Ancient Web: Nicholas Blachford Documented the Amiga Walker He Owned

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Nicholas Blachford was lucky enough to acquire a computer that never reached a shop. Then he did something almost as useful: he took photographs and explained exactly how unfinished it was.

Visit Blachford's Amiga Walker pages.

The Walker was a proposed successor to the Amiga 1200, developed by Amiga Technologies in 1995–96. Its strange, curved case attracted comparisons with a vacuum cleaner or a science-fiction helmet. Blachford says only two prototypes were fully assembled, and one eventually passed to him through an auction.

His page separates the intended machine from the actual prototype. The planned specifications included a 40 MHz Motorola 68EC030, CD-ROM drive, expandable memory, and a new custom chip called Toni. The photographed machine had a 68030 board, 16 MB of fast RAM, and plenty of signs that development had not reached production.

The cracks are part of the evidence

Blachford describes patch wires on the motherboard, a fragile plastic case, awkwardly positioned ports, and makeshift internal supports. Removing its hard drive required substantial disassembly. The device could sometimes begin loading Workbench, but ordinary startup might end in a boot loop or disk error.

The archive includes images of the internal construction, notes on alternative case drawings, and information from a Walker FAQ dated March 30, 1996. Its owner also records a successful demonstration at an Amiga show in Aachen in 2002. These are firsthand observations supplemented with period documentation, not a claim that the prototype represented a finished shipping design.

The larger Blachford homepage retains other material from the personal computing Web: BeOS and Amiga software, a 1999 concept called Super Palm, technology event reports from 2002–04, and a 1997 links page. In 2009 the author recalled a 2005 article on the Cell processor that attracted large traffic following a Slashdot mention; the numbers are his own reported statistics.

The Walker gallery, last substantially dated in 2004, gives the site its most distinctive artifact. Commercial histories tend to list what manufacturers shipped. Owners of prototypes can show what the companies almost built.

Explore the Walker photographs and development notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.