I left my Amiga behind in 1997, when I left my home country (Australia). I'd bought a PC that year too - a second hand 486, mainly because work had switched to windows 3.1, and my bridgeboard setup wasn't going to cut it for work at home.
The PC was 'just for work', when I had to bring work home. Most of my free time was spent with Devpac 3, Dpaint, and Protracker on the Amiga.
When I was leaving I looked over the costs involved and the headaches of converting to NTSC, different Power supplies, and the writing on the wall already with C= (AGA too little, too late). So I left it behind with a friend (who still only had a 1000 - man was he happy!)
The only time I've even come close to the fun I had with my Amiga was with the Linux crowd - I even set my Xwindows up to look like my old Amiga, eventually dual booting to Amithlon. But with a new job in TV News and then video production, I had to bite my lip and use Windows.
(I know some will say 'but VIDEO TOASTER!', sorry to say - but in a world dominated by Avid and now Final Cut, I would be asked 'Video....what?' if it was on my resume - and of course bringing work home and sending back finished EDL's over the net is a wonderful thing - but I digress).
Still... there's something about the machine that I keep going back to - even if it's only on an emulator (which again still doesn't seem to capture the full feeling for me). I tried for 10 years to rebuild my old machine - and was thwarted by a finite budget and huge ebay prices.
I've come and gone on this site a few times, mainly lurking - a little active, but couldn't remember my old username or password. Read up on the news, surfed the web to catch up. The Amiga is like the great tragedy of the computer revolution. It was ahead of it's time and a lot of people 'didn't get it' - The types of people who loved the Amiga are very much like the people who created it.
It's a sort of high tech Haight Ashbury that attracted fantastically talented people who shared a lot of the things they discovered with a tight community.
However the people who OWN Amiga are the exact OPPOSITE.
'Running the show' it seems were folks that just wanted to exploit what was made - then throw it away. AGA came too little too late with C=, when Amithlon came I thought it was 'the answer' - no longer being a slave to the dwindling supply of hardware, maybe eventually opening the way to NEW hardware. Maybe it would be the step to transitioning old software to new hardware.... But again - the way I read the story is it ended over squabbles about money and who could get what.
Every year like you say - there's less and less people around, and the companies that hold the IP for the OS and the other bits and bobs haven't really done that much - to my mind it seems like they are hovering, waiting to get a bigger slice of a rapidly diminishing pie, cashing in on the name alone.
That being said (in this already overly long post) - what remains of the community is just as it ever was, and just as I ever remembered it. In 24 hours after I finally got my Ami folks have been rapidly posting info for me - answering my (somewhat boneheaded) questions and giving advice, people have been sending me PM's about my machine... Other people I've never known seem genuinely as excited as I am about getting back on the horse again.
And that is something you will NEVER find in the rapidly growing PC Windows community - something I NEVER found even in the budding years of Linux - and I doubt anyone buying a classic mac at a pawn shop would experience with the Apple community.
I was 2 years old and on the other side of the planet during Woodstock - so I'm glad I got to be a part of this movement - and like lots of the old hippies, I'll keep thinking back to it and trying to recapture a little bit of it now and again.
My 2c, with a buck 50 tip!
Cheers!
Sig.
