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Thread: Amiga = Dell ?

  1. #1
    peat moss's Avatar Software Farmer BT Rep: +15BT Rep +15BT Rep +15
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    Just browsing around ,found this . History of Compaq , Dell , and even Linux is mentioned . Interesting , complaining about 8 bit sound , and video options .

    Edit: it's a long read but I like this comment:

    Intel created processors and motherboards that could handle multimedia in the early 90's. Microsoft and Intel (the Wintel duopoly) could then finally do what was necessary. In Windows 95, a world class multitasking, multimedia OS was released to the world. And the world was primed for it. It is really a shame that essentially the same features were disdained in AmigaDos a decade earlier. We all could have saved a whole lot of time and money. How much is Bill worth today?



    http://www.heartbone.com/comphist/AmigaHistory.htm
    Last edited by peat moss; 01-29-2005 at 11:42 PM.

  2. Software & Hardware   -   #2
    Snee's Avatar Error xɐʇuʎs BT Rep: +1
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    Amos rawked, I remember that.


    Gates bought the dos-embryo from someone else anyway, he's been profiting off the work of the real pioneers anyway you look at it, it's a bit unfair, really.
    Last edited by Snee; 01-30-2005 at 07:02 PM.

  3. Software & Hardware   -   #3
    bigdawgfoxx's Avatar Big Dawg
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    what the hell is amiga? lol
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  4. Software & Hardware   -   #4
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    shows what you know bigdawg

    amiga



    <computer> A range of home computers first released by
    Commodore Business Machines in early 1985 (though they did
    not design the original - see below). Amigas were popular for
    games, video processing, and multimedia. One notable
    feature is a hardware blitter for speeding up graphics
    operations on whole areas of the screen.

    The Amiga was originally called the Lorraine, and was
    developed by a company named "Amiga" or "Amiga, Inc.", funded
    by some doctors to produce a killer game machine. After the
    US game machine market collapsed, the Amiga company sold some
    joysticks but no Lorraines or any other computer. They
    eventually floundered and looked for a buyer.

    Commodore at that time bought the (mostly complete) Amiga
    machine, infused some money, and pushed it through the final
    stages of development in a hurry. Commodore released it
    sometime[?] in 1985.

    Most components within the machine were known by nicknames.
    The coprocessor commonly called the "Copper" is in fact the
    "Video Timing Coprocessor" and is split between two chips:
    the instruction fetch and execute units are in the "Agnus"
    chip, and the pixel timing circuits are in the "Denise" chip
    (A for address, D for data).

    "Agnus" and "Denise" were responsible for effects timed to the
    real-time position of the video scan, such as midscreen
    palette changes, sprite multiplying, and resolution
    changes. Different versions (in order) were: "Agnus" (could
    only address 512K of video RAM), "Fat Agnus" (in a PLCC
    package, could access 1MB of video RAM), "Super Agnus"
    (slightly upgraded "Fat Agnus"). "Agnus" and "Fat Agnus" came
    in PAL and NTSC versions, "Super Agnus" came in one
    version, jumper selectable for PAL or NTSC. "Agnus" was
    replaced by "Alice" in the A4000 and A1200, which allowed for
    more DMA channels and higher bus bandwidth.

    "Denise" outputs binary video data (3*4 bits) to the "Vidiot".
    The "Vidiot" is a hybrid that combines and amplifies the
    12-bit video data from "Denise" into RGB to the monitor.

    Other chips were "Amber" (a "flicker fixer", used in the A3000
    and Commodore display enhancer for the A2000), "Gary" (I/O,
    addressing, G for glue logic), "Buster" (the bus
    controller, which replaced "Gary" in the A2000), "Buster II"
    (for handling the Zorro II/III cards in the A3000, which meant
    that "Gary" was back again), "Ramsey" (The RAM controller),
    "DMAC" (The DMA controller chip for the WD33C93 SCSI adaptor
    used in the A3000 and on the A2091/A2092 SCSI adaptor card for
    the A2000; and to control the CD-ROM in the CDTV), and
    "Paula" (Peripheral, Audio, UART, interrupt Lines, and
    bus Arbiter).

    There were several Amiga chipsets: the "Old Chipset" (OCS),
    the "Enhanced Chipset" (ECS), and AGA. OCS included
    "Paula", "Gary", "Denise", and "Agnus".

    ECS had the same "Paula", "Gary", "Agnus" (could address 2MB
    of Chip RAM), "Super Denise" (upgraded to support "Agnus" so
    that a few new screen modes were available). With the
    introduction of the Amiga A600 "Gary" was replaced with
    "Gayle" (though the chipset was still called ECS). "Gayle"
    provided a number of improvments but the main one was support
    for the A600's PCMCIA port.

    The AGA chipset had "Agnus" with twice the speed and a 24-bit
    palette, maximum displayable: 8 bits (256 colours), although
    the famous "HAM" (Hold And Modify) trick allows pictures of
    256,000 colours to be displayed. AGA's "Paula" and "Gayle"
    were unchanged but AGA "Denise" supported AGA "Agnus"'s new
    screen modes. Unfortunately, even AGA "Paula" did not support
    High Density floppy disk drives. (The Amiga 4000, though,
    did support high density drives.) In order to use a high
    density disk drive Amiga HD floppy drives spin at half the
    rotational speed thus halving the data rate to "Paula".

    Commodore Business Machines went bankrupt on 1994-04-29,
    the German company Escom AG bought the rights to the Amiga
    on 1995-04-21 and the Commodore Amiga became the Escom
    Amiga. In April 1996 Escom were reported to be making the
    Amiga range again but they too fell on hard times and
    Gateway 2000 (now called Gateway) bought the Amiga brand
    on 1997-05-15.

    Gateway licensed the Amiga operating system to a German
    hardware company called Phase 5 on 1998-03-09. The
    following day, Phase 5 announced the introduction of a
    four-processor PowerPC based Amiga clone called the
    "pre\box". Since then, it has been announced that the
    new operating system will be a version of QNX.

    On 1998-06-25, a company called Access Innovations Ltd
    announced plans (http://www.micktinker.co.uk/aaplus.html) to
    build a new Amiga chip set, the AA+, based partly on the AGA
    chips but with new fully 32-bit functional core and 16-bit AGA
    hardware register emulation for backward compatibility.
    The new core promised improved memory access and video display
    DMA.

    By the end of 2000, Amiga development was under the control of
    a [new?] company called Amiga, Inc.. As well as continuing
    development of AmigaOS (version 3.9 released in December
    2000), their "Digital Environment" is a virtual machine for
    multiple platforms conforming to the ZICO specification.
    As of 2000, it ran on MIPS, ARM, PPC, and x86
    processors.
    www.spelling.com

  5. Software & Hardware   -   #5
    orcutt989's Avatar Blargh
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    Friend(Feminine) = Computer Company?

  6. Software & Hardware   -   #6
    bigdawgfoxx's Avatar Big Dawg
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    still lost but ok lol
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