The Beginning

[Naeem]

Good Call!

My first Amiga must have been the A500, after years of owning C64 in various forms.  I remember owning it, cant recall for the hell of it what happened to it though, but I can recall a golden era of game playing with loads of controllers and gimmicks etc.

The next Amiga I bought was the last.  I was one of the first to jump on the A1200.  It was quickly accompanied by the the Zappo CDROM, a 3.5" HDD (Internal), The obligatory 1.76M Ext Floppy, a Citizen swift 24 pin printer (Colour Dot matrix rules!!), the Microvitec multisync monitor.  I think the last thing I did, shortly after commodore went bust, was to buy the last ever Sensible Soccer :-(.  Though I had grand dreams of going PPC, I didnt see where it was going, it looked to me back then like the proprietary PPC code from the major board makers wouldnt amount to much.  Also having zero SW support for them outside of these proprietary extensions was very off-putting.

At some point around then I walked away.  Years of owning no "computer" at all (of course my console inventory was going through the roof over this time!).  Then various bouts of x86 laptops mostly on linux.  I do like XP pro a lot though and now have a desktop running it + cygwin + UAE.

Recently I sold my setup on ebay, finally c. 12-13 yrs of owning it.  House was completely full of console related crap, and it in away was responsible for it all, so I thought a little FIFO was in order.  When listing I noticed a few other setups and instantly recognised some of the oldie goodies with them, and wondered where they all went.  The bug joystick, the Zipstick, One of those shoot at the screen guns, all these toys :-)  Its only then I recalled my A500 and The Beginning.  A Beginning before the A1200.

When I do go PPC it will be on an A1 with OS4.0  I'll probably tweak it to make it a silent server box and its primary use will be to host my website.  Does anyone know if OS4.0 supports remote connections? A la RDPv5 on XP Pro or any linux / X11 fwding via ssh?   In any case I am happy for it to remain Debian until the OS has matured.  Would beat running cygwin anyway.  The rational chap inside me is telling me to grab AROS on a mini-itx board,  (http://www.mini-itx.com/ - and you guys thought the Walker looked whacky :-) Check the Teddy and picture frame) it'd cost a whole lot less and would do what I need it to do.  But do I want PPC to pass me by?

Decisions decisions.  Whoever said lifestyle computing would be easy? (fun even :-) )

How much was the A1200? 300GBP rings a bell.  In fact all of the major peripherals were about that mark, the multisync monitor, the CDROM, the printer.  Kids dont know how good they got it these days!

[Naeem]

All those drugs in the late 70's / early 80's!  :-)

Now I remember! For a while (before the C64 era) I did have a Vic20, I can picture myself playing some cartridge based game, Defender ? It was F**** A, back then :-)

And one of those atari things, the original console, one of those is somehwere in distant memory too :-)

But yeah in terms of Amiga-specific history I think thats covered above :-)


One thing though,  dont you guys see what made the old Commodores / Amiga sell?  Value.  Plain old fashioned value.

Though the HW wasnt anything to write home about, it certainly was not substandard, the SW was so lean it kicked ass :-)  

The key was that the price was many-fold lower than competitors products that were in some cases under-specced (even if we just took a HW view!)

Seems to be in direct contrast to todays A1 situation.  There are similarities.  We are still trying to use the OS to leverage some gains out of recent HW.  The thing that is missing though is value.

It costs more and we can do less with it.  If it really was carrying on the legacy of those early machines then OS4 would run on the cheapest boards and have capabilities exceeding any top-end ix86 system.  Could that happen today?

I dont think so.  I think competitors OS's arent as wasteful as they were in the old days, and hence we have lost a major competitive advantage.  Just the nostalgia / anti-mainstream sentiment that is fuelling sales now.

AROS might live up to this though.  We'll have to see how it turns out.

:-)

[Naeem]

Hmmm.

A few good points.  I havent used AROS so cant contribute any comments towards it.

You are right a lot of the Amiga revival is based on denial.

For me however the lure is in seeing the birth of an alternative OS.  I would love for Amiga OS to become feature-rich and push forward OS design, as WB did in previous years.

Not likely to happen if any growth is strangled before it is realised with oppressive HW regimes.

It needs to be targeted at a wider user base, perhaps the entire alternative OS market.  Moreover it needs a model that will make it money so that it can afford to continue to evolve.

Both of these I dont think are objectives of the propietors yet.