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Jimmy Maher

The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (Platform Studies) Hardcover – April 13, 2012

by Jimmy Maher (Author)

81 ratings

Part of: Platform Studies (19 Books)

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Exploring the often-overlooked history and technological innovations of the world's first true multimedia computer.

Long ago, in 1985, personal computers came in two general categories: the friendly, childish game machine used for fun (exemplified by Atari and Commodore products); and the boring, beige adult box used for business (exemplified by products from IBM). The game machines became fascinating technical and artistic platforms that were of limited real-world utility. The IBM products were all utility, with little emphasis on aesthetics and no emphasis on fun. Into this bifurcated computing environment came the Commodore Amiga 1000. This personal computer featured a palette of 4,096 colors, unprecedented animation capabilities, four-channel stereo sound, the capacity to run multiple applications simultaneously, a graphical user interface, and powerful processing potential. It was, Jimmy Maher writes in The Future Was Here, the world's first true multimedia personal computer.

Maher argues that the Amiga's capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future: digital cameras, Photoshop, MP3 players, and even YouTube, Flickr, and the blogosphere. He examines different facets of the platform―from Deluxe Paint to AmigaOS to Cinemaware―in each chapter, creating a portrait of the platform and the communities of practice that surrounded it. Of course, Maher acknowledges, the Amiga was not perfect: the DOS component of the operating systems was clunky and ill-matched, for example, and crashes often accompanied multitasking attempts. And Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. But for a few years, the Amiga's technical qualities were harnessed by engineers, programmers, artists, and others to push back boundaries and transform the culture of computing.

Print length

344 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

April 13, 2012
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

6 x 1.12 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0262017202
ISBN-13

978-0262017206
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Editorial Reviews

Review

At once challenging, rewarding, emotional, and insightful...a compelling read for those interested in the Amiga platform, as well as those interested to learn more about the culture of computing.

―John F. Barber, Leonardo Reviews

Review

The Future Was Here is proof of just how exhilarating Platform Studies can be. Jimmy Maher has the rare talent of writing technical descriptions that are both challenging and accessible so that, at the conclusion of each chapter, one experiences the rewarding pleasure of having learned and understood something new and difficult.

―Doug Reside, Digital Curator for the Performing Arts, New York Public Library

The Future was Here is by far the best document on the history, technology, and significance of the Commodore Amiga. An emotional read for those of us who were there, while explaining to everyone else just what made the Amiga such a seminal machine.

―Jesper Juul, New York University Game Center; author of Half-Real

Jimmy Maher shows us how 'the Amiga' was a phenomenon not just of hardware and software, but of community and creativity. He digs past easy nostalgia and into the telling specifics, revealing what enabled the Amiga to define so much of the playful, media-rich personal computing world in which we live today.

―Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Computer Science Department, University of California, Santa Cruz; author of Expressive Processing

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press (April 13, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 344 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262017202
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262017206
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.12 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,158,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews:
81 ratings

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PhotoSynth

I loved learning more about the Amiga

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2020

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I've never had an Amiga, but I remember being envious of my friends in the 80s that had such a wonderful machine and was curious to learn more about its history and technology.

The only negative is that the history parts, while a good overview, are relatively limited, mainly centered on Jack Tramiel and seems collected from available public sources rather than new interviews.

The book is structured around the impact of the Amiga on computing, with the various chapters also explaining the computer architecture, history and applications when those fit in the bigger story. Don't necessary believe all the claims, some of the technologies were already available earlier (e.g. the multitasking in the SInclair QL one year earlier), but only the Amiga made them successfully available to mass of consumers and professionals, and the machine was revolutionary at the time.

There are also many sections where the author delves in great details into aspects like the graphics processor, the bouncing ball demo and some of the software and add-ons. Casual users may find these descriptions too technical and boring, but for me (a computer engineer) these were the highlight of the book and even just by themselves warrant my 5 star rating. Very interesting!

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sien

A strong book about a fantastic machine

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2014

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The Future was here (2012) by Jimmy Maher is an excellent book about the wonderful Amiga computer. If you are an Amiga enthusiast or someone who remembers the Amiga fondly you can stop reading now and simply go and order the book for yourself. You won’t regret it. The book isn’t perfect but it offers a very welcome in depth study of an amazing computing platforms.

The Amiga was designed in the early 1980s by a team lead by Jay Miner . The Amiga was based around the Motorola 68000 chip that was also the CPU for the technologically less advanced and considerably more expensive Apple Macintosh. What was special about the Amiga is that it had a chipset that enabled much of the graphics and sound processing to be handled by something other than the CPU. Agnes, Denise and Paula that formed the original chipset. Sprites, blitting and sound were vastly superior on the Amiga to other contemporary systems. The Amiga wouldn’t really be outclassed as a computer for 6-7 years after its release. Today, such a leap forward is unthinkable.

The book covers the Amiga’s creation, the chipsets and the operating system the Amiga used., Next the release of the machine and the ‘Boing’ demo are described. The details of why the Boing demo was impressive and some of the tricks that were used is well described. Then there is a chapter on ‘Deluxe Paint’ which was one of the most famous Amiga painting programs that could create color art that was not possible on other systems of the time. The Amiga’s contribution to 3D modelling - SSG and Sculpt-Animate are then described. There is then a chapter on NewtTek and the HAM system for using all of the Amiga’s 4096 colors. Following a look at the Amiga’s OS there is a chapter on the Amiga demo scene that describes how clever hackers produced clever short bits of art on the system. The penultimate chapter describes Cinemaware and Psygnosis and some of the games on the Amiga. Finally there is a chapter on why the Amiga died in the 1990s.

The book is a little disjointed. It jumps around a bit in time and from subject to subject. It’s also a little haphazard in what it covers. The detail in some areas is deeper than the detail in others. There is also not enough thought given to how the Macintosh managed to survive while the Amiga floundered. The explanation is probably that the Macintosh managed to find an application that it was ideally suited for that worked for many businesses, desktop publishing, while the Amiga’s great abilities never found a similar market that was large enough. In addition the Amiga failed to improve the technology substantially to keep it ahead of the competition. The failure to develop new chipsets is, however, covered well by the book.

Maher has written an excellent account of a wonderful computing platform that is now largely a memory. He manages to capture just how it felt to use a computer that did give a glimpse of the future and describe many of the features that made it so outstanding.

6 people found this helpful

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G. Page

As I’m not a CS major (I do enjoy writing Amigabasic code though)

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018

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Lots of familiar stuff for me - I still use two Amigas that I got free. My A500’s A530 side car stopped spinning up (dying) but I was able to take the other two systems from those who wanted to keep them out of the landfill. As I’m not a CS major (I do enjoy writing Amigabasic code though), much of the book’s content was above me. Lots of familiar terms and peripherals, though. Too bad the Amiga didn’t make inroads - I know of a company outlawing the use of the Amiga in the middle 90’s

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

A good book only hampered by long, detailed examples that are often too uninteresting

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2016

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This is a must-read for any Amiga lover, and as someone who owned the original 1000 and a 500, I enjoyed much of what was said. There are some great insights, lots of insider stories, and some genuinely interesting stories. Much of the book is unfortunately trite, though, with long winded, technical examples that don't really help you understand the Amiga. If you're willing to put up with the fluff, and can skip past or just scan through the useless pages, it's worth the effort.

4 people found this helpful

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Buzz

A somewhat quirky book on Amiga history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2012

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This is a strangely written book. It is praiseworthy in that, apart from the mandatory nuts and bolts description of the Amiga and it's hardware/software, it also attempts to look at the larger picture, the technological and cultural era that the Amiga initiated and whose traces are still with us today.
In the attempt to grab both ends of the subject, the general and the detailed, and squeeze them into one coherent result, the result is not always that coherent. I was tempted to abandon the book at one point where I was reading the equivalent of a User Guide for Deluxe Paint, complete with references to select menu items to load images or to select resolution and color depth for a new image. There are cases where we are presented with very detailed descriptions of software implementations, i.e. bitplanes or specific color selections (with verbatim color tables!). No more than 2-3 pages after one such detailed section, IN THE SAME CHAPTER, we read about Commodore sales strategy across North America and Europe. If publication material editing and arrangement is an art, it was not mastered here.
Nevertheless, having not abandoned the book, I discovered much that I did not know, and for the first time, I established proper closure for the Amiga as a phenomenon that came, ran its course and was technologically obsoleted but conceptually far reaching. For all of us who loved the Amiga, and were sad to see it go, this book is a worthy tribute - an objective look at the design wonders, and the limitations, that made the Amiga the special experience that it was.

15 people found this helpful

Liberator

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2015

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Still the best computer going. This brings back the memories

One person found this helpful

FeliceMente

Splendido, per i fan di Amiga e non solo

Reviewed in Italy on April 8, 2013

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Estremamente consigliato a chiunque abbia usato Amiga e voglia riviverne la storia, oltre ad esemplorarne le caratteristiche tecniche che ne fecero una delle piattaforme più avanzate del tempo, e non solo.
È molto completo (trattando sia di aspetti tecnici che storici) ed è una lettura davvero molto piacevole.
Nel sito di supporto sono inoltre disponibili immagini e video che illustrano gli argomenti trattati nel libro, oltre ad esempi di codice (viene ad esempio ricreato il famoso demo della boing ball).
Si parla sia della scena nord americana, in cui Amiga veniva utilizzata soprattutto per applicazioni video e di grafica 2D e 3D, oltre che nell'ambito musicale, che di quella europea, dove Amiga era soprattutto una macchina da gioco. Non manca inoltre uno splendido capitolo sulla demoscene.
Estremamente consigliato, sia ai nostalgici di Amiga che agli appassionati di retrocomputing.

4 people found this helpful

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Francesco (Fi)

Amiga!

Reviewed in Italy on September 28, 2013

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Quando Commodore fece uscire Amiga 1000, una rivoluzione era partita: i pc di allora non erano neanche lontanamente comparabili e lo stesso Mac di allora risultava uscire perdente da un confronto in ambito grafico. Peccato, poteva essere la nascita di uno standard eccezionale, ma politiche scellerate o odiose (CBM rifiutò di regalare un Amiga 1000 al set del primo Star Trek per una scena, e Apple non ci pensò due volte a regalarne uno). Un O.S. che non era all'altezza dell'hardware ne decretò la discesa nell'oblio, ma non prima di aver raggiunto traguardi che hanno rappresentato una pietra miliare nella grafica e nel suono. Il libro racconta questo e molto altro!

4 people found this helpful

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Helladog

A good read for an Amiga fan

Reviewed in Canada on June 4, 2012

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The book is written in a way that demonstrates the technical aspect of the hardware and software that made (makes) the Amiga so unique. The author does manage to let loose and share a few stories, enriching the text. He covers pretty well all aspects of the Amiga experience of the 80-90's while remaining unbiased for the most part, and keeping a technical tone. I was glad to see many of the known people who influenced the Amiga mentioned.

It does become a bit laboured to read some of the more technical stuff, but in doing do, gives a lot more info that you may have known before, unless you were a programmer.

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