Customer Reviews

The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (Platform Studies)

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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.

The idea of the MIT platform series is sound, as long the author really knows his stuff, and can capture the ideas, spirit and ingenuity of the community that made and exploited and revere that system. They managed this for the VCS but they miss important aspects of the Amiga hardware and software and the way they worked together and created so much more than the sum of the parts - incoherently laced with US anecdotes from mostly early abandoners of a computer they failed to 'get' as the revolutionary platform it was. Brian Bagnall will hopefully do better; there are many great books to be written about the Amiga, but this one is already best forgotten - a missed opportunity.

A brilliantly written look at the future of computing. Which is in the past. No overly technical knowledge is required for reading. Superb.

This book examines the impact and legacy that the Commodore Amiga made and has left on the computing world, particularly from the perspective of how the Amiga deserves to be seen as the first multimedia computer. A common theme is the democratisation of high end functionality - whether music making, computer art, 3D, video production, ... - that the platform provided by giving access to (at the time) high end features on an affordable home computer.

I'd recommend this book to anyone with more than a passing interest in computer gaming and multimedia, as it really does show that the future was indeed here in 1985 with the launching of the Amiga 1000. Die hard Amiga fans will not find shocking revelations in here, however they will find insightful comment with well reasoned argument, and elucidation on a few seemingly trivial topics that illustrate just how closely tied into its custom chips the Amiga's software portfolio (and ultimate fate) was.

I particularly enjoyed how the book made me examine whether my admiration of the platform was purely due to nostalgia and a desire to go back to a simpler time, or whether the platform really was groundbreaking at the time and deserving of recognition: removing the rose tinted glasses, and measuring objectively, the Amiga was revolutionary.

A thoroughly enjoyable book for those who used or programmed the platform, and for those who wonder where the current state of the art came from.