Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Kernel on April 28, 2013, 08:46:55 PM
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So how many people here actually still have their classic Amiga setup and use it on a regular basis - i.e. not just sitting there sucking up electricity?
I used to love the Amiga and was a die hard user up until about 1998 when I finally got a job in the IT field and then my system went neglected and I sold it. It was an Amiga 3000 decked out with 16MB SC Zips, a Picasso IV, and pregnant mouse, a Bernouli Box 20MB cartridge system, 32X CD-ROM, and no battery damage at all. I kick myself every time I think about having let it go.
So I got the itch again a few years ago, as I periodically do, and ended up getting Amiga Forever and that of course manifested into purchasing a few A500's and another Amiga 3000. It has very slight battery damage (system appears to work fine but has an occasional crash... but that may be software related), has 16MB Fast Page Mode, a DENEB, a Samsung USB DVD-RW, and NetGear 10/100 USB dongle attached to a Buffalo AirStation wireless adapter.
However, I have a hard time justifying setting it up because of a) space and b) I'm not sure I'd actually use it other than a feel-good tie back to the good-ole days. What makes it worse is that I have a line on another A3K for parts which has 16MB Fast (possibly SC ZIPS) but I'm unsure as to the battery status (the guy has had it stored for years) and he said the system only boots to a black screen. It also has a (apparently) non working Picasso II card and a Emplant board so I'm willing to throw a little green at least to say I had a chance to gaze upon some of this classic hardware.
So what advise can people here provide, if any?
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My 4000D has 1152x864 24-bit Workbench via Picasso IV, Deneb USB with card reader and 10/100 networking, 18GB hard drive (to be 60GB SSD sometime soon,) CyberStorm MKIII 50MHz 68060 with 144MB RAM (128MB on the accelerator and 16MB on the motherboard) which will be replaced as soon as I get my CyberStorm PPC repaired. I have been able to configure Miami Deluxe to VPN into my managed networks. I use RDesktop to work on servers and remote workstations, an ssh2 client to run my Solaris servers, and YAM for my personal email. I don't browse the web on this machine due to the lack of a modern web browser, though IBrowse is often good enough for basic stuff. Using smbfs I have a shares on my Windows workstation and NAS mounted to provide protected file storage where necessary. It has an IDE DVD R/W drive attached to the SCSI controller, though I don't use it that often.
I use this as much as I can. I don't often sit at my desk, so I use my laptop more frequently, but it's there and usable. I cannot really answer whether your investment opportunity is worth it as I'd prefer a working system to start for cash. YMMV.
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Well, if you invest enough time and money, it can still be a very usable system! In my case I can even run the fairly modern OS4.1, a very slow 'version' of Firefox, some great PPC games and things like Dosbox. But, only a very select few use their Classic Amiga as their main machine, I'm quite sure.
Advise? I dont think you should upgrade your machine with the purpose of it becoming your main machine. Just invest what you want to spend time/cost-wise and make sure you have fun doing so.
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So how many people here actually still have their classic Amiga setup and use it on a regular basis - i.e. not just sitting there sucking up electricity?
Me me me me me !
But my classic Amiga is massively more powerful than yours so you may not feel the same as me.
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So how many people here actually still have their classic Amiga setup and use it on a regular basis - i.e. not just sitting there sucking up electricity?
So what advise can people here provide, if any?
Yep I still use mine more than my PC and XBOX 360.
Apart from playing lots of demos (which are still being made). I also love to play old PC games on it like Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB3KPxb2aKY) using ScummVM AGA.
I also enjoy a quick game of Quake 2 AGA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rve4IJRSZxw) and playing through the hundreds of freely available classic games using the brilliant WHDLOAD.
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Man, I've been meaning to put my 1200 to more use, I just haven't quite gotten around to it...I've got a MIDI adapter, a serial tablet, and ethernet, so there's no reason I couldn't use it for a bunch of things, but I've gotten kinda distracted by other projects (and by waiting for the keygen for MIDI Tracker to be built...)
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Now that I've managed to figure out why it was randomly crashing (had all the caps replaced by Amigakit! Thanks guys!), I've been using it a lot more, though I'm still working on getting just the right set up (been through ClassicWB, AmigaSYS4, and Amikit for Real Amigas) and for one reason or another, I have decided that I'm just going to build my own setup from scratch with OS3.9.
I have everything in my system I want, except for perhaps a USB card and an Accelerator, but I'm running with an A4000D, Mediator 4000Di, ZorRAM 128mb, Radeon 256mb (only have half the ram working, will fix it later), 10/100 ethernet and an 80gb hard drive.
I've got a second fan that I'm going to try out in the PSU to see if I can get it to be a bit more quiet, but other than that, it's quite usable for a lot of things.
@LoadWB Any chance you'd be willing to not rape me on a price for that CyberStorm MKIII 50MHz 68060 when you are able to get the PPC fixed? :D
slaapliedje
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I have two setup, but alas I barely use them anymore.....sniff sniff..too many children....
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YES! Amiga 500 very useful for Amiga 500 stuff
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Yuuuuuup!
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@LoadWB Any chance you'd be willing to not rape me on a price for that CyberStorm MKIII 50MHz 68060 when you are able to get the PPC fixed? :D
hehehe I'm generally very good with my Amiga prices for stuff that doesn't go up on eBay. But, as for the CS MKIII, I'm planning to use that in my 3000D. Things may change in the next year, but no promises. If I do decide to get rid of it I'll make sure you're first on my list.
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I have two setup, but alas I barely use them anymore.....sniff sniff..too many children....
Kids love amigas. Every kid I put in front of one cant get enough. Especially with a real joystick and games like Superfrog or something. Use the amigas with your kids then you both have fun!
@OP
Classic Amigas can be very useful if you are into music and/or graphics and video.
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Kids love amigas. Every kid I put in front of one cant get enough. Especially with a real joystick and games like Superfrog or something. Use the amigas with your kids then you both have fun!
I've found that when I put a kid in front of an Amiga, Commodore 64, or even my old TI they love it. One of them navigated Workbench like a pro -- was really cool!
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I used my A1200 every day until late 2004 when OS4 on the AmigaONE started to become usable for an everyday system. I never had a Windows PC until about 2006 when I was required to use one for a college course.
Now I use mixture Of OS4.1 and Windows, mainly because OS4 has no convenient way to watch Youtube and I also sometimes like to watch programmes on BBC iPlayer.
If youtube worked in OS4 web browsers I could probably ditch windows altogether, any creative work I do is always carried out on Amiga OS.
I do still have a CD32 and also have Minimig but they don't get used very often. I think maybe 5-6 years for the CD32 and perhaps late last year for the Minimig.
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The classic Amiga personality when I boot it up is: Lets do something fun and creative. I can't say the same for my laptop. I can easily be distracted by an email, even if I am having some fun and mostly what I do is business. It's stimulating, yes, but not pure fun in any sense. My classic Amigas are sheer joy and fun. I wouldn't never contaminate them with the distractions of web browsing and email. That's business. I turn my Amiga's on to do some art and have some fun.
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Yep, I still use mine quite a bit, although to be honest I cant really articulate why. There's just something about the system, and perhaps its software that appeals to me in a way other systems dont. I dont just mean pcs, macs, etc. either. I used to own an A1, also had a 1.42ghz mac mini running (unregged) MOS, and have an AROS machine orders of magnitude faster that either of the aforementioned systems, yet my a1200 still reigns surpreme as far as Im concerned.
It just does what I ask of it without fuss and can give great results.
This of course depends on what a person wants to do. It's hardly going to be my 1st choice for browsing for example, or watching video (both are tasks I predominantly do under Windows or AROS (depending on which OS my netbook has running at any given time)), but despite what Amiga forum sites try to suggest in NG vs. classic discussions, theyre far from the be all/end all of computing.
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I still use my towerized A3000 fairly regularly. I prefer ImageFX when I need to do some photo editing/manipulation and I still use Bars&Pipes for making music. If I need to edit textfiles there's nothing like CED and YAM is till used for some of my personal email.
But there is nothing I can't do on other platforms. All of these programs run well on UAE and there are of course modern applications for whatever OS is your choice.
I think I still use my Amiga because it's fun and I know my way around the programs and the OS. For me it's quicker to do something in ImageFX than to figure out the same operation in Photoshop or Gimp.
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It seems that modern systems are all for consumption, especially Windows systems. I was always productive and creative on my old Amiga. Can't wait to get an FPGA Arcade and run DPaint again*.
* as a homage to DPaint, GrafX2 somehow comes up horrendously short. It does have some useful features however for pixel work, albeit a nasty user interface.
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I still use my systems daily. Right now, its just my 68010 A2000 with a 40Mb SCSI hard drive and CDROM and indiECS. I use it to code C, play WHD Load, and just generally have fun learning all about amigaOS 3.1. I have an A4000d, but I have no display for it at the moment.
I do often bemoan the cost of the equipment, and sure a WinUAE setup is pretty freaking awesome in terms of raw speed. BUT - there is a sort of je ne sais quoi about the real deal that I enjoy. I'm going to soup this A2000 up as much as I can, and once the recap is done on the 4000 it will get some love as well.
I like seeing what I can accomplish with what I have.
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I've read a few about re-capping... is that recommended for specific models or all models? I was under the impression that unless there is bulging or leaking, caps are fine?
As to the mention of something about having a real machine to do this on rather than an emulator... yeah, I feel the same way. I guess it all just comes down to time availability... ever since I got the "real" job and had kids, all the tinkering and game playing seemed to go to the wayside...
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OK so the itch is getting stronger. I plugged it all in... had to of course tear it apart and reseat everything first though.
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Looks pretty clean too.
As for how useful Amigas are in modern day, I guess it all depends on what you do with them. An A1200 with a CF Card as a hard drive, 030 and some extra RAM plus a wireless PCMCIA card is an ideal set-up for many retro gamers and doesn't cost the earth. Adding a scan doubler/ flicker fixer puts the cost up a bit. Something I am sadly missing, I mostly use an RGB SCART lead on my projector and play my games on a six foot screen. Benefactor sprites never looked so big. :D
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Yes! I use my A500 almost daily, mostly for hardware hacking and seeing what other tweaks I can do on it to squeeze an extra ounce of performance out of it. I love the customizable and open nature of the system. Also there's just something that feels "right" about doing Amiga stuff on an actual Amiga. Always hated emulators, even when I didn't have an Amiga for years I refused to run one, and just kept all my software in storage until I picked up another one. Bit of a purist, I suppose. ;)
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I've read a few about re-capping... is that recommended for specific models or all models? I was under the impression that unless there is bulging or leaking, caps are fine?
SMD Electrolytic caps in A600/A1200/A4000/CD32 are the problem unfortunately. They leak, you can spot the leak by the dull finish on their solder joints. I suppose they could just dry out as well. In any case, those types of capacitors should be changed now if not already done so (they're not supposed to last above a few years anyway).
Lot's of Amiga's are still working fine with the original caps still in place (after 20 years) but it's very wise to check for leakage as any leakage can quite easily damage your board and even write the board off. :(
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Go figure... the Quantum ProDrive LPS 240 in this A3K is apparently going flakey and it will not boot anymore. HDToolBox will recognize it but it cannot properly read the driver geometry nor can it save the geometry information (Error 4 on write!) is what I get. to top that off, it appears to have a random lockup here and there when booted to the 3.1 install floppy and I don't know if it's related to the HD issue or not.
I have some U320 SCSI drives and am waiting for an active terminatior (already have the 80 pin to 68 & 50 adapters) but then I found a thread that IBM drives are a crapshoot and low and behold these are IBM drives that I have sitting around.
The deck seems to be stacked against me... I'm seriously considering parting with this thing. I'll wait until I try the active terminator to see if perhaps it's all related to an outgoing drive but I'm not going to hold my breath.
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Welcome back to amiga, now you start the spending...
Isn't the hd controller in the 3k scsi? I have always hated and never had ANY luck with scsi systems.
I have never owned a 3k or 4k, (But have owned all others) so sorry can't help much with your probs.
:)
Its kinda fun bringing the old girl back to working like it did back in the day
condition. If your not careful though, you'll go off on a tear upgrading it
to crazy levels also.
Just remember, once you go down the rabbit hole, there is no going back. hahaha
I dk, me I gave up on classic hardware but I still occasionally look for a cheap system to start a restore on again. (anyone got a cheap system needing restore? let me know)
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I've had good luck with SCSI controllers for A500/2000 and SCSI in Macs, but when I owned an A3000 it gave me nothing but trouble, so much that I eventually just gave up on it and traded it for my current A1200 setup...
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Go figure... the Quantum ProDrive LPS 240 in this A3K is apparently going flakey and it will not boot anymore. HDToolBox will recognize it but it cannot properly read the driver geometry nor can it save the geometry information (Error 4 on write!) is what I get. to top that off, it appears to have a random lockup here and there when booted to the 3.1 install floppy and I don't know if it's related to the HD issue or not.
I have some U320 SCSI drives and am waiting for an active terminatior (already have the 80 pin to 68 & 50 adapters) but then I found a thread that IBM drives are a crapshoot and low and behold these are IBM drives that I have sitting around.
The deck seems to be stacked against me... I'm seriously considering parting with this thing. I'll wait until I try the active terminator to see if perhaps it's all related to an outgoing drive but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Have you checked the battery??
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Go figure... the Quantum ProDrive LPS 240 in this A3K is apparently going flakey and it will not boot anymore. HDToolBox will recognize it but it cannot properly read the driver geometry nor can it save the geometry information (Error 4 on write!) is what I get. to top that off, it appears to have a random lockup here and there when booted to the 3.1 install floppy and I don't know if it's related to the HD issue or not.
I have some U320 SCSI drives and am waiting for an active terminatior (already have the 80 pin to 68 & 50 adapters) but then I found a thread that IBM drives are a crapshoot and low and behold these are IBM drives that I have sitting around.
The deck seems to be stacked against me... I'm seriously considering parting with this thing. I'll wait until I try the active terminator to see if perhaps it's all related to an outgoing drive but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I wouldn't try a U320 in an A3000. A 1-4gb 50 pin SCSI II drive will work better in such an old system.
And it might not be the drive, it could be the controller on the MB.
It might not be so much money but it will be time and effort. I almost parted with my A2500 a few years ago but instead rebuilt it. The main part was a new MB. And a better SCSI card than the 2091 it came with. It cost some money but it was fun and satisfying to do.
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As to the mention of something about having a real machine to do this on rather than an emulator... yeah, I feel the same way. I guess it all just comes down to time availability... ever since I got the "real" job and had kids, all the tinkering and game playing seemed to go to the wayside...
I only ever use UAE to prep hard drives and get everything I need installed before putting them into real miggies.
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Go figure... the Quantum ProDrive LPS 240 in this A3K is apparently going flakey and it will not boot anymore. HDToolBox will recognize it but it cannot properly read the driver geometry nor can it save the geometry information (Error 4 on write!) is what I get. to top that off, it appears to have a random lockup here and there when booted to the 3.1 install floppy and I don't know if it's related to the HD issue or not.
I have some U320 SCSI drives and am waiting for an active terminatior (already have the 80 pin to 68 & 50 adapters) but then I found a thread that IBM drives are a crapshoot and low and behold these are IBM drives that I have sitting around.
The deck seems to be stacked against me... I'm seriously considering parting with this thing. I'll wait until I try the active terminator to see if perhaps it's all related to an outgoing drive but I'm not going to hold my breath.
This is the easiest solution.
http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?idno_no=324&prod_no=AEC-7732U&type1_idno=6&ino=43
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Have you checked the battery??
I removed the battery long ago... it never had problems booting to the HD until yesterday. :(
And it just booted to the HD no problem. Then I try again and it doesn't.
The caps lock key is blinking slow and steady. Anyone know what that means?
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Kids love amigas. Every kid I put in front of one cant get enough. Especially with a real joystick and games like Superfrog or something. Use the amigas with your kids then you both have fun!
@OP
Classic Amigas can be very useful if you are into music and/or graphics and video.
Agree. Kids and wives. My wife still fires up Loopz every now and then for a late night game. Kids still love Bubble n Squeek.
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It seems that modern systems are all for consumption, especially Windows systems. I was always productive and creative on my old Amiga. Can't wait to get an FPGA Arcade and run DPaint again*.
* as a homage to DPaint, GrafX2 somehow comes up horrendously short. It does have some useful features however for pixel work, albeit a nasty user interface.
I'm not sure what you mean by Windows systems being "all for consumption". To your defense, I haven't tried Windows 8, but Windows 7 certainly has a huge base of productivity software.
I could see the sentiment as being valid if you compared modern systems to, say, Commodore 64, where programming the thing is actually something you have to opt out of after boot, but I have to say that Amiga really isn't far off from modern systems in any way related to productivity.
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The classic Amiga personality when I boot it up is: Lets do something fun and creative. I can't say the same for my laptop. I can easily be distracted by an email, even if I am having some fun and mostly what I do is business. It's stimulating, yes, but not pure fun in any sense. My classic Amigas are sheer joy and fun. I wouldn't never contaminate them with the distractions of web browsing and email. That's business. I turn my Amiga's on to do some art and have some fun.
That's it in a nutshell! "Let's do something fun and creative". I started looking into classic 8 bit computers last year after a report on BBC Click some time before. Later still, I realised I could hardly remember what I did on Amigas over a period of about 10.5 years, so that meant I had to buy one to undo the brainwashing. I soon bought a copy of Deluxe Paint III and started creating some computer graphics again, which I'd hardly done since buying a PC. I started with Photon Paint, which was included with my first Amiga, though. I thought that I needed to persevere to get the hang of Windoze or Linux graphics software, but I was wrong. It seems that no Windoze or even Linux graphics software works much like or as well as Deluxe Paint or Photon Paint. People talk a lot about Photoshop, but it seems hardly anyone knows how to use it. Just the name should tell you that it's for photo editing, not creating your own graphics. I think the GIMP is just as difficult and user unfriendly. I've used Paint Shop Pro, but didn't work with it for long.
I hope to move on to creating something else on the Amiga apart from just graphics in the near future.
As for the faulty components mentioned in this thread, my newly purchased GVP Impact Series II HD8+ stopped working after 5 days. I suspect the hard drive itself isn't the problem. Please check my thread about this and make any suggestions about what you think may have caused this. To sum up, the HDD still spins, the drive read light still lights up, the extra RAM is still detected, but the GVP installation software says it's a Quantum HDD of 0Mb capacity.
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64684
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The classic Amiga personality when I boot it up is: Lets do something fun and creative. I can't say the same for my laptop. I can easily be distracted by an email, even if I am having some fun and mostly what I do is business. It's stimulating, yes, but not pure fun in any sense. My classic Amigas are sheer joy and fun. I wouldn't never contaminate them with the distractions of web browsing and email. That's business. I turn my Amiga's on to do some art and have some fun.
That's it in a nutshell! "Let's do something fun and creative". I started looking into classic 8 bit computers last year after a report on BBC Click some time before. Later still, I realised I could hardly remember what I did on Amigas over a period of about 10.5 years, so that meant I had to buy one to undo the brainwashing. I soon bought a copy of Deluxe Paint III and started creating some computer graphics again, which I'd hardly done since buying a PC. I started with Photon Paint, which was included with my first Amiga, though. I thought that I needed to persevere to get the hang of Windoze or Linux graphics software, but I was wrong. It seems that no Windoze or even Linux graphics software works much like or as well as Deluxe Paint or Photon Paint. People talk a lot about Photoshop, but it seems hardly anyone knows how to use it. Just the name should tell you that it's for photo editing, not creating your own graphics. I think the GIMP is just as difficult and user unfriendly. I've used Paint Shop Pro, but didn't work with it for long.
I hope to move on to creating something else on the Amiga apart from just graphics in the near future.
As for some comments here about faulty components, please read my thread about my GVP Impact Series II HD8+ with the hard drive that stopped working 5 days after I got it if you haven't already done so. http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64684
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I've tried a few times to go back to classic hardware... about 10 times. I tried an A3000, A1200, A1200 with accelerator, A1200 with Accelerator and Scan Doubler, just about everything. I even tried MorphOs on a powerbook. But in the end I gave into the simplicity of WinUAE.
Although I admit if MorphOs ran on modern hardware and wireless worked without a USB wireless adapter, I would have actually used it daily.
As for the classic stuff... no way... just too clunky. Don't get me wrong, I love it, I would sleep with an A1200 under my pillow, but on my desk it's just too much space wasted with not much return.
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I'm not sure what you mean by Windows systems being "all for consumption". To your defense, I haven't tried Windows 8, but Windows 7 certainly has a huge base of productivity software.
I could see the sentiment as being valid if you compared modern systems to, say, Commodore 64, where programming the thing is actually something you have to opt out of after boot, but I have to say that Amiga really isn't far off from modern systems in any way related to productivity.
I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I think there has been an increasing push towards computer-as-consumption-device in the last decade and a half - and while I think it's only gotten really bad in recent years, it was already starting to be a trend when Windows XP came out (as fond as I am of XP, look how many steps were taken into "media integration" with it, as compared to 95-2k. Hell, it was the version where they introduced a dedicated "Media Center" version of the OS.) Nowadays it's apparently expected that an operating system will auto-index all your media files into a master library, auto-play any CD or DVD you drop in the drive, auto-everything so that you barely have to get up off the couch to be a media consumer.
Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a lot of great productivity software available for Windows (which is why it's taken me so long to even consider switching some of my pursuits over to my Amiga,) but the emphasis has shifted, and continues to shift. And while the Amiga is just as great a games machine as it is a productivity machine, I think Hattig's point holds true, because it was out of the mainstream well before that shift began to take place.
When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles. And we did use it for productive and creative work; my brothers and I drew stuff in MacPaint, or created doofy stories in Storybook Writer and Opening Night. We got our first electronic piano and my mom took up sequencing and printing sheet music on that Mac. And this was the norm back then. None of us were "computer people" at the time, and only my next-younger brother and I really ever became "computer people." We were all just ordinary people exploring the potential this new environment had to offer.
That's not really true anymore. "Average users" don't create, they only consume. (We're told as much - repeatedly - by advocates of consumption devices like tablets.) Nowadays, I'm pretty much the only member of the family who does anything more creative than my taxes on my computer; my brothers play games or read Cracked, and my parents read the news or hang out on Facebook. There's been a shift, and I think I'm the only one who's even noticed. And even I have more trouble getting myself in a creative mood on my modern systems.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just psychological; maybe putting myself in an old environment causes me to revert to the old mindset. But there's just a certain je ne sais quois electronic-muse that vintage computers have and modern computers don't.
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I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I think there has been an increasing push towards computer-as-consumption-device in the last decade and a half - and while I think it's only gotten really bad in recent years, it was already starting to be a trend when Windows XP came out (as fond as I am of XP, look how many steps were taken into "media integration" with it, as compared to 95-2k. Hell, it was the version where they introduced a dedicated "Media Center" version of the OS.) Nowadays it's apparently expected that an operating system will auto-index all your media files into a master library, auto-play any CD or DVD you drop in the drive, auto-everything so that you barely have to get up off the couch to be a media consumer.
Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a lot of great productivity software available for Windows (which is why it's taken me so long to even consider switching some of my pursuits over to my Amiga,) but the emphasis has shifted, and continues to shift. And while the Amiga is just as great a games machine as it is a productivity machine, I think Hattig's point holds true, because it was out of the mainstream well before that shift began to take place.
When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles. And we did use it for productive and creative work; my brothers and I drew stuff in MacPaint, or created doofy stories in Storybook Writer and Opening Night. We got our first electronic piano and my mom took up sequencing and printing sheet music on that Mac. And this was the norm back then. None of us were "computer people" at the time, and only my next-younger brother and I really ever became "computer people." We were all just ordinary people exploring the potential this new environment had to offer.
That's not really true anymore. "Average users" don't create, they only consume. (We're told as much - repeatedly - by advocates of consumption devices like tablets.) Nowadays, I'm pretty much the only member of the family who does anything more creative than my taxes on my computer; my brothers play games or read Cracked, and my parents read the news or hang out on Facebook. There's been a shift, and I think I'm the only one who's even noticed. And even I have more trouble getting myself in a creative mood on my modern systems.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just psychological; maybe putting myself in an old environment causes me to revert to the old mindset. But there's just a certain je ne sais quois electronic-muse that vintage computers have and modern computers don't.
QFT. It is actually the "clunkiness" that keeps me coming back. I turn it on, work through some C stuff, actually wait on the compiler (I have yet to wait on GCC even on my P4!), and am actually rather productive on it.
But yeah - I agree about computers as appliance. There seems to be little room left for people who don't want that, unless you like Unix. And if you don't? You're SOL. Unix/Linux is actually boring to me these days. Amiga fills a nice niche. Its that je ne sais quoi!
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A rant. (http://www.commodorejohn.com/consumption.php)
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A rant. (http://www.commodorejohn.com/consumption.php)
That's a great read! As a musician and programmer, I get to meet a lot of people who use their computers for producing original and interesting stuff, so my idea of it all might not be very representative of the whole. I don't think this is caused by computer technology -- the real cause is capitalism and consumerism. Capitalism is the angle and the ubiquity of information is just the magnitude. Capitalism reinforces the idea that whatever you do for a day job (whether you're a fireman or a telephone salesperson) is more valuable than whatever you'd spend your time doing being jobless (whether you're picking your nose or creating great art), and the idea that in your free time you might as well just stimulate the market in various ways.
The technological shift towards consumption I think of mostly as an adaption to the market, but if you get into the cybernetics of the thing, it's also very much the consumers approaching technology in the way they were taught to approach it.
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@commodorejohn
That is exactly how I see things. In fact, I've been wanting to get my printer working with my A4000D so I can start writing on it instead of my PC, where there are far too many distractions. With Windows 8 especially, it's become purely a "me too" application store.
It's also why I dislike Android so much. People have become only what their search parameters are to Google.
I think for most people that still use the Amiga, it really is a shot back to the days where there was some magic in computers, and they weren't just another appliance sitting around waiting for someone to look up the newest fail compilation on Youtube.
slaapliedje
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The magic of the toaster flyer editing system is still great!
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When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles.
That was much more true for Apple than C64/Atari 800 and later ST/A500. When I was a kid (C64 era) computer gaming was already huge, "productivity" was the line we gave our folks to justify buying us the things. Console gaming was for the peasants. :-)
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The magic of the toaster flyer editing system is still great!
The beauty of it is you can teach a 12year old to edit on it in an hr! And the full setup looks like you are a mad wizard :)
@ commodorejohn
nice post. agreed
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When I get my first amiga running, I plan on using it as my daily driver. My BORING comodity UBER gaming pc will get dusty and be used when I have to. We have thousands of times more power today, and it's used to run (mostly) crap.
Whether it's crappy coding (stalker, skyrim) or just crap (GTA4) this platform is going to waste !
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As a musician and programmer, I get to meet a lot of people who use their computers for producing original and interesting stuff, so my idea of it all might not be very representative of the whole.
Well, like I said, the capability for creation is definitely still there (even if my theoretical "muse" is missing and that makes it harder to focus.) But I think we are seeing a shift in emphasis.
The technological shift towards consumption I think of mostly as an adaption to the market, but if you get into the cybernetics of the thing, it's also very much the consumers approaching technology in the way they were taught to approach it.
Precisely. That's the primary difference between my family in the early '90s and Family X getting their first computer today - not that we were part of some creative elite, oh-so-much-better-suited to these pursuits (well, my mom was a pretty good pianist, but other than that,) but that Family X lives in a culture where they have been taught for years that they exist primarily to be consumers of product distributed by media conglomerates.
That was much more true for Apple than C64/Atari 800 and later ST/A500. When I was a kid (C64 era) computer gaming was already huge, "productivity" was the line we gave our folks to justify buying us the things. Console gaming was for the peasants. :-)
Well, yes and no. There was definitely a thriving gaming scene, and computers-as-entertainment as an idea goes all the way back to the '60s and the PDP-1. That said, you'll note that you still had to convince your folks that it was for something useful or creative. The expectation was still there, even though you were shirking it :D And I've rescued multiple C64s that came with as much productivity software as they did games, so people were using them for doing stuff in addition to gaming.
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Sure you could do real work on them (even I had a copy of GEOS), but by and large the C64/A500 were marketed as game machines, and were often scoffed at in the computing world because of that. The software sections at all the major chains, toy stores, etc, were filled with games, and comparatively little productivity. Walk into a mall Software Etc, and you'd see an A500 running a game demo. At least up until the mid-late 80's, people who had the money and considered the computer primarily as a tool bought IBMs (which had better suited displays for that anyway), or maybe an Apple.