I recently watched a new documentary about the Amiga years: From Bedrooms to Billions. It’s a $5 Vimeo rental that will be fascinating for anyone who lived through the 1980’s home computer revolution, or who’s interested in retro-computing technology. I was pleased to see a fair amount of technical content, as well as tons of interviews and more general discussion of the Amiga “scene” and the contemporary computer industry. There’s some nice discussion of other period computer systems too, especially the Atari ST series.

Amiga was a Silicon Valley start-up company, founded by Jay Miner and staffed by many ex-Atari engineers. They ran into financial difficulties during development, and were eventually bought by Commodore. The first Commodore Amiga 1000 computer was released in 1985, and its graphics, sound, and multitasking capabilities were far beyond any other home computer of the time, except perhaps for the Atari ST. As a high school student, I bought a second-hand Amiga 1000 system in 1989 and was absolutely stunned by its graphics fidelity. Yet I never really got into programming or hacking with the Amiga, and in my life it functioned only as a fancy game machine. I switched to a Macintosh when I went to university, and never looked back.

The Amiga Years reminds me of a few other nice documentaries about early computer history.

Get Lamp – A two-hour look into text adventure games, their roots in spelunking and Dungeons and Dragons, and especially Colossal Cave Adventure and Infocom. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

BBS: The Documentary – Before the internet was common for home users, there were modems and bulletin board systems. This documentary does a great job of describing the BBS scene, as well as some of the technical backstory surrounding protocols and software that I’d never heard before.

What tech documentaries have you seen and enjoyed?