Skip to main content

The Future Was Here - Jimmy Maher ***

I discovered the field of Platform Studies with Super Power, Spoony Bards and Silverware on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), and couldn't resist the earlier entry in the same series, The Future Was Here, which examines the Commodore Amiga.

 I had an Amiga 500 at home at the same time as working with IBM PCs at work, so this was a fascinating trip into the past for me. Unlike Dominic Arsenault in the SNES title, Jimmy Maher chooses to focus far more on the technology, plus a fair amount on the culture, but doesn't give the same business insights. We are repeatedly told how disastrous the Commodore management was (though occasionally this is is presented as a biased view from the Amiga fans), but don't get a feel for what was happening at the Commodore end. This story is driven by the technology, those who created the technology and those who used it.

 Apart from anything else, it was interesting to discover the US viewpoint. Apparently, the US end tried to position the Amiga as a business machine to rival the IBM PC and the Mac, while the European end of the market - the one I directly experienced - focused far more on the Amiga's capabilities as a games machine. And for its time, it was a superb one. If you aren't familiar with the Amiga, it was displaying impressive colour graphics and high quality sound at a time when Macs had tiny monochrome screens and IBM PCs were lucky if they could handle four colours and did little more than beeping. The Amiga's graphics capabilities meant that, while the US version couldn't get a foothold in business, it did become a standard for TV effects generation.

 Maher presents the Amiga fairly, I think, as a machine that was ahead of its time and pointed to many of the directions for the future, but implemented its capabilities in a way that was difficult to continue evolving. It did not have the flexibility of the open hardware development for IBM PCs, nor was it made by a company with the drive to keep improving in leaps as Apple did. As a result, the Amiga was an outstanding machine for about five years, but once were were into the 1990s it was rapidly overtaken and left behind.

 In part, the enjoyment of the book was a degree of nostalgia, particularly when Maher talked about the game Defender of the Crown, which was an Amiga must-have. As well as more on the business aspects, I would have liked to see more on the operating system and applications from the user's eye view. Instead, Maher focuses particularly on the developer's viewpoint. So we have pages of description of how the different parts of the operating system and the hardware chips functioned, and lengthy breakdowns of how, for instance, graphics demos interacted with the Amiga hardware. Of course we need to know what, for instance, its oddly named chips Denise, Paula and Agnus*, and the copper and blitter coprocessors did, but there was rather too much information for me.

 Overall, I'd say this was an even more specialist read than the SNES title. But if are interested in the workings of computer hardware and software, or you were an Amiga owner, I can recommend this book to fill in a lot of the detail from behind the scenes... and take you on a nostalgia trip in the bargain.

 * I've always been puzzled that the chips were supposedly given girls names, but 'agnus' is a male Latin word. I can only assume it was a misspelling of Agnes.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you


Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more