A lot of the Amiga World is like a time capsule, a frozen look into where we were 20 years ago. Does anyone actually argue about what a PC or Mac is? No, they have all gone through a series of changes over time but a Mac is still a Mac, whether it is running a beta version of Snow Leopard or OS 7.5.1.
Nobody in the PC world argues that a P4 isn't a real PC because it's slow and has only one core! There are still a few people running Window 3.1 and they are still PCs as much as a 4 core Xeon Vista computer.
The trouble with Amiga is that we lost a living Company long ago and have no one to tell us where Amiga is going. So some folks want to live in the World that existed at Commodore's Death Nell Vigil (TM), whilst others want to modernise the hardware and run the 15 year old OS on modern equipment. Still others want to take the concept of Amiga and ring it into the 21st Century.
When the Amiga was released it was cutting edge, it was capable of things that no other personal computer was capable of at that time. It squandered that lead and the company went belly up. The Amiga's capabilities in 2008 look oddly nostalgic. Think about where Amiga would have been today had Commodore not been found floating at the top of the tank! Amiga's with GBs of RAM, 8 cores, TB hard drives. It was able to squeeze so much out of so little, what could it have squeezed out of modern equipment?
AmigaDos would have been rewritten many times by now. The original creators made some choices, such as the lack of memory protection, that were necessary back them but now make no sense, they would have fixed them and built a new OS. It probably would have had to run the old stuff through a Classic system like the Macs used to have. But new software would have arisen and the old games updated to run in the new system.
For a decade and a half the Amiga has been leaderless, slowly losing it's user base. WHy do we need to tear at each other? We're all that's left, maybe a few thousand scattered across the globe. We have different visions, different ideas We disagree on what we want, but we don't disagree on what we don't want. We don't want the Amiga relegated to history.
