POLL: Which word, in your opinion, best describes AMIGA today?

[amigadave]

Active community = A.org, AW.net, Amigans.net, EAB.org, MorphZone.org, etc., etc., etc.,

New hardware available = SAM440ep & flex, Efika, Deneb, Minimig v1.1, IndivisionAGA 1200&4000/CD32, etc.

New applications and games = too lazy to look them up and create a list.

New Amiga related projects = NatAmi, GBA1000, porting AmigaOS4.x to Pegasos2 and MorphOS3.0 to MacMini, plus many more.

I can't remember any year out of the last ten years that we have had more activity in the Amiga community than 2008 and first 5 months of 2009.

With all of the above happening, how can anyone vote DEAD?

My vote = ALIVE!!!

[amigadave]

It's all semantics.

Different definitions for what constitutes an "Alive", or "Dead" computer platform.  Certainly no one thinks the Amiga is anywhere close to what it once was and I think The_Leander was being way too generous with his estimation of Amiga users today.  I would be pleasantly surprised if there were half that many and suspect that the actual number is closer to 20% of his estimate, or about 2,000 people worldwide that actually still turn on and use an Amiga computer, another 450 to 500 that use MorphOS and I don't have an educated guess of how many people out there use AmigaOS4.x, but I also suspect that almost all of the AmigaOS4.x and MorphOS users are included in the number of Amiga users anyway.

So, even though I voted that the Amiga is "Alive", due to recent activity and just because there are ANY of us left using Amigas and writing programs for Amigas, I can see how my definition does not apply to the many people that have replied that the Amiga is "Dead".  I don't agree, but I understand their definition and reasoning.

[amigadave]

@orb85750,

Well, my numbers, as clearly stated in my post are MY OWN estimates, and not hard figures, which I don't think anyone has verifiable information on an exact count of how many Amiga users are left out there.

AmigaWorld.net claimed to have about 3000 members a couple of years ago, which I doubt that they have gained in membership since then.  More likely, their membership has declined, just like everything else in the Amiga community.  Not all of their current members use their Amiga computers, as I can remember quite well the several years that I visited these, and other Amiga forums on a regular basis just to keep abreast of what was going on in the Amiga community, but had all of my Amigas packed away and never turned them on. I think it is safe to assume that most members of Amiga websites belong to more than one site.  Even though this is the site where I visit and post messages most often, I must be a member of at least half a dozen other Amiga related websites.

Then I got bitten again by the Amiga Bug and started collecting a massive amount of Amiga hardware & software and using them again.  Note that I didn't say there are only about 2,000 Amiga owners in the world, rather I wrote that there are probably only about 2,000 people that use their Amiga computers (on a regular basis).

If you look at the attendance records of any Amiga events over the last 5 years, the number of active people that post on this and other Amiga forums and participate on Amiga related irc channels, it seems fairly obvious that there are not 10,000, or more ACTIVE Amiga users out there anymore.  It is a great shame what greed and power hungry egos have done to decimate our once great community of over 300,000 to 500,000 users & programmers that I am sure we probably still had at the time Commodore went under, and maybe close to 1,000,000 users & programmers we probably had at the height of the Amigas heyday.

[amigadave]

bloodline wrote:

OS4, MOS and even my beloved AROS are nothing more than trying to give us what we already had 15 years ago... but on more modern hardware, so we can keep it with us.

So you think there are no new features, functions, or capabilities in AmigaOS4.x, or MorphOS, beyond what was available in AmigaOS3.1?  I think the developers of those two OSes would disagree, as well as the 800 to 1,200 users (guesstimate).  Do you own and use an AmigaOS4.x, or MorphOS computer?

This is not progress, this is life-support at best... nostalgia at worst.

The Amiga is a dead computing platform... if we want our community to survive then we need to focus on what is really important... without the delusion of grandeur that plagues the ranks.

The delusions of grandeur for the Amiga are limited to a few dozen at most, and not the majority of the remaining Amiga owners that still enjoy using their old or new Amiga computers and I don't even want to get into a discussion about "what is really important....." on a computer forum, but since you put it out there, why don't you try to explain (in your opinion) "what is really important........" to help our Amiga community survive?

For me, the prefect system would be a 68k AROS based AGA clone in an FPGA (Like a minimig but with AGA...)... that would be a nice system to have... Thus I await whatever Jens has planned with the CloneA project.

To each, their own.  I am a bit more interested in seeing what can be accomplished by the NatAmi team than I am in a 68k AROS AGA clone.  I think the NatAmi team has its sights set at a much higher goal as their target, and even if they do not reach all the way to their objectives, I think they will produce something better than a 68060 based Amiga with just the standard AGA capabilities.

[amigadave]

@bloodline,

Nothing personal, but your responses are getting so predictable.  If you don't have a good retort, you just try to deflect the question with a completely unrelated answer.

What does a crappy £199 PC from curries have to do with the questions I asked you?  Nothing!  You stated that "OS4, MOS and even my beloved AROS are nothing more than trying to give us what we already had 15 years ago...", which is not true.  The developers have advanced beyond what was available on an Amiga 15 years ago and continue to add more modern features with each release, just like any other OS, but obviously at a slower pace due to resources.  Just because those systems are not competing directly with Windows PCs, does not negate the progress that has been made, however slow or small.  The progress is useful for those of us who do use AmigaOS4.1 and MorphOS2.2 systems, so again I will ask, do you own and use any of these NEW systems that you are so quick to criticize, or call DEAD.

In response to my assertion that only a small group of the Amiga community has delusions of grandeur and my request that you explain what you meant about what is "really important to our community", you wrote: "Our community only has one generation left now, so lets just enjoy it  in 10 years the Amiga will be a footnote in history books".

I think people that make predictions like they know what will happen to the Amiga community (or anything else) in the future are having the delusions of grandeur, but I will do as you suggested and enjoy our community for the next ten years and as many more as I choose to participate in with this crazy group.

Then the funniest comment of all, in response to my preference of NatAmi over your less than vaporware 68k AROS AGA project that I have never heard anyone even mention before this, but is supposed to be somehow related to Jens' CloneA project, you again try to deflect the validity of my opinion and compare the NatAmi to your much loved £199 PC.

Just because you are caught up in the whizz-bang world of PCs that think they must have the shear number crunching CPU power to complete a zillion computations per second and to keep up with the competition the latest hardware must be used, because everything that came before it is now crap and therefore useless, does not mean that everyone would be better off following the rest of the lemmings off the cliff with their money every couple of years.

If there is some new application that I just have to buy because it is going to make my life so much better and it will only run on that £199 PC you are so hung up on, then maybe I will take a look at it, but I haven't seen or heard of it yet, and since it will probably only be written to run on Windows, as that is the dominant OS for your £199 PC, it will really have to be an application that I can't live without to get me to buy another PC of any kind, because I can not tolerate Windows problems any more and will not be spending any more money on any MS operating system or software.  What I can't find for MorphOS, I will find for MacOSX, or Linux.

Again, nothing personal about this message, I just don't believe your previous arguments had any meaning to them.

[amigadave]

bloodline wrote:
@amigadave

I find it hard to take anything personal on something as impersonal as an Internet forum!

I sound repetitive because people don't seem to understand what I am saying!

Progress would be an Amiga platform that is twice as powerful as that £199 PC but at the same price or cheaper! At the moment we are playing catch up... And catch up that is one 8th the performance at three times the price!

We will only ever play catch up now... We can't compete with the mega-budgets... :-)

I totally agree, but who here is trying to play catch up and what does that have to do with describing the Amiga as alive or dead?  CPU computing cycles per (put your monetary unit here) does not determine if a computer community is alive or dead.  If that were true, Apple would have been out of the computer hardware and software business long ago.

Probably the biggest problem with this entire thread is how it was worded.  The word "Amiga" is many different things to many different people.  It could mean what is left of the Amiga user & developer community, computer hardware that will run Amiga programs, one of the two different "Next Generation" Amiga-Like OSes and programs that run natively on them, or all of the above. Then the thread degraded into the "Dead" vs "Alive" argument and the various reasons to support each side (which I stupidly get sucked into just about every time it comes up, and it seems like I am not the only one that gets riled up about the "Dead" vs "Alive" question, considering the number of unique posters in this thread).

Oh, the part about nobody understanding what you are trying to say............, nope, we just don't agree with what you are trying to say.   :-D