As an old-school Amiga fan, this was really interesting to read. I never heard of this model, but I was aware of the ST line and even had an acquaintance in high school who owned one. Reminds me of the Amiga 4000. Released in '92 and a significant advancement on the earlier hardware (including the 68030 or 68040 CPU), but ultimately doomed to fail in the face of boring PC competition.
I loved the Falcon. I bought one the moment they were available in the UK. Having 4MB RAM and the hard drive felt like real power! And the 1.44 FDD too.
MultiTOS was a massive disappointment, but thankfully the Falcon was powerful enough that you could cram normal TOS full of desktop accessories that did loads of awesome stuff! From DSP mod/ym tune players to memory resident text editors. I loved the way you could create really nice desktop layouts with colorful icons and wallpapers :) I even had Fonteer as an AUTO app that changed the default font to the Mac one!
For me, it was a creative powerhouse and I loved making stuff on it. Some of the software was truly next-gen, such as NeoN and Apex Media. You're right about the choice of case, although to be fair Amiga did almost the exact same thing with the A1200.
Also, I've no idea if anything ever used the DSP port on the back :) I certainly had no hardware for it! But that SCSI-II port? That was sublime - with chained external Squirrel HDD drives, a CD-ROM and an iOmega Zip Drive. Plus of course being connected to a nice crisp SVGA display.
It lasted me for a good few years before the PC finally sunk its teeth into me. I still own a Falcon030, although it has been upgraded to 14MB, has a brand new PSU and has been re-capped.
Too little, too late? Yes, probably. Really, the STE should have been the Falcon hardware. But by then, the writing was on the wall.
The ET4000 chip for PCs came out in 1989/1990. It had 24-bit color at 640x480, 16-bit color at 800x600, and 256 colors at 1024x768.
The year after that, in 1991, the S3 chip came out, which had the same modes, had hardware sprites, and could even do 1280x1024 albeit at only 16 colors.
And the year after that, in 1992, Castle Wolfenstein 3D was released, with real-time first-person perspective 3D.
It was when the S3 came out that I saw the writing on the wall. I remember waiting year after year for the blitter upgrade for my 1040ST -- and never getting it, at least not before I had switched to PCs, which happened in 1988 professionally, and 1990-1992 personally.
I did mention multitasking with Amiga OS in a footnote. I don’t know much about Amiga OS, so I can’t speak its multitasking capabilities, but compared to Windows and Mac OS, MultiTOS was impressive in my opinion.
So that means there was a eight-year gap between Amiga and PC (Windows NT) for preemptive multitasking in the mainstream (i.e. excluding UNIX, MINIX, XENIX, Linux, and OS/2). But from what I understand those earlier non-mainstream OS's had a greater installed base and selection of software than MultiTOS.
I moved from the Atari 8 bit line to the Amiga in 1987. Not simply for the multitasking os - but because it seemed to be the true successor to the 400/800, which the ST line did not. I did have friends with ST and loved the MIDI functionality out of the box, but the Amiga bested it in just about every way. By the time both the Amiga and ST lines had move to next gen, I’d already moved to the PC and Macintosh world.
As an old-school Amiga fan, this was really interesting to read. I never heard of this model, but I was aware of the ST line and even had an acquaintance in high school who owned one. Reminds me of the Amiga 4000. Released in '92 and a significant advancement on the earlier hardware (including the 68030 or 68040 CPU), but ultimately doomed to fail in the face of boring PC competition.
I loved the Falcon. I bought one the moment they were available in the UK. Having 4MB RAM and the hard drive felt like real power! And the 1.44 FDD too.
MultiTOS was a massive disappointment, but thankfully the Falcon was powerful enough that you could cram normal TOS full of desktop accessories that did loads of awesome stuff! From DSP mod/ym tune players to memory resident text editors. I loved the way you could create really nice desktop layouts with colorful icons and wallpapers :) I even had Fonteer as an AUTO app that changed the default font to the Mac one!
For me, it was a creative powerhouse and I loved making stuff on it. Some of the software was truly next-gen, such as NeoN and Apex Media. You're right about the choice of case, although to be fair Amiga did almost the exact same thing with the A1200.
Also, I've no idea if anything ever used the DSP port on the back :) I certainly had no hardware for it! But that SCSI-II port? That was sublime - with chained external Squirrel HDD drives, a CD-ROM and an iOmega Zip Drive. Plus of course being connected to a nice crisp SVGA display.
It lasted me for a good few years before the PC finally sunk its teeth into me. I still own a Falcon030, although it has been upgraded to 14MB, has a brand new PSU and has been re-capped.
Too little, too late? Yes, probably. Really, the STE should have been the Falcon hardware. But by then, the writing was on the wall.
The ET4000 chip for PCs came out in 1989/1990. It had 24-bit color at 640x480, 16-bit color at 800x600, and 256 colors at 1024x768.
The year after that, in 1991, the S3 chip came out, which had the same modes, had hardware sprites, and could even do 1280x1024 albeit at only 16 colors.
And the year after that, in 1992, Castle Wolfenstein 3D was released, with real-time first-person perspective 3D.
It was when the S3 came out that I saw the writing on the wall. I remember waiting year after year for the blitter upgrade for my 1040ST -- and never getting it, at least not before I had switched to PCs, which happened in 1988 professionally, and 1990-1992 personally.
Was MultiTOS really that impressive for the time, seeing as AmigaOS offered preemptive multitasking in 1985?
I did mention multitasking with Amiga OS in a footnote. I don’t know much about Amiga OS, so I can’t speak its multitasking capabilities, but compared to Windows and Mac OS, MultiTOS was impressive in my opinion.
More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga)
So that means there was a eight-year gap between Amiga and PC (Windows NT) for preemptive multitasking in the mainstream (i.e. excluding UNIX, MINIX, XENIX, Linux, and OS/2). But from what I understand those earlier non-mainstream OS's had a greater installed base and selection of software than MultiTOS.
I loved OS/2, which is what I switched to in 1995 after the ST.
I moved from the Atari 8 bit line to the Amiga in 1987. Not simply for the multitasking os - but because it seemed to be the true successor to the 400/800, which the ST line did not. I did have friends with ST and loved the MIDI functionality out of the box, but the Amiga bested it in just about every way. By the time both the Amiga and ST lines had move to next gen, I’d already moved to the PC and Macintosh world.
And today, I have an Amiga 500 mini that I game on, but pretty much MacOS for everything minus work, where I’m forced to use Windows 10.