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Jimmy Maher

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

by Jimmy Maher (Author)

88 ratings

Book 3 of 11: Platform Studies

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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 1.13 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

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

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 1.13 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,814,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,443 in Web Design (Books)
- #5,078 in Video & Computer Games
- #11,063 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences

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Jimmy Maher

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I've been writing professionally on analog and digital culture for quite some time now.

My latest project is a series of books called simply The Wonders of the World, whose aim is to accessibly chronicle some of the most remarkable achievements in human history. The series is premised on the idea that its subjects are indeed wondrous, and there's no reason why books about them should be one whit less exciting and inspiring than a good novel. It's also something of an experiment in reader participation: books in the series first appear on a chapter-by-chapter basis at my website The Analog Antiquarian, where readers can comment on them, help to weed out the bad ideas, and generally shape the product before it gets refined into its final published form.

In addition to the Wonders of the World series, you may wish to explore my book on the history of the Commodore Amiga personal computer for the MIT Press's Platform Studies series, or visit my other website The Digital Antiquarian, a long-running history of personal computing and computer gaming. Your support of my work, whether through buying my books here or signing up to support my websites, is the only thing that makes it possible to continue. So, thank you for that! Without readers, a writer is nothing.

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5 star		67%
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3 star		12%
2 star		1%
1 star		4%

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Andrew Pape

Great nostalgic book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 30, 2012

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This is a well-written book, especially nostalgic for anyone who had an Amiga.

The book isn't perfect for any particular audience. I have a computer-game programming background, and have a Computer Science Degree, so I am more likely to understand the book's technical details than a layperson. If you don't know much about the basics of computers, then reading a book about an advanced computer like the Amiga will be difficult to read or appreciate.

The author picked a good example for each chapter, e.g. how the Boing ball demo was made, and also the 3D Juggler. I was happy to learn about Boing, although for casual readers it might be difficult to follow, e.g. the concepts of colour-cycling. For the Juggler demo, I'd heard years ago that it used pre-generated graphics, as the Amiga was too slow to do the maths and graphics in real-time. The book mentions ray-tracing, but not the concepts behind it. Ray-tracing is complex because of the "recursion" technique used. The author doesn't even allude to this. A simple mention of the big problem would have made the reader better appreciate the demo.

In some chapters, I lost interest because I didn't know about the exact technology discussed. This made me more like a layperson, and most probably other readers will struggle also.

Once the author got to the topic of game programming, about 1/2 way through the book, I couldn't put it down. This is because I had always dreamed about making games, and have made a couple myself, but long after the days of the Amiga. I was unfortunate enough not to have had enough technical knowledge to make an Amiga game. Now that the author has explaining technical details, I wish I was back in those old days but armed with my newfound knowledge.

Unfortunately, the author only alludes to both Assembly Language and C. Actually, there is no C code demo, and the small Assembler demo leaves a lot to be desired. When describing a great game, it is clear that the author is a programmer, and not just an historian. For example, he has written his own C version of a game originally written in Assembly Language. For those who don't know anything about these languages, or computer languages in general, the read will most likely be boring and intimidating.

From my point of view, the book would have been better if it were more technical, and for those who aren't computer literate, the book will be too complex as-is. The author had to compromise. I'd take half a star off the book's rating for being too technical for a layperson, and another 1/2 star for it not being technical enough for me. Otherwise, it's a great book. It could have been improved by having an appendix for those who don't know about "bits and bytes", and another for further explanations of the technical tricks used by game programmers.

The author explains the history of Commodore and the Amiga's demise, and this was news to me. I knew the Amiga had vanished, but never knew why. This history lesson is readable by anyone, both computer scientists and historians. This a a good book, well-written and with apt examples.

4 people found this helpful

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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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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 its 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, not having 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

Julian Regel

Nicely Technical

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 9, 2021

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This book deep dives into various "case studies" around the Amiga and how it was used. This results in some long chapters, but I generally found them all interesting and the book goes into a decent technical depth in explaining how the Amiga worked and how developers programmed it.

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

2 people 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!

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