Forget the Apple Macintosh, Ridley Scott, and “1984.” As computer launches go, we’ll take the Commodore Amiga, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry.
In January 1984—as the entire Western World is well aware—Apple unveiled the Macintosh with its Orwellian “1984″ ad during the Superbowl, directed by Ridley Scott. But it was soon eclipsed by Commodore International, the company behind that seminal personal computer, the Commodore 64.
In 1985, Commodore unveiled its Macintosh competitor, the Amiga 1000, at no less than the Lincoln Center in New York City. A live orchestra preceded a demonstration of the machine’s 3-D animation, and Andy Warhol used the machine to whip out a digital painting of Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry (see the video above). You can watch the whole event on YouTube (see the video above).
It was a stunt of epic proportions, in more ways than one. “The paint program (ProPaint) being used was a very early alpha, and the software engineers knew that it had bugs in it,” Jeremy Reimer wrote in his epic history of the Amiga for Ars Technica. “One of the known bugs was that the flood fill algorithm—the paint program didn’t use the hardware fills that were demonstrated earlier—would usually crash the program every second time it was used.”
What the heck is a flood fill algorithm? Let’s just say it’s something Andy Warhol needed to paint Debbie Harry. And the app didn’t crash once. “This is kind of pretty,” Warhol said as he finished his digital masterpiece. “I think I’ll keep that.”
The painting isn’t all that impressive by today’s standards. But in those days, Warhol’s stunt was state-of-the-art.
The Amiga was the first computer that used separate chips for graphics and sounds, which meant that it could do each better than anything else on the market. Its operating system could juggle multiple tasks at the same time using a technology called preemptive multitasking–something Apple and Microsoft didn’t match for over a decade. And most importantly—at least for Warhol’s purposes—it could display 4,096 colors at once, providing photo-realistic graphics at a time when most computer displays were monochrome.
Despite its power, the Amiga was much cheaper than the original Macintosh and even typical IBM PCs. It kept that edge over the years, garnering praise from musicians, digital artists, and animators. Warhol used the machine quite a bit, and recently, some of his Amiga art resurfaced from the ’80s.
Along with the Atari ST and the BeBox, the Amiga provided artists with an alternative to the Apple and Microsoft operating system duopoly. But Commodore was never able to capture the bohemian demographic from Apple. In fact, the Amiga was plagued by problems from the start, as Reimer documents. After Commodore rushed the machine to market, it was plagued by bugs and instability that continued to tarnish the brand’s reputation long after they were fixed. At the same time, poor marketing and company management kept the machines both out of stores and out of mind.
Commodore folded in 1994. But much like the iconic Commodore 64, the Amiga never really went away. Several companies have tried to revive the brand over the years, most recently the UK-based company Amigakit. Its spirit lives on in Amiga compatible operating systems MorphOS and AROC, as well as in DragonFlyBSD, a fork of FreeBSD created by former Amiga developer Matthew Dillon.
The Amiga’s legacy even includes that “guru meditation error” message you may have seen on many websites—including, occasionally, WIRED. What started as an in-joke at Commodore eventually became the Amiga’s standard error message. Years later, the team behind Varnish, an open source tool for speeding up web servers, adopted the message, spreading the meme across the web. That’s cool. But not quite as cool and Warhol and Harry.
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