Classic Amigas - Still Useful?

[Linde]

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.

[Linde]

A rant.

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.