had to load the animations from disk.

[@EeekItsSnek]

He was saying it was only loading from disk because he didn't have it downloaded to the machine. Because it's not his machine. He was using an optical drive. So if you had the drive space to download and install it, it wouldn't need to check disk for assets all the time.

[@LordHorst]

@@EeekItsSnek I was talking about my own copy of battle chess for the Amiga. I didn't have a hard drive, so everything had to be loaded from disk.

[@SirDimpls]

This actually has been a theme for a long time: "it looks like a gaming thing therefore we won't take it seriously" The GPU is the best example of purely gaming tech ending up playing a vital role in future stuff like AI, self-driving, and crypto

[@vapourmile]

Bollocks. The GPU has been pivotal in pushing floating point performance. It also has uses in visualisation. Much of the funding may come from consumer purchasers but it definitely isn't "purely gaming tech". Real-time computer graphics doesn't have its beginnings in gaming. It was medical visualisation, CAD, architectural visualisation and engineering.

[@vapourmile]

@smakfu That's truer, but even with that I don't think it was gaming which drove it. The TI 34010, Intel's i860 and the SGI geometry engine were all general purpose chips which were pressed into graphical tassk. It would be a mistake to think of ASICS like the Amigas blitter as being the route of graphics today. More advanced graphics systems predate the Amiga.

[@valenrn8657]

@@vapourmile Bullshit. GPU was coined by NVIDIA's GeForce 256 which combines hardware-accelerated T&L and effectively doubled TNT 2 raster, it's major launch title was Quake 3 NV15 map. NVIDIA's GPU definition requires a level of single-chip integration and features which SGI didn't deliver. The large PC gaming market is subsidizing professional PC GPU SKUs which slowly eaten SGI's OpenGL 3D hardware business. DX9a era FP16 pixel shader is NOT good enough for medical visualization. For AMD, significant Sony's and Microsoft's game consoles cash flow and upfront R&D payment funded AMD's Bulldozer dark era. Q4 2006 GeForce 8800 GTX was the start of CUDA and full speed graphics IEEE-754 FP32 performance for the PC while Xbox 360 has full speed IEEE-754 FP32 GpGPU in November 2005.

[@andrewchristiansen8311]

7:08 Original Gradius III for the SNES was made for the Amiga! Awesome!

[@Reyfox1]

Wow... it was way ahead of it's time. I had several Amigas. I had the Video Toaster, Opalvision, GVP accelerator boards, Super Denise, SuperGen, SCSI controllers, SyQuest, etc.... Too bad the greed of the board and lack of foresight killed Commodore and the Amiga. It was tough going to PC....

[@drphilxr]

How was the opalvision c/w later Picasso cards? (And damn you Mehdi Ali!)

[@Reyfox1]

@@drphilxr I had several Amigas to work with. The Opalvision in one. Accelerated Amiga 2000 and the video toaster and another. I also had an accelerated 3000. The Opalvision was supposed to have later on video editing capabilities but that never happened. Corporate greed killed the Amiga.

[@BollingHolt]

Did anyone else notice the misspelling at 16:38? LOL

[@CasperUK31]

The Amiga wasn't underrated on this side of the Atlantic :) We loved it

[@lucius1976]

Too much. We just copied too much that eventually no one wanted to release programs on it anymore. I remember that i never bought any software on the Amiga back in the day.

[@rustynail6819]

The Amiga was way ahead of it's time. In 1988 it was running like a PC from 1995. For music this was the standard and couple it with a video toaster you had a full production studio!

[@ericastier1646]

Nah you are confusing with the Atari. Atari got there first with PBase and could never be dethroned by Amiga.

[@mommywhereisdaddy]

it was the custom chips and dma channels. the amiga used dozens of dedicated direct memory access channels to speed up all kinds of operations while macintosh did it by software polling. dma was the key to true multitasking. and the custom chips, of course made it even better. "paula" for instance was responsible for audio and was way ahead of its time like blitter, gary and agnus. good old times, man.

[@vinhtran9308]

OS/2 with Presentation Manager (~1988) was a good candidate too, but PCs were too expensive anyway, need at least a decent 286 and more memory.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

This was about the year the Acorn Archimedes came out. Remember that had an ARM chip in it which, at 8MHz and RISC-based, ran rings performance-wise around anything else in its price range. Its misfortune was that it was non-IBM-compatible ... and British.

[@plibani4248]

Got my first computer in 1991 : an Amiga 500. It was great. In 1996 I bought my first PC running Windows 95. By many aspects it felt like a big leap BACKWARDS.

[@CloneShockTrooper]

Amiga 500 was my absolute favorite along with Commodor 64. Had many good times with both computers.

[@Fastwinstondoom]

14:50 "That was a great demo" High praise from Stewart xD

[@doomsday9973]

Impressing him was no easy feat either.

[@samuelbanya]

Damn, Dan Silva's Deluxe Paint III demo was so good. Those animated brush ideas are fascinating.

[@EGOS42]

Seeing DPIII is taking me back. I used to fly text around for title graphics in my high school video class for all the productions. It was such a fun tool. Amazing what you could do on an A1000 with 1.5MB ram and no hard disk. I was constantly filling floppies with my animations.

[@floydjohnson7888]

Three decades later found me writing a 3D "Moon Patrol" knockoff for Android.

[@danielleehim3077]

Roosendaal wrote the first source files titled “Blender” on the 2nd of January, 1994, still considered Blender’s official birthday. Originally, Blender was planned as an in-house application for NeoGeo; it grew from a series of pre-existing tools, including a ray-tracer built for the Amiga. This early version of Blender was intended to address a perennial frustration among creatives: when a difficult client requires multiple changes to a project, how do you implement those changes painlessly? Thanks to its highly configurable approach, Blender aimed at providing an answer. (As an aside: the name refers to a song by a Swiss electronic band, Yello). LOL For those that KNOW!!!

[@thealaskan1635]

It's stupid that Commodore and Atari computers were a better value than Apple or IBM/Intel computers for many years.

[@floydjohnson7888]

IIRC, back in the 8-bit era, Commodore "went there" in ads comparing the 64 against the Apple II.

[@Mintcar923]

@ungratefulmetalpansy I’m sure even Apple and IBM/Microsoft will say the same.. Just like the heads at FB admit MySpace should have destroyed them

[@julioibarra7156]

Really going to start diving into Linux this year for a variety of things. No need to be tied down to apple/windows for everything

[@LionheartNh]

I don't know you're on your Amiga playing First Samurai and before you know it three decades have slipped by. Now that's killing time.

[@backinthegame34]

Dan Silva ! What a champ.

[@benconway9010]

Man i want that chess game that was brilliant can they put that on today's PC or ps4 or Xbox? Some one please tell we can get this battle chess game today???

[@BTATSband]

Anybody know what that band is doing now? Couldn't find them on google.

[@uriituw]

One of Rockstar North’s first games.

[@Mintcar923]

They should remake it! It was my grammar school graduation gift from my grandmother along with Sword of Sodan

[@JP-iu8vb]

Does Mr. kildall have a earring here? He got the slicked back do on this one

[@victorrevuk2992]

Amiga Forewer! 🎉❤

[@Del-Canada]

You can see my Amiga 500 in two videos on my channel if interested. One was recorded in 1988 and the other was recorded in 1989. In one of them my younger brother is in my room while I was at sea playing Wayne Gretzky's Hockey. Had some amazing graphics for the time. Just used those years as search terms on my channel if you want to find them.

[@Del-Canada]

*use

[@blackneos940]

Did anyone else hear the Jazz in the background towards the end of this episode? :) You might need Headphones for this one. (:

[@joaogoncalves1149]

Yeah, it's probably background interference from another channel when the video was recorded.

[@anonUK]

If Microsoft and IBM-compatible OEMs had looked seriously at the Amiga and what it was able to do, all the advances of the 90s in the PC arena would have happened 3 years earlier.

[@superscatboy]

Seeing those Deluxe Paint 3 menus gives me intense nostalgia

[@medes5597]

Same. How many hours did I spend staring at them doing graphics work? Far far too many. Came with my amiga and was by far the thing I used most. I wish modern dya paint programmes had such easy to use art features.

[@aussieraver7182]

3:30 1 Trillion bytes = 10 Terabytes. Definitely a major feat in the late 80s. EDIT: 1 Terabyte, not 10.

[@themetalstickman]

1 terabyte, no?

[@aussieraver7182]

@@themetalstickman You are correct. I mustv added an extra 0. Thanks for clarifying.

[@loganmacgyver2625]

I still only just got one terrabyte of storage a few months ago and I'm blown away (i was using 500gb for a long time). Can't imagine a man of the 80's meeting a terrabyte of storage

[@hurricaneomega]

I used Eye Relief in kindergarten. I loved messing with the colors

[@RustyDodd]

Amigas being used to make Feynman diagrams. Now that is some nerdy shit and I love it.

[@albear972]

15:38 Sweet mullet!

[@BLACKSYNTH]

Ahhh the teenage days of making violent stick men animation in deluxe paint 4 ! happy days!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@haraldsegebrecht]

Why is there a sax playing in the background the whole time?

[@muhammadyusup6170]

actually, its synth

[@MiguelBaptista1981]

@smakfu I've made less of an effort to write exams than you did with that comment. Good lad.

[@bcgibson22]

Because it was the 80s

[@joaogoncalves1149]

It's probably background interference from another channel when the video was recorded.

[@AgeingBoyPsychic]

He was totally playing that game with a god mode or no collisions cheat...

[@DeenaMilkers]

its so funny to think that there was a time when the general computing population somehow doubted the computing power of a machine known for its graphical capabilities (and it could multi task)

[@derekfoulk4692]

Kind of scary to know that some of these pilots that trained on that Amiga software served in the gulf war and probably in some of the more recent wars too.

[@worldofretrogameplay6963]

Derek Foulk Why is it scary? That simulator was highly advanced for its time.

[@ropewalkingelephant]

11:36 “these are just games and they’re not important” 😂

[@TuNnL]

I totally remember Battle Chess, although my family never owned an Amiga. It shows how popular the game was, to the point that it was adapted for PC, as well. 💁🏻‍♂️♟️ 🖥️

[@medes5597]

It was originally designed for apple, it was enhanced for the amiga

[@Simcore999]

Hard to believe today, I can hold the 4Gigs ram computer in my hand!

[@GeeTheBuilder]

Just 4? You can hold 128Gb easily. 😃

[@Simcore999]

@@GeeTheBuilder I meant 4gb RAM a few years ago, I had 64gb on micro-Sd plus the internal basic 32gb ssd so 100gb total for the whole computer and storage inside half my hand thin as a pack of gum

[@dj2bklyn]

I cannot believe that the amiga never became the standard

[@KoopaMedia64]

The problem is Commodore failed to evolve the Amiga platform. Ike what PC and Mac did. Amiga ECS was a bandaid fix and AGA was too little too late.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

A standard has to be open, so that others can copy it. The Amiga hardware took a giant leap forward, then stood still as others caught up, and then overtook it. It never had a good software layer, like the Macintosh, that was capable of adapting to newer hardware.

[@truezulu]

God mode on in menace. Not even hidden that well...

[@lucius1976]

The demise of the Amiga was due to it's favourite program - XCopy

[@tantamusca]

Im still waiting for new version of Delux paint at 2020 😊😊

[@robertleeluben]

Look for a program called graf-x, it's pretty much a straight up remake of dpaint.

[@justsurfin5013]

Instant.. take. When she said there database would soon reach a trillion bytes of data. Literally 1Tb. We have thumb-drives now with upwards of 4tb capacity. Just amazing to think about. Finished this video. I had both an Amiga 500 and a 3000 before moving onto IBM based PCs. Could never forgive Commodore for how they mis-managed this machine. If this computer was the Microsoft of the day and won it would have changed everything. Image a commercial Amiga in 2024 (not the homebrew stuff, I mean if Amiga had replaced Microsoft and was commercial)...just wow.

[@GeeTheBuilder]

Might have to dig my A500 out of the loft. I also have 2 BBC model Bs with monitors and 5 1/4” disks. I cut my teeth programming on the Beeb. Then Amiga. Then MSX (I know, right 😄). Then PC Windows. Then Linux.

[@SlinkiestTortoise23]

DMA went onto to be Rockstar games!

[@ruthlessadmin]

Battle chess looks like it would be PAINFUL to play.....

[@bryonmiller4326]

It was painfully boring. At the time it looked great, but it even took forever to load the animations off the floppy disk when you did each move.

[@nyteshade]

Fantastic with a hard drive

[@bryonmiller4326]

@Randy Massey Good lord, I was a kid at the time you dick

[@floydjohnson7888]

11:27 : banter up

[@vinmangob8555]

Dam ass boses at commodore, should have had the Amiga 40000 out by now, with full 12 k graphics and 400 fps.

[@livertiny]

Does anyone else her faint free jazz sax in the background??

[@KozenaDrzka]

I have this game on my Amiga 9:14 lol

[@EeekItsSnek]

Imagine a world where Amiga/Commodore wasn't shoved out of the market by a failing IBM and a reclusive Apple. We could have had mass market, user friendly multitasking software over 10 years sooner. Crazy world we live in.

[@Ben333bacc]

Lou Wallace looks like Louie CK

[@tdang9528]

Gary kidall.. the founder of microsoft

[@KoopaMedia64]

Digital Research. Bill Gates founded Microsoft.

[@samuelbanya]

It's a joke

[@wolfgangricklefs5781]

IMHO Battle Chess ist still the best Action Chess Game.

[@endless031]

OH NO! One trillion bytes.... That's one terabyte LOL

[@BAZFANSHOTHITSClassicTunes]

Playing Menace is easy with sprite collision off,

[@blackneos940]

The 1980's: when hot did not just mean sexy. (:

[@bwzes03]

17:24 .... what the heck? 3 to 4 times faster clock rate.... So 14 Mhz is somehow 3 to 4 times faster clock than the original 7.16 Mhz??? How did you compute that, on a Pentium 60 ?

[@samwyse2006]

He fucked up explaining the speed difference, but 3 to 4 times faster is right, because the Amiga 2500 has a 68020 @ 14 MHz vs a 68000 @ 7.16 MHz.

[@valenrn8657]

Motorola didn't have Pentium Rating like marketing when discussing the difference between 68000 ~7.1Mhz with 16-bit bus to 68020 at 14Mhz with 32-bit bus. Amiga 2500's 68020 at 14 Mhz with 32bit fast ram is similar to Amiga 1200's 68EC020 at 14Mhz with a 32-bit fast ram.

[@SybilKibble]

That Menace game reminds me a lot of Section Z

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

the new amigas title souns like a funny wordplay

[@Sittin.]

7:08 U don`t say ;)

[@coolvideos8864]

Battle Chess, What kind of game is that? Well its a beat em up.

[@andree1991]

"thats a great demo" while the machine was fucking choking and barely running.

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

Actually, the programs were very responsive but the various tasks the programs had to do took time. The CPU in the Amiga at the time ran at only 7.16 MHz. Compared that to IBM PCs in 1989 which ran at about the same speed but which were often stuck in text mode and one program at a time.

[@oldtwins]

The 486 came out in 1989 and the 386 was already well entrenched and common for all but the most budget systems, with the 386 running circles around the 68k 7MHz processor. The A2500 was not a budget system, but it was the best you could get from C=. It stunk. Not fast at all, and had horrible graphic modes for productivity; PCs in this era could already be running 1024x768 modes flicker-free while the Amiga couldn't even do 640x480 flicker free. As evident here, 1989 was the beginning of the end for the Amiga, with the latest and greatest stagnating due to Irving Gould and his henchmen that had no idea what they were going to do with C=. The years before that were squandered as the system was already four years old since commercial release yet hardly had anything added to it. As the C= engineers stated, AAA was supposed to have been released around this time if they had wanted to stay competitive. AAA never saw the light of day.

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

In 1989, EGA or VGA was still the norm. If you had 1024×768 then you had an expensive graphics card, better than average monitor and you likely did it in monochrome. I remember articles on Desktop Publishing from that time. Progress was much faster on the PC side though, that's for sure.

[@JohnMosquera-Colombia]

Some serious comb-overs in this video..these guys were waiting anxiously for "Hairclub for Men" to start up......

[@Jurgh909]

Wish I had a Lotus ROM card

[@AntneeUK]

Some typos in this episode! Febuary instead of February in the spreadsheet demo, and annimation instead of animation in the show titles. What is this, PBS? Oh, wait :)

[@TheGraemi]

His playing with cheat enabled. ;-D

[@apacher6433]

Переведите кто то эти передачи на русский. ДО гроба благодарен буду! И не я один думаю. Интересно нереально же!!! Ток без перевода, беда прям:(

[@ThomasvonWelt]

[@barriewilson3719]

Gary looks ill :(

[@vapourmile]

"Underrated"? LOL. Close. What you meant to say was "overrated".

[@Trusteft]

I don't even remember this computer. Why? lol

[@asphixmx]

me neither...and I am an Amiga fan...

[@Tony_7791]

Blue knight is gone..booo

[@AbdiPianoChannel]

If Amiga was called Thoth or TH computers I'm sure it would've been more respectable computer system. Thoth was the name of Egyptian God of intelligence or wisdom.

[@PaxHominibusBonaeVoluntatis]

frankly this game is terrible :( it looks like sam coupe or C=65 not even like playstation I. My raspberry pi has better multitasking and compute power.

[@amigabang6157]

PS1 was released in 1994 in Japan. This show is from 1989.

[@trondyne3513]

Boomers playing video games... Hey they did it first!!!

[@andree1991]

Wow battlechess was total slow and boring garbage

[@HardCase1911]

You nitwit, it was loading off the floppy disk. Go back to kindergarten little boy.

[@weaponofmassconstruction1940]

@@HardCase1911 Cupid stunt.