Retrospective of the Amiga Walker
Wobbling on stubby quadrupedal legs like an Imperial beetle bot, the Amiga Walker was Commodore's last ditch attempt at popularizing their flagging line of personal computers before pulling them off the market. Retro Thing has a retrospective, making the point that many of the Walker's features — a fun, mainstream, internet-ready computer with a unique design — were later applied with great success by companies like Apple:
An innovative feature that folks seem to have forgotten about was that the top section of the Walker was designed to lift off, so an end user could easily sandwich in hardware expansion modules for things like hard drives, advanced graphics boards, and whatever other magic the Amiga's vibrant 3rd party community could dream up. Fun computing and easy end-user experience weren't mainstream ideas in 1996.Only a few years later these ideas wouldn't seem so ridiculous when Apple launched the first iMac. The Mac Mini also has some of the Walker spirit in that many of its hardware accessories are available in the same miniature case style and footprint, so you can stack up components on your desk in a neat and compact package. It's a shame that while Mac's design departures earn Apple magazine covers and financial rewards, it seems that the history of the Walker will forever be relegated to the trashcan that people said it resembled.
Walker: The Amiga That Never Took Its First Steps [Retro Thing]
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Amiga (was it even Commodore in around 1994 - I'm not sure) licensed their hardware for some pretty interesting things: Virtuality's 3D arcade gaming system was based on dual A3000s (fond memories of Saturday mornings at Luna City in Piccadilly Circus) and I worked with someone who sold rugged computers based on an A3000 chassis and which got quite a long way through British Army acceptance testing. Had Commodore not curled up its toes at the wrong time the Amiga might have been a contender still today.
Commodore was indeed defunct by the time the Walker was developed in 1996. What was left of Commodore was bought by Escom LTD of Germany in 1995 for a paltry $14 million. Escom was the company that developed the Mind Walker, as it was known, protoype. It never got out the door because Escom went belly up the following year. Viscorp, which attempted to buy the Amiga assets at one point, wasn't interested in the Mind Walker and neither was Gateway when they purchased the Amiga assets for the patents.
wow- i've never seen that one before... integrate the drives into the body and it's styling would still be modern and relevant today.
It looks like Pupshaw! http://www.jimwoodring.com/pupalbum.html
I always felt that the Amiga was the Mac's poor cousin. In fact when moving from the Amiga to something newer, the Mac seemed the logical choice, if only they weren't so expensive at the time I might have never owned a Windows PC.
Quite Brave Little Toaster-esque, wouldn't you say?
#5 Marshn: When did you feel that way? For most of its brief life, the Amiga line had superior hardware and a more advanced (arguably "better") OS than the Mac.
Too bad they couldnt be bothered to/decided not to disguise the of the shelf CDROM/floppy drive, otherwise this might have been a nice design.
Hi everyone,
I had an Amiga 1200 and before that I had a Timex 2068 (when computing was funny and games were addicting).
Nowadays it seems that programmers don't squeeze the machines like they used to.
And users are no longer "into their machines".
Although this is about the Amiga, how many of us who had a Spectrum(or Timex in my case), would make small programs and use those peeks and pokes.
That was fun.
Kind regards,
José