bloodline wrote:
The problem is that every day tasks, mundane tasks... casual computing tasks can now be handled by a small battery powered device that I can hold in my hand! I only switch my main machines to do specific work.
Same goes with me with an EeePC using a hsdpa modem. I'd consider something smaller if I thought for a second I could type with it and not get cramp though :-)
The only difference is I can litterally do everything I need bar gaming on this thing, not just the mundane stuff.
bloodline wrote:
The space the Amiga occupied has gone. In fact, up until I used the iPhone, I still had hope that the Amiga could find a place... but now, technology has moved on, the way we can use machines has changed. The world is a different place :-)
For me using BeOS, as limiting as it was (in terms of software) brought me to the same conclusion, later using Elive linux erased any lingering doubt, truly, it was the most elegant and easy to use system I've ever had the pleasure of running.
I still have a place in my heart for the amiga, it was the system that first really introduced me to what a computer could do, it was the first computer I had that got me online, brought me here, and up until 2003, was my only computer type.
Something like the NatAmi, or even an Amithlon type setup would be cool, purely from the point of a desire to play old games.
But to try to drag it into the modern day rather then celebrate its heyday through things like NatAmi, is just plain wrong at this stage. The last hope for a resurection was back in 98/99, when 3.5 came out. Don't believe me? Take a look at the software released for the Amiga that year, of the hardware being released. There was, for that brief moment in time a real hope again, a feeling that things were moving forward, yet only 2 years later, all that had stalled, the release, of the AmigaOne was delayed, the single biggest hardware producer in the community at the time (Phase 5) croaked. Key software producers were winding down and moving to other platforms. Yes, both the A1 came out, as well as OS4, but both were poor in terms of quality and years overdue.
Amigadave I am by no measure immature, I don't use words or phrases lightly, if I say something it is because I've generally researched it and am sure of my ground. Yes, great, people would like to see a modern Amiga-like OS out, but truthfully, there already are - both AROS and Haiku fit that bill quite nicely. The main problem people here have with this seems to me to be the fact that neither have the Amiga name attached to them. Building a complete new OS from the bottom up, with only a nod to the original API's (since most of them would not be workable within a modern OS) just so you can have the Amiga name plastered over it is genuinely a waste of developers time. There are better, more elegant solutions out there and developers know it.
I take no pleasure in accepting that the Amiga no longer has a place outside of a hobbyists or retro scene, indeed when I sat down and began to make plans to switch from the Amiga to BeOS, it was a very long and painful thing, I'd spent at that time over a decade learning every tip and trick to getting the most out of these obscure little machines, I had one of the single most patched/hacked/kludged systems going in terms of my 1200 both in software and hardware, there was little I couldn't tell you about any patch you cared to mention on aminet. But as I said, false hope always leads to bitter dissapointment, my wakeup call was seeing the abortion that was the AmigaOne role out, obscenely overpriced, without an OS and no real timeframe of getting one. I spent the exact same money for a complete, self built PC as just the board would have cost me, running BeOS and running a damn sight faster.
Linux came later. Elive being my final stop in the desktop before getting the EeePC and never looking back.
