Deep philosophical question: What makes an Amiga an Amiga?

[commodorejohn]

I'm going to have to go with the "actually a machine produced and distributed as Amiga by Commodore from 1985-1994" line of thought, with an extension to the Escom variants of the same, because that quite succintly and definitely excludes everything I don't think is a true Amiga.

However, if I were pressed to give details, I think the key elements that make the Amiga special are these: a powerful but programmer-friendly CPU architecture, a well-designed hardware system that achieves power through flexible control of simple components, and an operating system designed to achieve tight integration with the hardware and be accessible to and enable the programmer rather than trying to shackle them.

Various systems that embody some of those principles I'll consider "Amiga-inspired," but I reserve "Amiga" for the real deal, thanks.

[commodorejohn]

We've changed, the world has changed, computing has changed in the years since the death of Commodore.  I bought a shiny new plaything that was bleeding edge, with a sense that we could change our world.  It's that feeling that I've always associated with the Amiga, not whether there was a snapshot menu selection or a particular set of custom chips.  But the feeling has passed us by and all we are left with are the machines that remained in the wake of Commodore's death.  It's most nostalgia now.  More bittersweet memories of lost youth.

Well, you can keep your midlife crisis, I'll enjoy the machines for their own merits, thanks.

[commodorejohn]

We've changed, the world has changed, computing has changed in the years since the death of Commodore.  I bought a shiny new plaything that was bleeding edge, with a sense that we could change our world.  It's that feeling that I've always associated with the Amiga, not whether there was a snapshot menu selection or a particular set of custom chips.  But the feeling has passed us by and all we are left with are the machines that remained in the wake of Commodore's death.  It's most nostalgia now.  More bittersweet memories of lost youth.

It's silly to get hung up on the failure of the present to be the future of the past; I'd rather just enjoy the Amiga for its own merits, thanks.

[commodorejohn]

Was that too hard to parse? I mean that of course the 2000s didn't turn out how we thought they were going to in the 1990s, but it's silly to get hung up on that fact, because things never happen how we fantasize that they might - just like the 1950s didn't have the automated houses they were predicting in the 1930s, and we don't have flying cars on aerial highways like they thought we might in the '50s, and so on and so forth.

But if you get too caught up in moping about the fact that The Jetsons didn't turn out to be reality, or that the Amiga didn't stay on the bleeding edge of the computer industry, or what have you, you're going to miss the nice things about not only the actual present, but the past that you were hoping would lead to this fantasy future. Hence, I don't hold with persia's opinion that all is vanity simply because the Amiga didn't retain its position forever - nothing ever does, but that doesn't make my A1200 less neat.

[commodorejohn]

And the Jetsons was supposed to be comedic even by '60s sensibilities.

Yeah, but it really isn't that far removed from some of the predictions you'd see in old issues of Popular Mechanics...

[commodorejohn]

Yes, but you don't want to get so focused on that that you lose sight of the things about reality that rock. We don't have moon colonies, but we do have the Amiga, and I'll place Lemmings at least on par with a moon colony.