Hi all!
Sorry if this has already been reported: ArsTechnica ran a series on the Amiga and its last installment, entitled
"A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs. Blue" includes an interesting comment by Dave Haynie
I wouldn't exactly say my heart was broken... I was just fed up with all the vultures and crooks trying to get a little taste of the Amiga's mouldering body before the bones turned to dust. Or something along those lines.
There were too many wanna-bes fighting over a tiny little bit of possible sales, and more often than not just ripping off Amiga fans. One big strength of the Amiga experience has always been the community, the users who became nearly as passionate about their computers as they did their art, their music, their video, etc. Those are the people who really deserved better, and I didn't want to be any part of another promise to them that some idiot wasn't going to let me keep. But I never gave up on the community.
Things have actually got much better lately. Kind of like the boardwalk in Asbury Park... if something on value to enough people gets bad enough, it doesn't take a whole lot to get it going back in the right direction. Trevor and A-EON didn't create the weird situation with PowerPC and Amiga, but they're the real deal, they're not trying to rip anyone off, just deliver some kind of new Amiga without going to deeply into debt. And it's a good time for it, because the originals are starting to fail. It has been decades. There are a bunch of projects, like the Vampire accelerators, the Amiga chips and other things being built in FPGAs, building classic Amigas from scratch again, in one form or another. I'm expecting an "Amy-ITX" to arrive at my house in the next few weeks.
Sure, Amigas may never be a big business again. Without real ongoing OS development, it's kind of frozen in time here and there. Then again, they seem to have got multiprocessing on AROS last year... only 24 years after Randell Jesup and I tried to something abotu that at Commodore with the Gemini project.
Keep the faith,
-Dave Haynie
The whole article (and series) is also worth reading
Happy reading!
