New classic boards

[stopthegop]

Warning:  Philosophical Rant ahead!  Proceed at your own discretion.  

I'm with Amiga92570 & Amigadave.  I don't plan on ever parting ways with my Amiga systems.  Never.  The Amiga is that once-in-a-lifetime product that changed the world--and was so far ahead of its time its almost scary.  The words "modular design", "innovative", "fast", "multi-tasking" and "multi-media" -- liberally abused by peecee companies to oil up their false advertising--all accurately describe the Amiga.  I don't think there is ever going to be another machine like it.  The Amiga, I believe, was the pinnacle of a design philosophy that embraced elegance, grace, speed, efficiency, responsiveness, and the highest respect and regard for user; a philosophy that is regrettably dying, crushed under the weight of the Amiga's  monopolistic polar-inverse: the "certification"-happy world of Windows.  I don't think there will ever be another computer like the Amiga because the design philosophy that led to its creation has also seemingly died.  MHO

[stopthegop]

Guess what. Modern PCs have all kinds of hardware to offload tasks that the Amiga custom chips take care of. PCs have had 2D blitters for ages now and even 3D accelerators have been standard for years. Sound cards with DSPs that can do what Paula does and a whole lot more have been around for ages as well (though they haven't exactly become standard issue in large part because mixing a few audio channels together takes a trivial amount of processor time on a modern PC).

The difference is that these DMA co-processors were central elements in the design of the Amiga since its inception.  The Amiga was designed around this concept.  The PC was originally designed (and sold as) a drab tool for "business", its numbing green and black screen only reinforcing the point.  All of the multimedia razzle-dazzle of "fast" PCs today comes from contrived bolted-on sub-systems that, impressive as some of them might be, were antithesis to the original design and intention of the x86 PC.  The Amiga was a truly integrated system.  PC makers love to abuse the word "innovate" to describe whatever they happen to be selling at the moment.  I've never heard anyone who knows the definition of "innovate" use it to describe their PC.  Mostly I hear profanity when people talk about their computers.        

many of the things that made the hardware special have long since been replicated on boring old x86 PC hardware.

Key word "boring".  The Amiga was (and is) a revolutionary machine.  I fail to see the point in spending a lot of money on a "modern" PC.  New PCs are just next year's trash.    

If your CPU is seriously pegged at 100% half the time it's probably because your PC is stuffed to the gills with spyware.

Why is it that only "fast" PCs are afflicted by this problem?  I use my Amiga online everyday.  It is just as fast now as the day I bought it.  I do an occasional disk defrag and it runs fine.  Why is so much time and effort needed with PCs to "remove spyware"?   Why is "spyware" on my PC in the first place?  Isn't Windows "secure"?