Back in the late 80s, when I was in college, I owned an Amiga 500. The OS booted off of a floppy, but it had loads of memory (relative to all my dormmates PCs), had awesome sound and graphics, and it was all native. Even that was an upgrade from a Commodore 64, so I had yet to even really see a “PC compatible”. With what I could do on the Amiga, I found it difficult to comprehend why anyone would mess around with a PC.
Sometime later I gave some guy on the internet the 500 and some cash and got myself a 2000 with dual floppies and a 40MB HDD. Now I was in the big leagues, with a Motorola 68030 25MHz processor–a real screamer. No, seriously. It was 1990 and that was some serious speed then. That machine was my baby for some time until I eventually got out in the real world and finally got bit by the PC bug. I’ve missed it ever since.
If you know anything about Commodore, you know it’s been bought a gazillion times by as many companies, after each in turn went bankrupt for one reason or another. Eventually, the Amiga faded away into oblivion, despite small pockets of devoted users who to this day somehow manage to keep it’s legacy alive.
Now it seems that the Amiga may have found a new name for itself, with a new operating system and a new hardware platform. Is the Amiga back? We’ll have to wait and see.
Oh, man! I still have an A500 in my garage somewhere. I loved that machine. I eventually upgraded to a A3000 33MHz. The cool thing about the 3000 was that it had a built in Flicker Switch that could be used to convert the video out to a standard VGA frequency. I used my 3000 on a decent Nokia Monitor till 1999-ish. I sold it to some Amiga nut in my local area and now I really miss it. The Amiga OS is still one of the best OS’s to ever have been created. So easy to use and plug and play compatible (before that term ever even existed).
I had an Amiga 500 with the one megabyte upgrade. It came in the “Cartoon Classics” pack – Lemmings (addicted, yes), Bart Simpson vs The Space Mutants (anyone remember that the intro took up the whole of the first disk), Captain Planet (awful game) and the fantastic Deluxe Paint 3. Man, I loved that system, but got really hit hard by a virus :( I gave up on it when I got my first PC back in 1995, and by the time I dug it out of the loft the disk drive was ruined. I died a little that day… Haha.
I had 1MB in my 2000 and it also had extra graphics ram, so it was pretty sweet. I also had a card in it, named something like “Flicker Fixer” that allowed hookup to a VGA monitor at high res without that damn interlace flicker. It was just such an awesome system and so easy to use. I think it really set the stage for GUI OS.
Oh man, Lemmings was the shizzle. My dormmates were addicted to Earl Weaver Baseball and some days we would spend hours having one on one tournaments. Those were the days.
The only interaction I had with an Amiga was the one my grandmother had (she is a computer nut). I don’t remember what kind it was or the name of it, but I know it was Amiga.
I would always go over there and play this sweetass Sinbad game. The graphics blew everything else out of the water. Even though the game was damn near impossible for me I played just so I could look at the pretty (yeah I said that on purpose…’the pretty’).
Isnt the Amiga where Apple got the idea for the mouse and GUI, and the in turn, Microsoft stole from Apple? I may be wrong.
Some of the GUI designers for the Amiga actually helped out in the design of some of the Windows 95 UI (menu bevels, etc).
I’m pretty sure that Xerox was the first to come up with the Windows UI idea.
Don’t get me started about MS stealing from Apple. It is alomst 100% the oposite of what you think. Most of the OSX UI ideas were originally from Longhorn… that’s why MS closed the open Alphas… Aplle accusing MS of stealing ideas from Tiger… bahhh… i’ve lost all respect for Apple because of this.
So if OSX originally came out in 2001, you are saying they did then steal from Longhorn, which in fact is still not released in 2006?
Yes, OSX did have a lot of updates, but if elements are stolen from Windows, how come no one has seen them on a windows machine?