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A history of the Amiga, part 4: Enter Commodore

Part four of our series on the history of the Amiga covers Amiga's rescue by …

The announcement


The master of ceremonies was Commodore marketing vice president Bob Truckenbrode, but he soon gave way to the real star of the show: the head of software engineering, Bob Pariseau. With his long hair elegantly tied back in a ponytail, Pariseau directed the demonstration like a maestro conducting a symphony. With each wave of his hand, he would signal his counterpart, sitting at a real Amiga 1000, to demonstrate each new feature.

Robert Pariseau
Robert Pariseau

"At Amiga, the user controls how he uses his time, not the computer," Pariseau said, as his assistant showed the flexibility of the then-new graphical user interface. He then brought up a graphical word processor called TextCraft to show how a GUI could be applied to everyday work: the word processor featured menus, toolbar buttons, and an on-screen ruler for setting margins and tab stops. Pedestrian stuff for 1995, but astounding for a decade earlier!

Then he moved on to showing off the Amiga's graphics capabilities, showing all 4,096 colors at once on the same screen, followed by a close-up photo of a baboon's face in 640 by 400 resolution: an image that many people might remember gazing at in VGA monitor advertisements from the early 1990s.

Baboon picture
It's looking at you!

From static images, he moved on to the Amiga's strong suit: animation. The custom chips included hardware commands to flood fill arbitrary areas: those who remember using flood fill in Photoshop on older computers will remember how slow it was when it had to rely on the CPU. The Amiga's hardware-accelerated version filled up multiple rotating and intersecting triangles with different colors as they spun across the screen, all at a constant 30 frames per second. Another animation demo, Robot City, showed the Amiga's built-in sprite and collision detection features, allowing large animated characters to move over complex backgrounds and interact with each other.

Hardware triangles
Hardware flood fills

None of the demos were taking over the entire computer to do their magic. Each full-screen demo could be smoothly slid down to reveal other running applications beneath.

The concept of multitasking was virtually unknown for personal computer users in 1985, and Bob went through several examples of how this feature could be used not just for entertainment but for business applications as well. A bar chart and pie chart were built simultaneously from the same numerical data, and the user could quickly switch from one window to another to see the results in either format.

Moving on from graphics to sound, Bob demonstrated the four-channel synthesized sound hardware by using the keyboard as a virtual piano playing various different sampled instruments. "With all four channels going simultaneously, the 68000 [CPU] is idle," Pariseau commented, something that would not be true for many years in other computers until sampled waveform sound cards became available for PCs. A close-up of the Amiga operator at the keyboard showed his fingers shaking slightly—there was a lot riding on these demos, and the software was brand new and still largely untested. Yet the Amiga performed masterfully in its first time on stage, without crashing once.

The next demonstration was of computer-generated speech: the Amiga spoke in a male voice, a female voice, a fast and a slow voice, and all were pitch-modulated to sound more like a real person; the last voice was spoken in a monotone, "just like a real computer." This line got a good laugh from the audience.

Even back in 1985, the market was already showing signs of standardizing on the IBM PC platform, and Bob acknowledged this fact in his speech. "You know, it's hard," he said, "it's hard to be innovative in an industry that has been dominated by one technology for so long. We at Commodore Amiga knew that to do this [introduce a new platform] we had to be at least an order of magnitude better than anything anyone had ever seen.

"We've done that," he continued, "and then we decided: why stop there? Why not include that older technology in what we had already done?" Thus was set the stage for the very first IBM PC emulator on the Amiga, called Amiga Transformer. The program was started up, then a PC-DOS installation disk was placed into an attached 5.25 inch floppy drive, and this was replaced with a Lotus 1-2-3 disk. "Standard, vanilla, IBM DOS," Bob said with a sigh, and the crowd laughed again. Compared to the exciting graphics and sound demos of a few minutes earlier, it was a bit of a letdown seeing the industry standard spreadsheet take over the screen.

To lighten the mood, Bob finished off with a replay of the original Boing Ball demo that was first shown at CES only a year earlier. "We've lived our dream," he said, "and seen it come to life. Now it's your turn. What will you do with the Amiga Computer?"

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