Will Amiga ever live again?

[drwho]

I have to agree with something Jettah said a few posts back, I think that the Amiga is more than the sum of its parts alone.

Like many folks, I started with the Amiga very early. I had owned many systems and also worked on larger systems professionally (PDP-8, PDP 11/23, VAX, Sun, SGI, etc), but none of them ever seemed to compare to the Amiga.

When people talk to me about the Amiga, they ask what it is that still drives me with the machine after all these years. I can't explain it to them. I don't know why tinkering with my StartupSequence is so much fun, I am not exactly sure what the attraction is to writing ARexx scripts for interprocess communications between my applications is. I don't exactly know why I get such satisfaction when I am goofing with C on the Amiga and I can make a new window that doesn't do anything. I am not sure why I think that it's important to mention to people that Datastorm is written in 100% assembly language. I am not sure why DPaint is still a great graphics application. I am happy that I know what blitter and copper means and that non-Amigans don't. It's unclear to me why, even though I think WinUAE is a wonderful emulator, I believe that nothing beats the experience of working on a real Amiga.

Maybe it's just that I don't want to be another regular guy, running Windows because it's what everyone else does or a Mac or Linux because it's the "next best thing".

Just my 2 cents,
Mike

[drwho]

You can find Datastorm on Back To The Roots. It is one of the ones that has been legally released to the public AFAIK. You ca grab the .adf file and use something like adf2dsk or some other tool to unpack it to floppy.

Datastorm is in the middle of the page here:
http://www.back2roots.org/Games/ADF-Games/D/

Have Fun!!!
Mike

[drwho]

downix wrote:

Remember, Commodore at that time was plotting on abandoning the classic OS for Windows NT.

This is a really good point. When you think about it, it's a good thing that Commodore went belly-up when it did. I am sure that none of us would have wanted to live in the radically changed, "post-intuition" world that could have come from the above mentioned event.

-Mike

[drwho]

I don't disagree with your argument, but, I think the reason that the Amiga in its original incarnation is no longer with us is part of a much bigger problem than whether or not Microsoft's products are any good or not.

I think the real issue has more to do with a growing need in the late 80's for a more unified desktop platform solution. Microsoft did have one thing that most other companies didn't, and that was an understanding of what was needed, whether or not they implemented it correctly is of little consequence really.

The point I am trying to make (poorly, I might add) is that someone was going to come up with the "we need a standard desktop platform" idea. We could just as easily be sitting here hating the Linux people, or the BeOS people or even Commodore if history had worked out a bit differently.

Although, the above argument certainly doesn't excuse C= from its obvious neglect in its handling of the Amiga market.

- Mike