Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
Amiga 1000：领先时代十年的杰作
On July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as a 1980s computer. There were 1970s computers and 1990s computers, and it was the Amiga that dragged the rest of the industry into the 1990s.
1985年7月23日，Commodore公司推出了Amiga 1000电脑。不得不说，当时的世界还没做好迎接它的准备。曾参与后期型号研发的Commodore工程师Dave Haynie曾表示，所谓的“80年代电脑”根本不存在。当时只有70年代的电脑和90年代的电脑，而正是Amiga将整个行业强行拖入了90年代。
Ten years ahead of its time
领先时代十年
A typical Amiga 1000 setup in 1985 cost nearly $2,000 at the time. Living in the future was expensive. It is not hyperbole to say the Amiga 1000 was 10 years ahead of its time. Its custom chipset had color graphics with up to 4,096 colors, stereo sound, a graphical user interface. Its operating system had full preemptive multitasking. The combination of the chipset and the operating system meant it could run on a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.14 megahertz and 256 KB of RAM. And it could boot and run off a single floppy drive. Amiga demonstrated it in January 1984, when the chips existed only as prototype circuit boards. By the end of 1985, it was a shipping product.
1985年，一套典型的Amiga 1000配置售价接近2000美元。生活在未来是昂贵的。说Amiga 1000领先时代十年绝非夸张。其定制芯片组支持高达4096色的彩色图形、立体声以及图形用户界面。其操作系统具备完全的抢占式多任务处理能力。这种芯片组与操作系统的结合，意味着它仅需一颗主频为7.14 MHz的摩托罗拉68000 CPU和256 KB内存即可运行。它甚至可以通过单张软盘启动并运行。Amiga在1984年1月就进行了演示，当时芯片还只是原型电路板。而到了1985年底，它已经成为了一款正式发售的产品。
Realistically, an ideal configuration had dual floppy drives and 512k of RAM, and a megabyte was a lot nicer. But dual floppies and a meg of RAM wasn’t an outlandish machine in 1985, and in that configuration, it was smooth and pleasant to use. Commodore commissioned artist Andy Warhol to demonstrate it by using it to create digital art to show off its capabilities.
实际上，理想的配置是双软驱和512KB内存，如果能有1MB内存体验会更好。但在1985年，双软驱加1MB内存的配置并不算离谱，且在这种配置下，它的使用体验非常流畅舒适。Commodore还曾委托艺术家安迪·沃霍尔（Andy Warhol）使用该电脑创作数字艺术，以展示其强大的性能。
Multitasking: The Amiga 1000’s secret
多任务处理：Amiga 1000的秘密武器
Graphical user interfaces weren’t exactly new in the summer of 1985. Apple had introduced the Macintosh about a year and a half earlier, and the Lisa predated even that by nearly a year. Atari released its ST computer three months before the Amiga, and the ST also had a graphical operating system with a mouse and color.
1985年夏天，图形用户界面（GUI）其实并不算新鲜事物。苹果公司在大约一年半前推出了Macintosh，而Lisa电脑甚至比它还要早近一年。雅达利（Atari）在Amiga发布前三个月推出了ST电脑，ST同样拥有带鼠标和色彩显示的图形操作系统。
It was multitasking that put the Amiga on the map. And it wasn’t the cooperative multitasking that Windows 3.0 and 3.1 did or Apple System 7 did. It was full preemptive multitasking like Windows 95. The only thing Windows NT did that the Amiga didn’t was memory protection.
正是多任务处理让Amiga脱颖而出。它采用的并非Windows 3.0/3.1或Apple System 7那种协作式多任务处理，而是像Windows 95那样的完全抢占式多任务处理。Windows NT唯一比Amiga多出的功能就是内存保护。
The Amiga’s operating system wasn’t based on Unix and it certainly wasn’t based on Windows NT. Its direct ancestor was an operating system called TRIPOS that originated at Cambridge University.
Amiga的操作系统并非基于Unix，当然也不是基于Windows NT。它的直系祖先是一个源自剑桥大学、名为TRIPOS的操作系统。
Adding memory protection would have been a nice touch, but the additional required hardware would have increased costs. And the Amiga at its debut was not exactly inexpensive. The base system cost $1,295 without a monitor. A color monitor, which you definitely wanted, cost another $300. Add the additional memory and a second floppy drive for another $150 to $200 each, and you soon learned the Amiga you really wanted was more like a $2,000 computer. Living in the future was expensive, but compared to the $2,495 Apple wanted for a less capable machine, the price wasn’t unreasonable.
如果能加入内存保护会更好，但所需的额外硬件会增加成本。Amiga在首发时并不便宜。基础系统不含显示器售价为1295美元。你肯定想要的彩色显示器需要额外支付300美元。再加上额外的内存和第二个软驱（每个需150到200美元），你很快就会发现，你真正想要的Amiga配置其实接近2000美元。生活在未来是昂贵的，但与苹果公司为性能较弱的机器开出的2495美元价格相比，这个价格并非不合理。
Living with an Amiga
与Amiga共处的时光
I’m not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn’t able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great.
我不确定在1987年之前是否亲眼见过Amiga，但仅仅通过阅读相关资料，我就知道我想要一台。直到1991年我才如愿以偿，所以我入坑相当晚。但即便是在1991年，Amiga依然给人一种生活在未来的感觉。我可以同时加载多个程序并轻松切换，唯一的限制就是内存大小。我可以用终端程序连接BBS，开始下载，然后将其切换到后台，打开文字处理器写作业，同时下载还在继续。在某些情况下，我甚至可以在后台下载的同时玩游戏。我可以在玩《文明》的同时下载文件，这感觉棒极了。
Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable. But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue.
起初，Amiga以不稳定著称。但这很大程度上是因为早期的Amiga软件编写得不够好。当时的软件倾向于直接请求资源，并假设资源一定可用。如果资源不可用，它不会优雅地报错退出，而是直接分配资源，导致“Guru Meditation”（大师冥想）错误——这是Amiga版的蓝屏死机或内核恐慌。只不过它是红色的，而不是蓝色的。
But it wasn’t long before the software developers learned how to write code that behaved in this brave new world. Certainly by the time I was in the scene in 1991, the software generally behaved very well. When I bought a Windows PC in 1994, it felt like a serious downgrade. If I treated it like an Amiga and launched a terminal program, connected to a BBS, started download, and then switched over to Microsoft Word, it didn’t always work reliably. More often than not it was fine. But something would crash often enough to make me hesitate doing something I took for granted on an Amiga.
但没过多久，软件开发者们就学会了如何在这个勇敢的新世界中编写规范的代码。到了1991年我入坑时，软件运行状况已经非常稳定了。当我1994年购买Windows PC时，感觉就像是严重的性能倒退。如果我像对待Amiga那样在PC上运行终端程序、连接BBS、开始下载，然后切换到Microsoft Word，它并不总是能稳定工作。虽然大多数时候没问题，但偶尔发生的崩溃足以让我对那些在Amiga上习以为常的操作产生顾虑。
People ask me all the time when PCs caught up. It didn’t happen all at once. And it wasn’t until 1995 that all the pieces were there.
人们总是问我PC是什么时候赶上Amiga的。这并非一蹴而就，直到1995年，所有关键要素才真正齐备。
Why the Amiga makes me mad
为什么Amiga让我感到愤怒
And that’s why I almost everything about the Amiga makes me mad. With a good product marketing team behind it, it would have been the greatest computer of all time. When anyone asks its engineers why they built it, they tell you things like they wanted to build the very best computer that they could with the technology that was available to them at the time. That’s how engineers think, so it’s a perfectly good answer, engineer to engineer. But that answer doesn’t sell. You have to come up with something about wanting to change the world. And you have to word it in a way that sounds believable if you are going to attract a mass audience. Apple does that very well. Microsoft was never as good at it, but they were better at it than Commodore.
这就是为什么关于Amiga的一切几乎都让我感到愤怒。如果背后有一个优秀的市场营销团队，它本可以成为史上最伟大的电脑。当有人问工程师们为什么要制造它时，他们会说，他们只是想利用当时现有的技术制造出最好的电脑。这是工程师的思维方式，作为同行，这是一个完美的答案。但这个答案卖不出去。你必须提出一些关于“改变世界”的愿景，并且必须以一种令人信服的方式表达出来，才能吸引大众。苹果在这方面做得非常好。微软虽然不如苹果，但也比Commodore强得多。
Commodore didn’t have a Steve Jobs or even a Steve Ballmer. They had an oligarch named Irving Gould who was only interested in looting as much from the company as possible as he ran it into the ground. It is a testament to the quality of the product Commodore had that it took him a decade to do it after Jack Tramiel left the company and left him unchecked to rob it blind.
Commodore没有史蒂夫·乔布斯，甚至连史蒂夫·鲍尔默都没有。他们只有一位名叫Irving Gould的寡头，他只关心在把公司搞垮的过程中尽可能多地掠夺财富。Commodore的产品质量是如此之高，以至于在Jack Tramiel离开公司、任由Gould肆意洗劫之后，他竟然花了整整十年才把公司彻底搞垮。