Eon is an astonishing Amiga demo released a few years ago. It runs on a bog-standard Amiga 500, a machine that first saw the light of day in 1985. Here’s how it was made.
Andreas shared a comparison that will make it clear to any developer on a modern machine just how much slower the Amiga 500 is compared to a modern machine.
Let’s MD5 ~800Kb data, using reference RSA MD5 code.
- On an old, but modern, Surface Laptop 2 that took 2ms.
- The Amiga 500 took 29 seconds.
This CPU is more than 10,000x slower than the CPU in your PC or Mac.
One of my WordPress plugins will do an MD5 calculation of the URL on every request, and it’s like nothing. It’s not a big job for a web server to do. An Amiga could not do that.
However, it can, in the right hands, seemingly perform miracles and create cool looking demos that even today impress! There’s something to be said for programming in a constrained environment.