From humble beginnings, a technical icon grew
The second documentary from Anthony and Nicola Caulfield of Gracious Films is now available. And instead of looking at the history of British influences on the gaming world and the technology behind it, it’s time for one of the most iconic home computers ever developed: the Amiga.
As with the original From Bedrooms to Billions, the documentary starts with the humble beginnings of what would become a machine far beyond its time. It opens with late Ralph Baer, inventor of the Brown Box and credited as the father of videogames, then moves on to interviews with Joe Decuir, Larry Kaplan and Trip Hawkins, providing the history of Atari and how the key players in the history of the Commodore Amiga found their place.
The emphasis here is on the innovation that brought a diagram drawn on graph paper to something physical, in the form of several sizeable breadboards with a multitude of criss-crossing wires. The real genius from there lay in the fact that the hardware engineers, most notably Jay Miner, took this prototype for a new computer and turned it into the multimedia chips used in the Amiga.
There are numerous account of how Atari changed its management structure and how through one way or another, various people eventually decamped from the company and came together under the Hi-Toro brand, which was later renamed to the Amiga Corporation.
It’s an extremely engaging history, with its fair share of ups and downs, and the Caulfields manage to keep the flow of the story without reducing the core of the documentary to the vilification of one party or another.
Toward the end of the first half of the film, you get a real sense of just how precarious the future of the Amiga computer actually was. And with that, an idea of how very different things could have turned out.
It also covers the tumultuous relationship between the Amiga and Jack Tramiel’s Atari – complete with his philosophy of “business is war”. Again, it’s an eye-opening account of what happened at the time from the people who were in the firing line.
The second half of the documentary looks at the software side of the Amiga, the gaming in particular, but also the demo scene and some of the more iconic programs that musicians and artists of the time used. Here we see just how advanced the Amiga really was, in that the programmers of the day could create some incredible things with the hardware at their disposal.
The documentary instils the sense of the pioneer, from the early days of the foundation of Atari to the view of the Amiga circuit diagram written on a whiteboard – which is something that’s often talked of during the interviews.
Just like the previous film, this documentary pitches itself perfectly to those of a certain age, as well as enthusiasts and those interested in history, without stretching itself too thinly over its two and half hours running time.
In short, for a mere £3.99 rental or £10.54 purchase, From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years is an engaging and thoroughly interesting exploration of an influential and iconic computer. David Hayward
Another superb exploration into our technical history.