Ah yes, how could I forget Aminet. Set up one machine with a browser pointing to it.
As much as Aminet was a revolution to us, especially in the early days, having a terminal (be it a 'netted A500 or an X1000/MOS/AROS box running on gigabit ethernet), a "demo box" of Aminet would be about as exciting as a dry fart in a warm wind in this modern world. It's effectively a static download website, and somewhere most of us have been pulling files from for over 20 years either via HTTP or FTP. No offense intended, but it's just not display material meant to impress in this day and age of being able to download files at high speeds 20,000 feet in the air on a jetliner on a device that fits in your shirt pocket.
Aminet is a tremendous resource, but having a demo box dedicated to showing a bland (albeit very functional and wholly important to the Amiga scene for 20+ years) download site such as Aminet would be like watching paint dry. Might as well just throw a 3.5" floppy container down on a table with a collection of Fred Fish disks and call it an interactive display. Aminet is just a download site, nothing exotic or fancy. Terribly important to us Amigans, but not a first of a first in the early computer scene if you consider the other platforms at all. In fact, mid 90's it couldn't even compare size wise to the Pee Cee or Mac file download sites.
I say this as a guy that to this day still runs a BBS that I mirror all of Aminet to my filebase once a week - not a knock against Aminet in the least! (Not that anyone has a deep desire to grab Aminet files off my BBS with ZModem via Telnet, heh. I think I've had about 30 downloads in the last year on my BBS as a whole.)
My vote? The Toaster *made* the Amiga. If you don't have an extensive Toaster display booth, you might as well not even bother with historical displays. Same goes for gaming.
A DPaint and other early graphics software showcase is also a must.
I hope the whole event doesn't just turn into some masquerade of the OG Amiga stuff being on the sidelines as a "thoughtful consideration" while the NG platforms get flogged to death as the Second Coming, and a lot of people have such concerns with the event itself being sponsored by a NG hardware manufacturer.
The bigger thing that needs to document in regards to the Amiga is just the atmosphere that was floating around when the Amiga came to be. No one knew what they were doing. No one was following a marketing plan, trying to figure out what would sell. The computer industry was virgin soil and a bunch of guys got lucky enough to get enough funding to attempt to build the computer *THEY* would want to own.
I was lucky enough to talk to Jay Miner years ago and something he said to me stuck with me deeply, and that was "It was early days, we were just trying to build a machine we all wanted to own, the best machine you could dream of".
I'd like to think they succeeded, and then some.
