Having a plan to read a lot of old amiga magazines, and comment on them. Im not sure if anyone will find it interesting, but we'll see.
Basically the plan is to start at the beginning, with magazines scanned from bombjack's amazing site (there's also the amiga magazine rack but they mostly just scan the game reviews)

In a way, a travel through time.
Pretend it's back in the day and we`ll try and experience things as they were.

Starting at 1985, there's two I could find at a first glance, amiga world (which has the distinction of coming out before the amiga was on sale) and .info which seems to have been a commodore magazine previously.


So what do we find in the first two issues of amiga world?


Amiga World 1
First and foremost... you need to read issue 1. The speculation, talk and sheer excitement is hard to understand now.

They have a little introductory chart which leaves out the Atari ST,  but compares with Mac, IBM PC (5150?) and PC AT. Good stuff.

Processor speed is comparable (7 mhz 68000 for the amiga and mac, 6 mhz 286 for the AT, and 4 mhz 8086 for the PC).
Memory you get 256 K in the amiga and AT, only 128K in the mac. Expandable up to 512K for the mac (really? That was all?), 3 megs for the AT and a staggering 8 MB for the amiga.

Disk capacity, you get 880K disks, compared to the piddly 400K on the mac. The AT is boss here with 1.2 meg 5.25" disks.

Of course colour is a foregone conclusion. Monochrome is the standard (16 colours optional if you have an EGA card, which would have been beastly expensive in 1985) while the amiga rocks 4096 colours available (though 32 is normal modes)

Sound is far superior as well of course.

They definately talk up this new fangled space computer.


A lot of talk about the idea of having a graphical user interface. Clearly not something that is considered standard, even though the Mac has been out for a little while.


20 meg hard drive is available pretty much right away. Awesome stuff. Imagine how long it'd take to fill that?


Electronic arts is on board. Big name software from a big company.


Turbo pascal coming next year. To do...whatever it is Pascal does. Im sure that`ll be exciting.


You can subscribe to amiga world with a 25% discount! I`ll have to see if I have 15 bucks in my couch. THis computer is probably gonna be big.


Just to drive the point home, there`s whole pages dedicated to art drawn on the amiga. I am idly wondering what paint program they could have been done with. Was Deluxe Paint out right away?


Not a lot of price lists in the first issue, but some lists of software that will be upcoming. Hope it turns out to be good.


Lots of questions and answers. Very broad so far. Sadly, you can`t use a cassette recorder to save and load programs.

Awesome post! Good luck, remember to get a bunch of AA batteries for that walkman because you will be needing it! I have heard that a movie called Back to the Future is coming out later this year, you know with the kid from Family Ties.

Hells yeah

The sequel to Rambo was cool, and Rocky boxed with Dolph Lundgreen.

"I will break you"

Who'll be the new Bond after Moore ?

Amiga world 2

November and December issue. It`d be nice to get an issue every month.

Observations:


Tecmar makes what I can only describe as a frankenstein tower. This beast plugs into the side of the amiga, and then you stick expansions on top of it. All in all, you`ll end up with a 20 meg hard drive, 20 meg tape backup, a modem (2400 baud!) and 1 meg of extra RAM.

You can tell your amiga is awesome, because with all this plugged in, its 2 feet tall!


Electronic Arts advertising some new games coming out. Arctic fox, marble madness, archon (must be a port), skyfox.


Another comparison article. PC`s and Mac`s suck more for more money. Eat your heart out Apple.
No mention of this new fangled Atari yet.


Amiga Transformer. Emulates an 8086 processor to let you run IBM stuff. Apparently it even runs Lotus 1-2-3. Amazing stuff!


Amiga is totally a business machine. A big article about spreadsheets. When I grow up, I hope that won`t be what I do all day.


Holy crap. There`s a Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy game from infocom. You even get sunglasses in the box.
And you can get a sampler disk with 4 stories on it for only 8 dollars. Can`t argue with that.


MIDI and music software. I guess with this amazing new computer, you can do some pretty neat sounds.


You can also program in C! That sounds pretty professional.



Now, hopefully some games will come out for this computer. Spreadsheets and word processing is great but after all, IBMs let you play Paratrooper.


Stay tuned!

Turbo pascal coming next year. To do...whatever it is Pascal does. Im sure that`ll be exciting.

From the beginning some big names tested the waters (by advertising in early Amiga magazines) . Some got further than others. Wordperfect made it to a finished Amiga product, lotus 1-2-3 and dbase did not (Though I have read that one of these came close). I always thought it would have been killer to show a couple (or all three) of these products running natively on an Amiga at the same time. What 'business' person could not see the value in that? Ah, well... Anyway, Turbo Pascal was a big name at the time, too, and we never saw this either. :-(

Can you tell that I used to regularly read the Bandito's column in Amazing Amiga? Those were exciting days...

Info 9, December 85, January 86)

I guess they dont have the capacity for a November issue. THe front of the article states it's the only computer magazine produced entirely on home computers.


So now we get to where it counts: Amiga vs Atari ST!
The result of course is that the amiga beats the ST out in every regard. Good thing. I guess we'll have to see if Atari steps up their game.
The ST is cheaper but also less capable. The ST compares favourably to the older Macintosh.
But which machine will developers focus on?
Cost or quality?

A reader comments The point I am trying to make is this: The Atari is a very good computer at a terrific price, while the Amiga is a terrific computer at a very good price.


For Commodore freaks, there's a long look at the C128, but that's outside the scope of this look.


Not amiga particularly, but a list of some BBS's you can dial and various services you can subscribe to (CompuServe is 6 dollars per hour during non prime times), Delphi costs 50 dollars to subscribe to, but you get 2 free hours.

There's also a few graphics networks, like PLayNet and QuantumLink. Wild stuff. I wonder if computer networking will become a big deal.


Still mostly Commodore 64/128 articles and whatnot. Maybe it will be a while before the Amiga really kicks off?

Graphicraft was out right away.  I used to demo it to the customers to show off the gfx.

Ah awesome. Do you happen to recall around how much it cost?

LOL!  Too funny Runie!  I have complete or mostly complete sets of AmigaWorld and Amazing Computing. Haven't done so in a while, but I'd take a random issue of either into to "library" with me when making a deposit and flip through the pages. What you said about the sheer excitement being hard to believe now, I disagree with. The Amiga was big stuff back then and the next gen era of computing was just getting off the ground. Totally exciting times, backed up by great marketing on all counts, 'cept for the sparsity on C= behalf maybe. But not at first. Ads a plenty for Amiga and the promise of a new consumer "super computer" was born. I absolutely love flipping through these old mags. I remember not being able to afford a hard drive for my A1000 or A500 back in the day, but sure as **** made sure I was subscribed to AmigaWorld at all times  ;-)    Used to take 'em to high school with me and read during study hall, recess or whatever. :lol:

Someone in another thread recently mentioned EA being a crummy developer or was somehow disappointing. Again, totally disagree. They really stood by, supported and had a ton of great titles at or near the launch. And continued to update their catalogue throughout most of the Amiga's life. I equate EA with quality software for sure, but my only disappointment with them has to do with the fact we were promised a Pinball Construction Set that was never released. Those bastards!  :mad:

By this  time I was probably still on the c64, which had replaced the zx spectrum. I had not yet seen the Amiga light. There where plans about defecting back to Sinclair since substantial drooling had been done over the Quantum Leap, microdrives and all. But instead I upgraded the c64 with a 1541 floppy drive and the QL disappeared from the desire-horizon.

Hope this tread takes a very long time to finish.

Love reading real mags too.

Read ZZAP!64 issue one today and found top 64 C64 games and top 10 C64 duffers....expect 74 new gameplay videos on Youtube soon