No, I did not give him an Amiga. I actually started him on an Amiga A500 about 15 years ago, then he bought his own A3000D and used that for about a year before wanting to move to an x86 compatible computer. He then bought an eMachine and has used it for the past 10 years, so I guess it was time for him to upgrade. My sister and I have been writing him back and forth for the last couple of weeks and finally convinced him NOT to get the computer that the local shop around the corner from him was trying to sell him. He then wanted to buy another eMachine from WalMart for about $500 including a 17" LCD monitor. It has a 1.6ghz Celeron CPU and 1gb RAM with Vista Home Premium. This was slightly better than the computer shop around the corner, but not by much.
My siblings and I had already bought my Mother (divorced from Dad long ago) a iBook several years ago and then later an iSight camera so she can do video conference calls with my younger sister in New Zealand, older brother in Orange County, CA and older sister in Long Beach, CA, so we were trying to convince dear old Dad to get a Mac so he could do the same. He could not see the advantage of spending twice the money for a Mac to get the same performance as he could get on a PC. Also he wanted to keep using his Windows version of a family tree program.
To make an end to this long story, I found and won an auction on eBay for a 17" Intel iMac at $610 for Dad last night and will be going to visit him soon to set it up and show him how I can help him long distance via sharing the desktop with iChat. Hopefully that way my sister or I can help him if he has any troubles. Also, I will install Parallels and set it up for him to run his Windows family tree program transparently from the MacOS desktop.
Just a boring story about old people that still use computers. :-D
