RE: "No, You're Not a Blogger!" (Hive Edition - Meme)
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Oh no, at the time SWOS was released the Amiga had a colour palette of 16.8 million colours with 257,000 onscreen at any one time. PCs at the time had a colour palette of 4098 with 256 onscreen at any one time.
Ironically, those PC stats were where the Amiga was at release.
PCs were crap and Macs were black and white but had a graphical interface.
Computing has come a long way since then.
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Yeah, nowadays every screen can easily support 16M colors.
A $35 on-board computer can outperformance thousands of Amigas at the same time.
That’s true but weirdly not by much. What made the Amiga different was that most of the work was done by hardware not software like it is today. If the Amiga ran on Apple’s silicon using the same setup as in the 80s and 90s you’d see that Amiga blitzing a Mac in terms of raw power. In fact, there wouldn’t be a computer around that could match it. And I’m talking massive supercomputer rigs.
Half the OS was on a dedicated chip. ALL graphics went to the graphics card and ALL audio went to the audio card. This left the CPU doing all the heavy crunching without getting bogged down processing audio and graphics then handing off to the audio and graphics cards.
The Amiga was doing in 14mHz what PCs were struggling to do in 1gHz.
Memory usage was extremely low as a result. I once had 17 apps open including the following:
3D ray trace rendering
Paint application
Web browser
Email client
Word processor
Spreadsheet
A couple of games
And some other smaller apps
All in 3 megabytes of RAM. Try running just one of those these days in the same amount of RAM.
The Amiga was the most powerful desktop computer around but just disappeared because of various CEOs who didn’t understand computers not knowing what they had.
Basically what happened to the Amiga is what happened to early Apple when Jobs got booted out. Unfortunately Amiga never had a Steve Jobs to save them.
That's impressive at the time...
Reminded of the PS2. It also had an impressive architecture that only a few games out of thousands got close to its Hardware Potential.