The mac was probably the closest equivlent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.
The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right.
The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos
Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).
My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.
My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.
I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.
I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.
I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.
(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/
Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9
As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.
However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.
Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background.
And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music.
I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.
Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.
> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.
Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.
> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).
GenXer signing off.
P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I mo longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so.
Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.
By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.