Guesses on amount of people related to amiga.(this includes all ages and all countries)

[Liluh]

In reply to your comment.

You`re right. I can guess that in early 90`s there were around 100.000 or more Amiga users in Poland, but that can be hard to verify as it was also the time when whole computer market here grew in its early days of capitalism freedom and everyone bought everything produced in the west That doesn`t mean Amiga was not a beloved and noble one of course, as plenty of tv stations, companies and even in some cases government used Amiga computers. As for TV stations, including the most powerfull at that day Public TV. It`s a know history when sometime in early 90`s this TVP showed some championship in football and during that high-time of viewers something went wrong in the studio and Scala screen apeared. Someone from Scala or their dealers seen it and looked up all the info about customers finding that no one from TVP every bought a single copy. Few heads fell. Anyway, I don`t quite remember but Poland didn`t yet have, or had it for a very short time anti-piracy law. Everyone copied every software or game and sold it where ever they wanted to. I remember big computer shops selling games this way by just adding a paper bag and sometimes color printed screen from the game. Golden days of piracy ;P

But getting to the point, I`m completly sure that there were around 60.000-70.000 Amigans in 1996 and still at least 40.000-50.000 in early 1998. The ammount decreases eversince and now I`d guess there`s no more than 3.000 of active Amiga users + 15.000 of users with Amiga under their beds, in wardrobes etc. That`s becouse there`s no Amiga printed magazine since ACS which went down in 2002 and therefore people have no access to news, contact with other users and being abondoned in such state they go for PC or Mac. All that remains is community gathered in internet around various sites, IRC channels and such, as only there they can get known of still prospering companies, other users and fresh news from Amiga world. I believe that also a number of those without net access remain hidden in the shadows of unknown market territories

[Liluh]

Oh, that had to be in later years. I mean the stuff with top secret operations like games list in the back of the shop. In my days they just put it up on the shelfs with a brief description and picture. Some of the more decent shops, living from hardware mainly, had real original software and games, not many though. I always wondered becouse all those boxes stood there for years covering with dust and just rarely someone bought it. Nevertheless, there were few companies, with the biggest IPS (big games dealer and producer now, under different name though) which published original titles under licenses in original boxes and they even made it to earn for living and further investments in the future. Anyway, I remember buying pirated  Lightwave on sth around 16 diskettes, with xero`ed manual togheter with my A1200, these were the last days when piracy wasn`t prohibited.  About that 200mb HD. I had 120mb in my a600 2mb ram and I really couldn`t fill it to the limits back then. Later it appeared usefull, as around 1999 I took that amy from wardrobe and thanks to early miami, connect it to internet. I could use amirc, yam and ibrowse, just one at a time though Other thing is, that when I wrote something (and I write pretty fast)  and finished, I could sit back and observe how for at lest 30 seconds more it appeared on the screen letter by letter