Classic Amigas - Still Useful?

[commodorejohn]

Man, I've been meaning to put my 1200 to more use, I just haven't quite gotten around to it...I've got a MIDI adapter, a serial tablet, and ethernet, so there's no reason I couldn't use it for a bunch of things, but I've gotten kinda distracted by other projects (and by waiting for the keygen for MIDI Tracker to be built...)

[commodorejohn]

I've had good luck with SCSI controllers for A500/2000 and SCSI in Macs, but when I owned an A3000 it gave me nothing but trouble, so much that I eventually just gave up on it and traded it for my current A1200 setup...

[commodorejohn]

I'm not sure what you mean by Windows systems being "all for consumption". To your defense, I haven't tried Windows 8, but Windows 7 certainly has a huge base of productivity software.

I could see the sentiment as being valid if you compared modern systems to, say, Commodore 64, where programming the thing is actually something you have to opt out of after boot, but I have to say that Amiga really isn't far off from modern systems in any way related to productivity.

I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I think there has been an increasing push towards computer-as-consumption-device in the last decade and a half - and while I think it's only gotten really bad in recent years, it was already starting to be a trend when Windows XP came out (as fond as I am of XP, look how many steps were taken into "media integration" with it, as compared to 95-2k. Hell, it was the version where they introduced a dedicated "Media Center" version of the OS.) Nowadays it's apparently expected that an operating system will auto-index all your media files into a master library, auto-play any CD or DVD you drop in the drive, auto-everything so that you barely have to get up off the couch to be a media consumer.

Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a lot of great productivity software available for Windows (which is why it's taken me so long to even consider switching some of my pursuits over to my Amiga,) but the emphasis has shifted, and continues to shift. And while the Amiga is just as great a games machine as it is a productivity machine, I think Hattig's point holds true, because it was out of the mainstream well before that shift began to take place.

When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles. And we did use it for productive and creative work; my brothers and I drew stuff in MacPaint, or created doofy stories in Storybook Writer and Opening Night. We got our first electronic piano and my mom took up sequencing and printing sheet music on that Mac. And this was the norm back then. None of us were "computer people" at the time, and only my next-younger brother and I really ever became "computer people." We were all just ordinary people exploring the potential this new environment had to offer.

That's not really true anymore. "Average users" don't create, they only consume. (We're told as much - repeatedly - by advocates of consumption devices like tablets.) Nowadays, I'm pretty much the only member of the family who does anything more creative than my taxes on my computer; my brothers play games or read Cracked, and my parents read the news or hang out on Facebook. There's been a shift, and I think I'm the only one who's even noticed. And even I have more trouble getting myself in a creative mood on my modern systems.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just psychological; maybe putting myself in an old environment causes me to revert to the old mindset. But there's just a certain je ne sais quois electronic-muse that vintage computers have and modern computers don't.

[commodorejohn]

A rant.

[commodorejohn]

As a musician and programmer, I get to meet a lot of people who use their computers for producing original and interesting stuff, so my idea of it all might not be very representative of the whole.

Well, like I said, the capability for creation is definitely still there (even if my theoretical "muse" is missing and that makes it harder to focus.) But I think we are seeing a shift in emphasis.

The technological shift towards consumption I think of mostly as an adaption to the market, but if you get into the cybernetics of the thing, it's also very much the consumers approaching technology in the way they were taught to approach it.

Precisely. That's the primary difference between my family in the early '90s and Family X getting their first computer today - not that we were part of some creative elite, oh-so-much-better-suited to these pursuits (well, my mom was a pretty good pianist, but other than that,) but that Family X lives in a culture where they have been taught for years that they exist primarily to be consumers of product distributed by media conglomerates.

That was much more true for Apple than C64/Atari  800 and later ST/A500. When I was a kid (C64 era) computer gaming was  already huge, "productivity" was the line we gave our folks to justify  buying us the things. Console gaming was for the peasants. :-)

Well, yes and no. There was definitely a thriving gaming scene, and computers-as-entertainment as an idea goes all the way back to the '60s and the PDP-1. That said, you'll note that you still had to convince your folks that it was for something useful or creative. The expectation was still there, even though you were shirking it And I've rescued multiple C64s that came with as much productivity software as they did games, so people were using them for doing stuff in addition to gaming.