I had ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Atari 1024, but when I bought Amiga 500 my life changed. For the very first time I could sample music and create my own tracks using Soundtracker. One day I took Amiga to a recording studio. The sound engineer was in shock when he saw what was possible to achieve using samples. LOL Amiga 500 was just awesome. I ended up working in a local TV station producing music. Nowadays we use ProTools, but man, these were the times. We were so happy... and didn't know about it.
if you bought the expansion, the A500 originally shipped with 512KiB of RAM I remember getting the expansion and being able to run It Came from the Desert - those were the days
@@jaworskij Of course you had: Amiga had two independent banks of RAM (!) and every application had to move the data between them manually, as the components could access only one of them.
I used to have an A500 with the add-on of the A590 Hard-drive. My A590 had a whopping 20 Megabyte SCSI hard-drive in it. I had an extra 1 megabyte of memory plugged into the A590 memory sockets to bring my Amiga 500 up to 2 megabytes of memory. I later expanded my storage space by adding on the SCSI version of the iOmega 100MB zipdrive.
i had an A1200, it was my 1st PC ever, i think i was around 6 or 8 years old... this thing brought me into the whole computer stuff... i really miss the days messing around with the workbench ;D
The real strength of the Amiga seems to be broadcast quality video effects. The only Amiga I've seen in real life was doing titles at a cable company in 1997.
@adric22 Overheating wasn't a real issue in those days because the circuit board parts didn't produce that much heat as nowadays. Weren't even that integrated though.
I got Amiga Forever on CD, and even though I only used the original Workbench for a few minutes, it had a lot of surprises in it, with the biggest shocker being 'holy crap, they could do this in 1985?' In all honesty, a lot of the stuff didn't seem possible for PCs until at least ten years later.
The most memorable game I played on my Amiga 500 (well, my older brother's Amiga 500) was the Midwinter. It featured an open gameworld on a vast island resembling Iceland a bit, all snow covered and the only way to travel was 1) skiing, 2) using any motorized snowcat, 3) by cablecar, 4) hanggliding! You had an armour-piercing rifle that could destroy the enemy's snowcats and flying drones but if you became injured, you lost a few hours and if you lost too much time, the enemy would have taken over the entire island. The idea was to drive to a nearby village or garage to get a transport and/or recruit other people. Once recruited, you could also play as them. So with every few turns you would increase your network of resistance fighters, it was great! Trying to stop an enemy convoy could be challenging if the convoy was escorted by armed snowcats. But being caught in the open, on skis, with an enemy drone calling in artillery fire on your location or dropping bombs on you could be terrible and frustrating. But after becoming more experienced, you also got little bonuses like, if you had blown up or shot 20+ enemy vehicles, you got a message you killed the company commander and then the entire convoy would disband. Or, if more enemy companies were closing in on your location, you could be extremely fortunate to kill the regimental commander, meaning that all four subordinate company commanders would desert and their companies would also disband. The graphics were state of the art for its time but try telling that to kids of today... BTW, you had to slow the enemy advance by using a scorched earth policy, blowing up munitions warehouses and fuel refineries while you could still get fuel for your snowcat from the local garages and get ammo from the shops. Once the enemy advance had slowed to a grind, the thing was to infiltrate and get behind enemy lines, which was very tricky and you always lost your transport and had to travel the last few waypoints and villages on skis, being bombed and bombarded and chased by enemy snowcats all the time. But there was one safe mode of travel: cablecar. Unfortunately, you still had to leave the cablecar and continue skiing or try hanggliding.
@ginbim I fully agree. Memory gluttons are all people are these days. That was the amazing thing about the Amiga. They not only did a lot more than the competition did, they also did it with much much less.
A4000 was the last classic model. Many specs like the A3000, but had IDE instead of SCSI (critizised by many). It had the upgraded AGA chipset, A4000T was a towered version of the A4000. Commodore went bankrupt around the time the A4000 was released, so furter development was in the hands of 3rd party developers. Many expansions was available for these computers, also 68060 and PPC CPU cards for A1200, A3000 and A4000. Some even managed to get a PPC card to run on the A2000.
Loved the Amigas I used back then.. from the A500 I had in 1988 to the A4000 I was still using in 1999. There was nothing to compare until PCs moved to 486 tech and even then the Win 95 OS was garbage compared to Amiga OS 3.1. I ran my AMAX (Mac emulator) and 486 PC bridge cards for many years, until it finally became impossible to ignore Pentium-based computing. Still have a tear in the eye remember nights up playing multi-player Falcon over modem connections and rendering 3D animations using Imagine, Real 3D and when I finally had the money.. Lightwave.
www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/compare.html Executor, a fast MacOS 68K emulator for 486 CPU. _Executor's 68040 CPU emulator is very fast because it uses dynamic compilation_ Running non-Amiga software on Amiga doesn't benefit the Amiga platform. Vortex Golden Gate bridgeboard has Cyrix Cx486SLC which is based on the i386SX 16bit bus. 486SLC doesn't include 486 instruction set until Cyrix Cx5x86. Cyrix's "486" label is BS.
Frankly, this is AMAZING. Laser printers, mice, colours screens, video editing softwares in 1987 : it was already all there ! There was nothing on earth like these machines back then !
@@IkarusKommt Amiga (OCS/ECS) has hardware accelerated graphics through the blitter chip and 32 colors (or 4096 in HAM mode). You can also use the copper chip to generate excellent gradients with fine granularity. It easily eats a Tandy 1000 or PCJr for dinner when it comes to graphics. I am a PC guy, but I still see how Amiga was better than anything else in the home computer segment at the time.
+CineRaphael Exactly! Yet to be fair it should be considered the C64 is five years older than the Amiga! It was still sold at the Amiga age though, well into the 90s, as a low cost machine (which it was not in 1982).
Loved this. It blew the IBM compatibles out of the water in every aspect. When my family "upgraded" to a 386, I thought we downgraded, but glad that I got to use the old family computer for games.
I wasn't even born when this thing came out. My friend said he had this computer when he was a teen (yeah, there's a 14 year age gap!). Old skool audio production ftw though!
I still use my Amiga computers every day. With my 2MB A600 I can go online, chat to friends on MSN and IRC, read E-Mail and News, play MUDs, and listen to music all at the same time. I use my A500 for games mostly, but I love it just as much :)
Nice setup with a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. I never had an Amiga, but had an Atari 65XE, and then 1040STe. 1987, great old days. I miss those older computers. Although I have to say that the IBM PS/2 and the Macintosh were very exciting in those days too. Today? I don't find computers exciting. They are simply a chore these days. In the 80's computing used to be fun, really.
Wow! What a rockin' video, especially the music segment in the middle... from abound 5:40 with the musician on the DX7, to around 5:55 when the dude in the blue sweater just goes off!!!
My 1st computer was a IBM PC/XT that my grandfather gave me. 1 color (orange) monitor, no mouse, 10mb hard drive, and a whole meg of ram. :D But that computer is responsible for making me the geek I am today. Got thrown away during a move, and I sorely miss it today.
Brings back memories! I miss my Amiga 500! It was my first home computer and in it's day it was a kick ass machine! I had to sell it to pay some bills. I then bought a DOS based computer. Talk about going backwards! The Amiga ruled!
The graphics and text on the screenshots look so old and dated now, but this was special and new in 1987. A lot of the hardware mentioned in this promo would have been very expensive back then. I absolutely love the voice over actors in this video, they really make the Amiga 500 look like something very very special and unique and powerful. It's a shame I was far too young to use one of these back in 1987.
I borrowed this tape from the public library, just to watch it a few times. I never was able to save up enough to buy my own Amiga 500. :( May get one now, there's a few games I'm sure I'd like to play on it.
After this there was a vacum for Amiga hardware, especially for the video marked, so there was also made some clones named DraCo. A bit like the A4000T, but did not have the custom chipsets, hey did feature a few other imprevements though. There have been some new PPC hardware released, a few AmigaOne models and these days the SAM440 and SAM440-Flex boards. There are also some hardware for the MorphOS platform (Amiga-like OS, but without the Amiga brand).
Wow. I got one of these for my 8th birthday, complete with the modem and a panasonic dot matrix printer. I was the first person I knew who had a computer by at least 3 years. Also, I feel very, very old now. :P
I had an Amiga 2000 and it was so GD advanced for its time. Too bad it was mismanaged out of existence. I'm an artist and some of my Amiga artwork was published in the computer magazines of the day. There is no telling how far the Amiga could have gone if properly managed. Nothing could touch it back in the day.
This was my first computer, when i bought it i had the memory expanded from 500kb to a whopping 1meg, but it utilised that 1 meg very well...i wish i still had it...
This was a very special computer so far ahead of it's time, just wish there was a version of workbench for this day and age you could only imagine how great that would be!
Open Windows was originaly designed by Sun Microsystems for their SunOS. It was a windows manager, that looked quite a bit different than motif or troff. Then, Open Windows was available with Linux distribution such as Slackware. That was like in 1995, so I don't even know if Slackware is still available. Anyway, the Open Windows was sometimes called Open Look GUI. It is very nice, very customizable, etc. That's why it is my favorite one. And also because I like the look and feel of it.
Think I'll need several posts covering all models:) I might forget some though: Classic Amigas: A1000, this one had kickstart on floppy. I think first models delivered with only 256kb Ram. Kickstart is like a mix between a Bios and some basic parts of the OS. A500, kickstart 1.2 and 1.3 A500+ ( like A500 with updated kickstart ROM 2.x and Workbench 2.x, and shipped with 1MB Ram) CDTV, looked like a standard stereo CD-player, but was a A500 with a CD-Rom drive. Very underestimated product IMHO.
Ahhh... good old days, when it was all so exciting and new.... the agonising anticipation and excitement of waiting 5 minutes for a low res image to download, line by painstaking line....Ohhhh Yeeeeaa... you know what I'm talking about if you were online in the late 80s early 90s. And BBS's, and STAG disks...
A600, not sure if this came with kick3 or 2. but was by many described as a flop, smaller keyboard and less expandable, it did have a PMCIA slot though. A2000, hardware wise not so far away from the A500, but more expandable and came in a desktop casing. There was also some special editions made in small numbers like the A1500 and A2500. I think they was similar to the A2000, but with some expansions included.
Commodore Amiga ruled! - and to this day still does. Imagine an computer from the late 80'ies still being able to access the internet and do true hardware multitasking - amazing. Deluxe Paint was originally invented and created for the Amiga, the MS-DOS version was just a minimalistic imitation of the original :-)
Started my Computer-Career with a Texas Instruments Ti99/4a and loved my C-64 with 300 Baud Acoustic coupler (Akkustik-Koppler) via telephone and discovering the first Mailboxes and even ChatRooms!!! But the AMIGA500 was the first Computer that really forced creativity. Had my first real $ Jobs with that beautiful Machine: With Deluxe Paint, Imagine, Cinema4d and a magic TV GenLock ;) those were wonderful times - and unforgettable Nights full of Cyber-Magic. But LOV now my i7Quadcore 8GBRAM W7!
razors78: "Who is the music artist behind this Promo Video?" Sounds like an in-house job or a prerecorded backing soundtrack. I used to work for a production house and they had an in-house studio that would produce music for all of our projects. As cheesy or sophisticated a sound you wanted, and no licensing or copyright issues! :)
The Amiga was another example of when the better technology lost out because of poor marketing and management. My older brother bought an Amiga 500 with the memory expansion. I blew a lot of time on that thing playing games, screwing with paint programs, and tinkering with Amiga BASIC. I loved The Bard's Tale. Faery Tale was also amazing to me at the time. It was the first game I remember being what I considered open world. You could basically walk off in any direction. Good times.
To be fair to Commodore's marketing people, this advert shows that they were touting the strengths of the Amiga pretty well. I think what worked against them was the reputed late 80s distrust of home computers by much of the American market (consoles became more popular after the 1983 'video game crash') and the domination of general office use (i.e. word processing, spreadsheets and databases) by IBM PCs, which was pretty much worldwide and certainly so in America (America being the largest market for computers). There are countless tales of poor management by Commodore which are undoubtedly true, but I think this TV advert did a good job of getting the message across about how good the Amiga was.
@@danyoutube7491 Even ATARI was sane enough to realize you cannot do the office work on a TV screen - They provided a monochrome monitor and 640x400 resolution. Amigas could do only 640x200, wasting the precise vertical space.
Wow. That's pretty good for 1987. and running stuff like that on 1 meg of RAM. these days you can't get vista to run fast without adding enough RAM to run ten thousand Amigas and having a few human sacrifices.
At least in this commercial they show some good productivity software for the Amiga. It should be better advertised for business market. There were great apps that could compete with software from DOS and early Windows. I've tried many different office apps and I was impressed how advanced they were for the time.
From what I've read about 1980s computing, I think the problem was (not entirely, apparently there were limitations with the max resolution output of the Amiga, and also without a flicker fixer long work was apparently uncomfortable) that IBM had given office consumers confidence to jump into computing to replace manual systems like typewriters, and so IBM had become the defacto choice. Before IBM entered the PC market, the market was much smaller, because a lot of general office people (or perhaps more specifically their managers and company owners) hadn't had the confidence to go ahead and comptuerise their workplaces. Quite simply, the name of IBM carried a lot of weight. After this, the best software that ran on IBM became the standard, and anything that couldn't run the exact same program (ie anything that wasn't an IBM or compatible) was a hard sell to say the least.
By 1987, office computers had SuperEGA cards that could do 800x500x16 non-interlaced video or 132x40 text modes. Amiga, with its 320x200 TV screen instead of a monitor could not compete there.
Amiga computers really were made for people who wanted to be creative themselves instead of just consuming. Too bad Commodore had no lucky hand with marketing and rested on their laurels for too long. The A4000 in '92 was the last machine I bought from Commodore. Shame the end for the company came two years later, but it was foreseeable.
A3000 / A3000UX (Unix model), Many consider this was one of the best models. Came with a 68030 or 68040 CPU, and had scsi onboard. Still had the ECS chipset. A1200, case design similar to A500, but with updated kickstart/OS version 3.x, AGA chipset, 68020 CPU, 2MB Chipram, IDE interface for internal HDD. CD32, was a CD console version of the A1200.
I am a programmer too. I work on the XBox 360 project. I'm also a embedded software developer and have written entire operating systems that compile down to 4KB. Don't link to any external library, see how big you can make your code. Turn off debug information.
The Amiga was the best system. I used mine for years and years too. It was so innovative. It had the best sound processor too... Too bad it ended like it did, those systems really deserved to last and we would have a alternative to Microsucks and Jobs's fashion products today...
Funny how they show the monitor sitting mostly on top of the A500 but I've never seen anyone do that. Wouldn't it block the air vents?
I used to do that, everything worked fine. I guess the top was made ribbing specifically for this so the monitor wouldn't block all of the air.
"I am the Commodore Amiga 500: I am a game machine". That's all that needs be said. I had so many hours of fun with my Amiga
T2, Simpsons, batman, FA/18 Interceptor, lemmings...... Oh the hours n hours of fun
@@kingvendrick1879 Mom I want Lotus for My computer!
Mom: But we have Lotus at home!
Lotus at home: Lotus 1-2-3
I had ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Atari 1024, but when I bought Amiga 500 my life changed. For the very first time I could sample music and create my own tracks using Soundtracker.
One day I took Amiga to a recording studio. The sound engineer was in shock when he saw what was possible to achieve using samples. LOL
Amiga 500 was just awesome. I ended up working in a local TV station producing music. Nowadays we use ProTools, but man, these were the times. We were so happy... and didn't know about it.
brings on the tears, had the A500 back in the day... recently bought 500, 600 and 1200 ;)
The Amiga was life from 87-90. What great years. Copying all the games I could get hold of at school.
In Poland we had 80s in 90s :)
1 F U L L M E G A B Y T E
Yes, and it didnt have the same memory problems as did MS-DOS machines with the same amount of RAM.
if you bought the expansion, the A500 originally shipped with 512KiB of RAM
I remember getting the expansion and being able to run It Came from the Desert - those were the days
@@jaworskij Of course you had: Amiga had two independent banks of RAM (!) and every application had to move the data between them manually, as the components could access only one of them.
I used to have an A500 with the add-on of the A590 Hard-drive. My A590 had a whopping 20 Megabyte SCSI hard-drive in it. I had an extra 1 megabyte of memory plugged into the A590 memory sockets to bring my Amiga 500 up to 2 megabytes of memory. I later expanded my storage space by adding on the SCSI version of the iOmega 100MB zipdrive.
The A500 was my First new Computer in late 1989, great machine..
i had an A1200, it was my 1st PC ever, i think i was around 6 or 8 years old...
this thing brought me into the whole computer stuff... i really miss the days messing around with the workbench ;D
They used to run this ad at the 2 Amiga stores I went to back in 1988. Over & Over & Over I'd have to hear this while I was looking.
The real strength of the Amiga seems to be broadcast quality video effects. The only Amiga I've seen in real life was doing titles at a cable company in 1997.
I LOVE THIS COMPUTER!
czesc mgr!
@adric22 Overheating wasn't a real issue in those days because the circuit board parts didn't produce that much heat as nowadays. Weren't even that integrated though.
I got Amiga Forever on CD, and even though I only used the original Workbench for a few minutes, it had a lot of surprises in it, with the biggest shocker being 'holy crap, they could do this in 1985?' In all honesty, a lot of the stuff didn't seem possible for PCs until at least ten years later.
The most memorable game I played on my Amiga 500 (well, my older brother's Amiga 500) was the Midwinter. It featured an open gameworld on a vast island resembling Iceland a bit, all snow covered and the only way to travel was 1) skiing, 2) using any motorized snowcat, 3) by cablecar, 4) hanggliding!
You had an armour-piercing rifle that could destroy the enemy's snowcats and flying drones but if you became injured, you lost a few hours and if you lost too much time, the enemy would have taken over the entire island. The idea was to drive to a nearby village or garage to get a transport and/or recruit other people. Once recruited, you could also play as them. So with every few turns you would increase your network of resistance fighters, it was great!
Trying to stop an enemy convoy could be challenging if the convoy was escorted by armed snowcats. But being caught in the open, on skis, with an enemy drone calling in artillery fire on your location or dropping bombs on you could be terrible and frustrating. But after becoming more experienced, you also got little bonuses like, if you had blown up or shot 20+ enemy vehicles, you got a message you killed the company commander and then the entire convoy would disband. Or, if more enemy companies were closing in on your location, you could be extremely fortunate to kill the regimental commander, meaning that all four subordinate company commanders would desert and their companies would also disband. The graphics were state of the art for its time but try telling that to kids of today...
BTW, you had to slow the enemy advance by using a scorched earth policy, blowing up munitions warehouses and fuel refineries while you could still get fuel for your snowcat from the local garages and get ammo from the shops. Once the enemy advance had slowed to a grind, the thing was to infiltrate and get behind enemy lines, which was very tricky and you always lost your transport and had to travel the last few waypoints and villages on skis, being bombed and bombarded and chased by enemy snowcats all the time. But there was one safe mode of travel: cablecar. Unfortunately, you still had to leave the cablecar and continue skiing or try hanggliding.
Advertized as professional computer, famous as gaming machine
Just like today.
i've watched this video and every video about amiga several times. inspires me to program day in, day out.
Merry Christmas Amiga & Friends of.
@ginbim
I fully agree. Memory gluttons are all people are these days. That was the amazing thing about the Amiga. They not only did a lot more than the competition did, they also did it with much much less.
Ahh how I loved my Amiga 500 & my Amiga 4000 & Video Toaster Flyer.
A4000 was the last classic model. Many specs like the A3000, but had IDE instead of SCSI (critizised by many). It had the upgraded AGA chipset, A4000T was a towered version of the A4000.
Commodore went bankrupt around the time the A4000 was released, so furter development was in the hands of 3rd party developers.
Many expansions was available for these computers, also 68060 and PPC CPU cards for A1200, A3000 and A4000. Some even managed to get a PPC card to run on the A2000.
Loved the Amigas I used back then.. from the A500 I had in 1988 to the A4000 I was still using in 1999. There was nothing to compare until PCs moved to 486 tech and even then the Win 95 OS was garbage compared to Amiga OS 3.1. I ran my AMAX (Mac emulator) and 486 PC bridge cards for many years, until it finally became impossible to ignore Pentium-based computing. Still have a tear in the eye remember nights up playing multi-player Falcon over modem connections and rendering 3D animations using Imagine, Real 3D and when I finally had the money.. Lightwave.
www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/compare.html
Executor, a fast MacOS 68K emulator for 486 CPU.
_Executor's 68040 CPU emulator is very fast because it uses dynamic compilation_
Running non-Amiga software on Amiga doesn't benefit the Amiga platform.
Vortex Golden Gate bridgeboard has Cyrix Cx486SLC which is based on the i386SX 16bit bus.
486SLC doesn't include 486 instruction set until Cyrix Cx5x86. Cyrix's "486" label is BS.
hear the ASMR value of this wonderful commercial. even buzzing sound is perfect as if it's intentionally put in the video.
@cobrachoppergirl
I had an amiga 500... this ad doesn't lie, it was the best computer of the late 80s.
Especially with the games...
can't wait till this comes out
Frankly, this is AMAZING. Laser printers, mice, colours screens, video editing softwares in 1987 : it was already all there ! There was nothing on earth like these machines back then !
Love these machines. Decades ahead of their time.
Amiga has the same graphic capabilities as PCJr (or Tandy 1000), designed in 1983-84.
@@IkarusKommt Amiga (OCS/ECS) has hardware accelerated graphics through the blitter chip and 32 colors (or 4096 in HAM mode). You can also use the copper chip to generate excellent gradients with fine granularity. It easily eats a Tandy 1000 or PCJr for dinner when it comes to graphics. I am a PC guy, but I still see how Amiga was better than anything else in the home computer segment at the time.
BEST EVER for at least a whole decade and thats no BS
this was my first computer ever!!
i miss it so much
I just realized that my heart is still attached with Amiga :) Hail Commodore we need it back.
WOAH!!!! ONE FULL MEGABYTE OF INTERNAL MEMORY!
+CaptainCrape 512 KB, usually. 1 MB was already upgraded. ^^
But that was enough then.
+Norman Roscher woah c64 got only 64 kb
+CineRaphael Exactly! Yet to be fair it should be considered the C64 is five years older than the Amiga!
It was still sold at the Amiga age though, well into the 90s, as a low cost machine (which it was not in 1982).
Commodore Amiga was ahead of its time back then. It shit on PC graphics and sound.
IKR! But remember... today's 8-16GB RAM, or 4-5 TB HD will seem equally tiny and amusing in 10-20 years!
1MB back then, was like having 16GB of memory now. I remember sitting at my C64 and being awed at the immense amount of memory the A500 had.
16GB back then was like having 128GB of memory now.
@@mlcs 16GB back then didn't exist
@@t-rozbenouameur5304 yeah, but I meant 16gb in 2007
@@mlcs what do you mean? That simply didn't exist.
@@mlcs are you confusing MB with GB?
I was lucky enough to use an Amiga in elementary school for animation with deluxe paint...got hooked and now I work at a Studio.
a true classic i used to play pinball dreams for ages on the machone
Thats really great to hear that the Amiga is alive! You proove what the Amiga is capable of. Its a very underated computer.
I never saw this one before. Nothing compared to it back in the day, but I was poor and continued to use my C64 up til 1992. Thanks for posting.
Loved this. It blew the IBM compatibles out of the water in every aspect. When my family "upgraded" to a 386, I thought we downgraded, but glad that I got to use the old family computer for games.
I wasn't even born when this thing came out. My friend said he had this computer when he was a teen (yeah, there's a 14 year age gap!).
Old skool audio production ftw though!
Thanks for posting... Very interesting, wish I was born 20 years earlier!
I still use my Amiga computers every day. With my 2MB A600 I can go online, chat to friends on MSN and IRC, read E-Mail and News, play MUDs, and listen to music all at the same time. I use my A500 for games mostly, but I love it just as much :)
Nice setup with a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. I never had an Amiga, but had an Atari 65XE, and then 1040STe. 1987, great old days. I miss those older computers. Although I have to say that the IBM PS/2 and the Macintosh were very exciting in those days too. Today? I don't find computers exciting. They are simply a chore these days. In the 80's computing used to be fun, really.
Wow! What a rockin' video, especially the music segment in the middle... from abound 5:40 with the musician on the DX7, to around 5:55 when the dude in the blue sweater just goes off!!!
I like how that guy during the sound and video portion was in an episode of Tales from the Crypt
My 1st computer was a IBM PC/XT that my grandfather gave me. 1 color (orange) monitor, no mouse, 10mb hard drive, and a whole meg of ram. :D
But that computer is responsible for making me the geek I am today. Got thrown away during a move, and I sorely miss it today.
I've never owned one, but I remember my first computer - Timex Sinclair 2048. Thx for this video!
Brings back memories! I miss my Amiga 500! It was my first home computer and in it's day it was a kick ass machine! I had to sell it to pay some bills. I then bought a DOS based computer. Talk about going backwards! The Amiga ruled!
think we got ours for about £400! Never realised how fortunate i was at the time getting one for christmas! lol Brilliant!
Keep in mind, this was back when IBM/DOS machines were using 640k or less.
A Meg of memory was vast back in the day.
I agree with you. Back then, people didn't even have a clue what a KIlobyte was either!
So true. I was watching an old TV movie where they used one of those old cell phones the size of a brick with a long car radio antenna. Amazing.
i remember getting my Amiga 500 in the early 90's - it was the bomb!
Amiga zawszy rządziła!! uwielbiałem ten dźwięk ze stacji dysków :)
THE SPIRIT OF AMIGA IS STILL GOING STRONG !!!!...
I was an Amiga fan... the best computer I had in that time. It was an amazing technology for its time.
The graphics and text on the screenshots look so old and dated now, but this was special and new in 1987. A lot of the hardware mentioned in this promo would have been very expensive back then. I absolutely love the voice over actors in this video, they really make the Amiga 500 look like something very very special and unique and powerful. It's a shame I was far too young to use one of these back in 1987.
320x200 was nothing to write home about in 1987. ATI, Tseng, Orchid et al. already made SVGA (256 color) adapters by the end of the year.
@@IkarusKommt For the PC, yes.
I still have 3 amiga500s boxed and tucked away..I am 51 and most of my teenage years were spent on a A500.
I like the monitor coming out of the smoke.
I did not know function keys used to be such a selling point?!
I borrowed this tape from the public library, just to watch it a few times. I never was able to save up enough to buy my own Amiga 500. :(
May get one now, there's a few games I'm sure I'd like to play on it.
After this there was a vacum for Amiga hardware, especially for the video marked, so there was also made some clones named DraCo. A bit like the A4000T, but did not have the custom chipsets, hey did feature a few other imprevements though.
There have been some new PPC hardware released, a few AmigaOne models and these days the SAM440 and SAM440-Flex boards. There are also some hardware for the MorphOS platform (Amiga-like OS, but without the Amiga brand).
Wow. I got one of these for my 8th birthday, complete with the modem and a panasonic dot matrix printer. I was the first person I knew who had a computer by at least 3 years.
Also, I feel very, very old now. :P
"one whole megabyte of internal memory"
I know it sounds inmature, but I loled when I heard that.
A machine that was truly ahead of it time and launch a generation of computer animation professionals.
I had an Amiga 2000 and it was so GD advanced for its time. Too bad it was mismanaged out of existence. I'm an artist and some of my Amiga artwork was published in the computer magazines of the day. There is no telling how far the Amiga could have gone if properly managed. Nothing could touch it back in the day.
My favourite bits:
4:00 "Now the fun begins!"
5:40/5:53 - Jeeez look at that guy! He's "literally" in the music!
This was my first computer, when i bought it i had the memory expanded from 500kb to a whopping 1meg, but it utilised that 1 meg very well...i wish i still had it...
This was a very special computer so far ahead of it's time, just wish there was a version of workbench for this day and age you could only imagine how great that would be!
AROS is Workbench for the modern day OS
there' s also AMIWM for Linux, that makes your normal x86 machine look like Workbench
@@jpunyedvideorestorations9347 I sure wish there was a tutorial for how to install that for Linux Lite (Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS).
BUT IT'S DESKTOP PUBLISHING THAT REALLY TURNS ME ON.
greatest youtube video ever.
0:43 Faery Tale Adventure! Best game for the era. The start of all RPG's! Massive for it's time!
Open Windows was originaly designed by Sun Microsystems for their SunOS. It was a windows manager, that looked quite a bit different than motif or troff. Then, Open Windows was available with Linux distribution such as Slackware. That was like in 1995, so I don't even know if Slackware is still available. Anyway, the Open Windows was sometimes called Open Look GUI. It is very nice, very customizable, etc. That's why it is my favorite one. And also because I like the look and feel of it.
Almost! Just as they were fading away, I saw an external hard drive available for the 500.
Think I'll need several posts covering all models:) I might forget some though:
Classic Amigas:
A1000, this one had kickstart on floppy. I think first models delivered with only 256kb Ram. Kickstart is like a mix between a Bios and some basic parts of the OS.
A500, kickstart 1.2 and 1.3
A500+ ( like A500 with updated kickstart ROM 2.x and Workbench 2.x, and shipped with 1MB Ram)
CDTV, looked like a standard stereo CD-player, but was a A500 with a CD-Rom drive. Very underestimated product IMHO.
Amazing!! I want one! Remember the days?
who remembers 'interceptor F22' i think it was?! it was amazing at the time, as was 'apprentice' :-)
Ahhh... good old days, when it was all so exciting and new.... the agonising anticipation and excitement of waiting 5 minutes for a low res image to download, line by painstaking line....Ohhhh Yeeeeaa... you know what I'm talking about if you were online in the late 80s early 90s. And BBS's, and STAG disks...
Legendary computer of 90s. Just a legend :)
A600, not sure if this came with kick3 or 2. but was by many described as a flop, smaller keyboard and less expandable, it did have a PMCIA slot though.
A2000, hardware wise not so far away from the A500, but more expandable and came in a desktop casing.
There was also some special editions made in small numbers like the A1500 and A2500. I think they was similar to the A2000, but with some expansions included.
Commodore Amiga ruled! - and to this day still does. Imagine an computer from the late 80'ies still being able to access the internet and do true hardware multitasking - amazing. Deluxe Paint was originally invented and created for the Amiga, the MS-DOS version was just a minimalistic imitation of the original :-)
That Was Amazing Thank You Bro For This Upload
Started my Computer-Career with a Texas Instruments Ti99/4a and loved my C-64 with 300 Baud Acoustic coupler (Akkustik-Koppler) via telephone and discovering the first Mailboxes and even ChatRooms!!!
But the AMIGA500 was the first Computer that really forced creativity. Had my first real $ Jobs with that beautiful Machine: With Deluxe Paint, Imagine, Cinema4d and a magic TV GenLock ;) those were wonderful times - and unforgettable Nights full of Cyber-Magic. But LOV now my i7Quadcore 8GBRAM W7!
incredible that they are already referring to what we know as the internet, in a 1987 promo - about 8 minutes in when they talk about the modem
this is the greatest video I have ever seen...
Thank you so much!
Holy shit!!! One megabite of internal memory. That is soo much memory i cant even put one song on that dinosour...
razors78: "Who is the music artist behind this Promo Video?"
Sounds like an in-house job or a prerecorded backing soundtrack.
I used to work for a production house and they had an in-house studio that would produce music for all of our projects. As cheesy or sophisticated a sound you wanted, and no licensing or copyright issues! :)
I always used PC in my whole life, but man Amiga sure was a powerful computer back in 87.
There was mention, perhaps edited out, that some of the events shown included future developments.
Cudo. Wspaniała maszyna!
The Amiga was another example of when the better technology lost out because of poor marketing and management. My older brother bought an Amiga 500 with the memory expansion. I blew a lot of time on that thing playing games, screwing with paint programs, and tinkering with Amiga BASIC. I loved The Bard's Tale. Faery Tale was also amazing to me at the time. It was the first game I remember being what I considered open world. You could basically walk off in any direction. Good times.
To be fair to Commodore's marketing people, this advert shows that they were touting the strengths of the Amiga pretty well. I think what worked against them was the reputed late 80s distrust of home computers by much of the American market (consoles became more popular after the 1983 'video game crash') and the domination of general office use (i.e. word processing, spreadsheets and databases) by IBM PCs, which was pretty much worldwide and certainly so in America (America being the largest market for computers). There are countless tales of poor management by Commodore which are undoubtedly true, but I think this TV advert did a good job of getting the message across about how good the Amiga was.
@@danyoutube7491 Even ATARI was sane enough to realize you cannot do the office work on a TV screen - They provided a monochrome monitor and 640x400 resolution. Amigas could do only 640x200, wasting the precise vertical space.
Wow. That's pretty good for 1987. and running stuff like that on 1 meg of RAM. these days you can't get vista to run fast without adding enough RAM to run ten thousand Amigas and having a few human sacrifices.
BLOWING MY MIND RIGHT NOW, COMMODORE.
At least in this commercial they show some good productivity software for the Amiga. It should be better advertised for business market. There were great apps that could compete with software from DOS and early Windows. I've tried many different office apps and I was impressed how advanced they were for the time.
From what I've read about 1980s computing, I think the problem was (not entirely, apparently there were limitations with the max resolution output of the Amiga, and also without a flicker fixer long work was apparently uncomfortable) that IBM had given office consumers confidence to jump into computing to replace manual systems like typewriters, and so IBM had become the defacto choice. Before IBM entered the PC market, the market was much smaller, because a lot of general office people (or perhaps more specifically their managers and company owners) hadn't had the confidence to go ahead and comptuerise their workplaces. Quite simply, the name of IBM carried a lot of weight. After this, the best software that ran on IBM became the standard, and anything that couldn't run the exact same program (ie anything that wasn't an IBM or compatible) was a hard sell to say the least.
By 1987, office computers had SuperEGA cards that could do 800x500x16 non-interlaced video or 132x40 text modes. Amiga, with its 320x200 TV screen instead of a monitor could not compete there.
Amiga computers really were made for people who wanted to be creative themselves instead of just consuming. Too bad Commodore had no lucky hand with marketing and rested on their laurels for too long.
The A4000 in '92 was the last machine I bought from Commodore. Shame the end for the company came two years later, but it was foreseeable.
@SSMATT08 Depends on what model. The 500's, 600's and 1200's were a few hundred. Stuff like the 2000 or 3000 were a couple thousand.
i'm so old i remember when this looked both good and futuristic
A3000 / A3000UX (Unix model), Many consider this was one of the best models. Came with a 68030 or 68040 CPU, and had scsi onboard. Still had the ECS chipset.
A1200, case design similar to A500, but with updated kickstart/OS version 3.x, AGA chipset, 68020 CPU, 2MB Chipram, IDE interface for internal HDD.
CD32, was a CD console version of the A1200.
LOL I never saw a computer commercial like this!
I am a programmer too. I work on the XBox 360 project.
I'm also a embedded software developer and have written entire operating systems that compile down to 4KB.
Don't link to any external library, see how big you can make your code. Turn off debug information.
Cool! The Amiga 500 was my second computer after the 64C. I also had an Amiga 3000. It's been nothing but Macs for me since.
The Amiga was the best system. I used mine for years and years too. It was so innovative. It had the best sound processor too... Too bad it ended like it did, those systems really deserved to last and we would have a alternative to Microsucks and Jobs's fashion products today...
looks like amiga was ahead of it's timein many ways, including this ad. all the "i'm a mac, I'm a pc" thing...
"i'm the amiga" started IT!!
Yeah! I think the guy at 6:25 is from A-Team, isn't he?