As my first contribution to the CRYPTmag, an opportunity that has so kindly been offered to me by one of the Editors (Ian Fyvie AKA The Ferret) and the approval of the rest of the members as well (although with some doubts! ;-) I am going to start writing about my own firsthand experience with desktop computers, and with our beloved Amiga in particular.
I would not start introducing myself right away in here in the usual formal manner due to one basic reason: there is not much to say in that respect that would be worthy of a mention so early and lengthen this article unnecessarily. Besides, I am sure via the scattered explanations that I will be giving throughout this piece of writing and other works that I will be doing for the CRYPTmag in the future (hopefully!) readers (if any!) will surely get to know who I am, what I do or have done in my life, as well as how I do or don't think or feel about everything. (A full paragraph of self-introduction that was after all though, wasn't it?) ;)

OK now, I own a number of Amigas today. Some work, some don't, and of those that do work, only a few work fully! (But none I wish to part with at any price, unless I find someone(s) who would take them for a keepsake the way I myself or many other Amigans have been doing -at least- since the demise of Commodore nearly a couple of decades ago.)
Anyway, the first Amiga computer I got myself (which I still own and it works still finely enough too) was an A500 model I bought in the year 1990. However, the first Amiga computer I worked with and fell for albeit after quite some consideration and hesitation was an A2000 I had my hands on in a workplace. (What, "consideration and hesitation" when falling in love? What kind of dude is this one!?)

+ My First Amiga A500 +

I was working as a member of staff of an Audio Visual department in a university in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. My duty alongside my colleagues was to produce educational videos as well as photographic transparencies and prints that were to be made for students or professors to be used in their thesis or lectures and similar events. This was late in the year 1986 if I can still recall it right and of the various old and new equipment that we used in the department that had been left badly misused or unused in the previous six or seven years after the revolution in that country, one was a then state of the art video mixing desk or a "switchboard" (neither quite a deck nor a console, yet!) plus a couple of fancy mini video (tube!) cameras that were still capable of giving reasonably high quality and true color pictures. (The entire equipment was not so long later replaced with the latest digital technology of the time though but let's not get into that at this moment.)

Of the interesting items that were to be found on that mixing desk was something called a genlock, which sounded really peculiar as most of us very young men at the time (I was 27 years old then and more into photography) were almost quite new to video, professional video in particular. We got to know what a genlock was when a while later we watched a demo videotape of some Sony video studio products among which a really nice desktop computer was also being shown. In the demo video, that computer served as a 'member' of the video studio's team of cameras and a cool portable yet professional deck to control all those fancy equipment including that even fancier computer.

I had been using and working with a friend's Sinclair Spectrum 48K computer for a few years already by that time and had some more or less clear ideas of how a more powerful computer could be used to do motion picture titling effects as well as animation among other things. There were in fact quite a few such programs available on the Sinclair (or Commodore 64 and other home computers of the time too) but they were limited in many respects, not so many colours to work with being the major issue. And this 'thing' in that demo tape sounded like the one indeed: there was a glimpse of some nice looking moving graphics and the console-type desktop machine itself looked not only attractive but also did show so many input / output jacks and sockets and stuff all around the box in a couple of quickly passing short shots.
I was more akin to computers than most of the guys in the crew as far as having hands on experience with home computers went. There was another guy who studied computer as a side course in the university and was even familiar with some BASIC programming but did not use a computer extensively (and was quite a help with the computer later) so I insisted, even pushed the crew into talking the (dental) university in whose AV department we were working into buying that Sony computer also, which they eventually did.

So, now there I was with this beauty in my hands as the others put me on going through its manuals and a number of programs that came with it so that we could put it to good use for the department's needs. I will get more into this amazing machine later, preferably in another dedicated article but let's suffice it to say that the only graphics program that was available with the machine, Graphics Editor, came on a floppy and was a BASIC program (open source!) and could do a lot of things, well, considering the graphic editor programs of small computers of the time at least, but its major drawback was its palette that was limited to only 16 fixed-non-changeable-colours. And yes, this wonderful 8-bit with a Z80A CPU-Ed also had a genlocker unit, amongst many other items, built-in!

Pic 1. Sony SMC 70GP (Front View)

The word Genlocker (in red) is on the right hand side above the keyboard, beneath the floppy drive.

Yes, that must be the light pen lying on the keyboard.

Anyway, long story short, as I was trying to get this machine's nice but limited potentials graphics editor program to help us do animations of any kind, and a couple other guys were also helping in that respect too (by using the computer's own BASIC program to move 'sprites' that we painted using the GE program already mentioned) but it soon proved that although the machine itself was indeed a great piece of computer engineering ("the best in its class" according to some Amiga resources I got to know of later) its hardware as well as the graphic editor program that came with it were no match with the Amiga that was already out in the market, but we were not quite aware of its presence yet.

Pic 2. Sony SMC 70GP (Rear View)

And so it was that one day this young lad showed up from another university's AV department and brought with him an Amiga 2000 with a stereo 1084 monitor. And with it, also came a number of floppy diskettes with some amazing programs on them that put the poor Sony machine not only into shame but also into oblivion! In fact, the SMC70GP ¹ Sony machine, although a superb professional system, was already a dead one since any developments for it by Sony had been stopped even at the time we bought it from the dealership. (Its user manual however, gave all the information as how to develop new software or even hardware for it.)

Anyway, what came with the A2000 machine at that time, was the FantaVision animation and sound program, Deluxe Paint III, Sonix, Deluxe Music, Sculpt Animate 4-D and of course a number of games and other things, which we got to know later as we started to and continued using this great system. There was the mouse too of course that facilitated not only the computer operation itself but also served for drawing and painting with the graphic programs. And as for a GUI OS and multitasking powers of the Amiga, well the Sony was a stone-age system in comparison by being still stuck in a text only operating system (CP/M) and the ability to run only one program at a time!

The Amigan readers of these lines do not certainly need me in here to explain the almost limitless capabilities of that A2000 setup and the joy we all had working with that machine but I can tell only this and close this article: for a couple of years, we used that Amiga with only two floppy drives, no accelerator boards, and only the 1MB Chip RAM that was installed on it to produce many educational animations and titling effects that we mixed in with the videos or pictures we made for the university.

Yes, you read it right: One Mega Bytes of graphics memory ONLY!

Well, of course what helped us so greatly to comfortably do rather large size / long time animations (in 32 colour / low resolution that is of course) was the video equipment we had at hand that let us 'splice' all the small bits of animation together when editing the final works and mixing with the video.

What became of the other "beloved" Sony machine?
Well, both its built-in genlock (which did have provisions for input AND output) as well as its great 14" professional studio monitor served more than well on the Amiga. Perfect match! There was also another piece of equipment that we had obtained for the Sony computer: a 4096-colour frame grabber add-on (with some other extras built-in) that also proved to be a great companion for the Amiga 2000! (No wonder then why Sony was one of the first proposers to Commodore to buy the Amiga at the height of its success in late `80s!?)

Pic 3. Sony SMC 70GP (Right-Hand View)

If fully connected with all the cabling that this little wonder could handle on its so many input / output sockets, it would sure look like a spider web or something!

Pic 4. Sony SMC 70GP (Left-Hand View)

RGB in / out, 8 bit stereo sound in / out, printer port, and what not?

¹ Footnote:
" SMC70GP" stands for Super Micro Computer 70 Graphics Producer

That's all for now folks. More to Follow.

Shahbaz Parsipour AKA dada.