Amiga: Hobby or Everyday Computing?

[Nlandas]

Right now it's a hobby for me. I'd like to get my Towerized A4000 to the point where I could use it for more but I'd need a PPC and OS4 for that.

I think the real question in the long run is how many hobbyists are interested/willing to use one as their primary computer if hardware was available to run a new AmigaOS 4.X? How much initial market is there for a new Amiga with modern hardware running AmigaOS.

I for one would love to be using an Amiga as my primary computer again. I have very basic needs which have been discussed in other threads before.

Good modern webbrowser with plugins (Port Firefox)
Good Email client. (Thunderbird or any other)
Basic Word processor/spreadsheet system. (Port OpenOffice.)
Picture viewer/cataloger
MP3 player/cataloger

The rest I can wait on and I know if the market builds developers will come.

-Nyle

[Lockon_15]

A very unique hobby.

- Nice environment where I can rest from actual life issuess (of couse, after taking care of wife & kid).
- A great tech demonstrator for most of my colleagues considering Pentium as a 1st multimedia machine.
- An escape pod back to time when everything looked more simple and fun.

And finally, the one and the only reason why I've stuck in ICT biz. :lol:  

[delshay]

my A1200 projects.

[mauidj]

I use mine purely for work.
I have been an artist for 25 years and started doing computer art on an Amiga 1000. I was one of the first artists to use a computer to design clothing and clothing graphics. It gave my work a look like no other and resulted in an unbelievable career path for me.
My Amiga designs have appeared on clothing from the world's top sports fashion houses as well as in magazines, museums and the homes of the rich and famous.
I stopped using an Amiga around the mid 90's when I moved to the Mac.
But this year I wanted to go back to my old style of creating and the look it resulted in and amazingly there is nothing available that does the job like DPaint.
The power and in some cases, the restrictions, enable me to create in a unique way.
This year I purchased a variety of machines and after some playing around whittled them down to the 3000T I have now. I am also using E-UAE on my MacBook Pro. (still trying to get it sorted though).
I am experimenting with the amazing new Epson 72" inkjet printer using output from the miggy created at 640 x 480 resolution. It's really cool stuff.
I am also currently working on a new clothing line which I am going to launch early next year.
All designed on the miggy :-D

[persia]

Yeah, I'd have to agree, a hobby.  It was my first computer (I had used Univac 1100 and various Vaxen but never actually owned a computer before.  Your first computer is a lot like your first love, frozen in time always remembered with fondness.

I sit at the Amiga or UAE, it makes no difference to me, and play old games, play with old software and enjoy the heady days of the late '80s.  It's been a dozen years or more since I could do real work on an Amiga, but that's just part of the charm.  The Amiga is all play, nothing to put on the CV, nothing to work for one of those Muttly Awards (certifications) we all worship in IT, just a bit of fun!

Seriously, could I do real work on an Amiga?  Nope, I'm not patient enough to deal with all the limitations and instability.  I have a MacPro that runs circles around the Amiga, that has a full Bash command line and a host of video, audio and image editors on it.  I can't figure out how to open the 12 Megapixel raw images on my Amiga and refuse to take the loss associated with JPEG compression.  My Amiga can't do HD, can't mix my old (digitised) video with my modern video.  In the end I bought Amiga to be cutting edge, and that's why I have my Mac Pro today.

Really life is the same, my first love was a beautiful 16 year old girl with the biggest brightest eyes you could image, who could keep my happy for hours on end, she's now middle aged with 4 kids, drives a people mover, smokes like a coal plant and weighs 20 stone....

[hardlink]

mauidj wrote:
I use mine purely for work.

Wow, another one for the Professional camp; how many more want to step up?  :-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Hobby, but as ICT person, I consider it also as a source of inspiration. And a lot of fun/memories with gaming on it
/me has a hard time growing up....

[bloodline]

persia wrote:
Yeah, I'd have to agree, a hobby.  It was my first computer (I had used Univac 1100 and various Vaxen but never actually owned a computer before.  Your first computer is a lot like your first love, frozen in time always remembered with fondness.

I sit at the Amiga or UAE, it makes no difference to me, and play old games, play with old software and enjoy the heady days of the late '80s.  It's been a dozen years or more since I could do real work on an Amiga, but that's just part of the charm.  The Amiga is all play, nothing to put on the CV, nothing to work for one of those Muttly Awards (certifications) we all worship in IT, just a bit of fun!

Seriously, could I do real work on an Amiga?  Nope, I'm not patient enough to deal with all the limitations and instability.  I have a MacPro that runs circles around the Amiga, that has a full Bash command line and a host of video, audio and image editors on it.  I can't figure out how to open the 12 Megapixel raw images on my Amiga and refuse to take the loss associated with JPEG compression.  My Amiga can't do HD, can't mix my old (digitised) video with my modern video.  In the end I bought Amiga to be cutting edge, and that's why I have my Mac Pro today.

Really life is the same, my first love was a beautiful 16 year old girl with the biggest brightest eyes you could image, who could keep my happy for hours on end, she's now middle aged with 4 kids, drives a people mover, smokes like a coal plant and weighs 20 stone....

Yeah, I have to agree with this totally.

[quarkx]

I love it as a pure hobby. I work on monster machines all day (like my $7000 Voodoo laptop, building websites, doing 3 D animation and such). To me, the few hours a night working and learning the Amiga is just plain fun. Half the fun is hunting down parts, collecting the pieces and so forth.The fact I have a few hundred floppies to go through and figure out what they are, and if they work is half the fun.
I have a buddy who restores old cars, and he see really no difference in doing that and messing around with old computers.
If I had gotten right off the bat, a A4000 all souped up, I think I wouldn't have half the fun with it. The fact That I am starting with a base A2000 and working up, is the fun part. But hey, thats just me. :-D

[taunusand]

@quarkx
I agree :-)
Another hobby of mine is Ford Taunus, I know a lot of people having old classic Ford cars as theis hobby. We also collect parts, spend time maintaining and repairing our old cars and such.
It's the same, a hobby witch some people thinks are strange.

"Why don't you just buy a new car?" = "Why don't you just buy a new PC?"

Because we like our hobby, that's why :-D

[quarkx]

taunusand wrote:
@quarkx
I agree :-)
Another hobby of mine is Ford Taunus, I know a lot of people having old classic Ford cars as theis hobby. We also collect parts, spend time maintaining and repairing our old cars and such.
It's the same, a hobby witch some people thinks are strange.

"Why don't you just buy a new car?" = "Why don't you just buy a new PC?"

Because we like our hobby, that's why :-D

Ford TAUNUS? I will have to look that one up. They never had that particular model here in Canada! Taurus yes, but that was a low end economy model. My buddy is into restoring the old Buick's like the GSX and the Stage one cars. He spends most of his weekends in the Auto reckers's yard. I wish they had junk yards here for computer parts. Here we are not allowed to take anything form the dump and there are littrally walls of monitors and tower units lining the dump road. :boohoo:

[Dandy]

amigakidd wrote:

...
How many of you use an Amiga for everyday computing (I mean earn a living) using one.

At work (Ford) I have an PC, of course.
But:
When I started working here back in 1998 it was usual in case someone needed an A0-drawing as an attachment in A4-format to call the CAD office. They plotted the needed .cgm-drawing on A0 format.
Then the person had to go to the CAD office, get the drawing and take it to the print office, where it was scaled down to A4-format.
Finally that person had to fetch the A4-drawing from the print office and give it to the "scan-man", who scanned it to make it digitally available.

This approach remionded me at the "stone age of computing".
At home on my classic miggy I had a tool called "MetaView" from Henk Jonas, that was able to convert the .cgm-drawings from our CAD-stations to e.g. GIF or JPEG.

I asked Ford IT team for a tool to convert .cgm-drawings to e.g. GIF on my PC. They told me that such a tool would not exist within the Ford world.

So I approached my manager and told him I intended to give a demonstration how to save a lot of time by modernising that attachment process. I asked him to allow me to install AmigaForever, OS (meanwhile OS 3.9) and MetaView.

I got the permission and gave the demonstration.
Management was convinced and I got the permission to leave the Amiga installation on my PC to convert the drawings, if necessary.

Meanwhile we have "VIS mockup" on our PC's for that purpose, but AmigaForever is still installed on my PC...

Ahhh - and I typed the application for my current job still on my trusty, old A500...

So far for the "earn a living"-part.

At home I use my A4000PPC on an everyday basis.
My WIntel box underneath my desk is remote-controlled (RDesktop) by my A4kPPC and only used in the rare cases where an app is missing on the Amiga or not meeting my needs sufficiantly.

amigakidd wrote:

Is owning an Amiga or emulating one just a hobby?

Not just a hobby - also serioulsly used...

amigakidd wrote:

...
What makes it so different to owning a PC/Mac? Do we become special when we own an Amiga or a copy of Amiga Forever?

Hmmmm - I noticed that if you use a WIntel-box, many configurations are done by Windows without the user becoming aware of it.
From my perspective this is suboptimal, as I want to understand how COMPUTERS work - and not how WIntel-systems do it.
Often you don't get aware of things because Windows cares for it in its own way - and not the way it is done on other systems e.g. Linux or Amiga.

Quite often the WIntel-world even comes up with different synonyms than in "general computing".

amigakidd wrote:

Is it a cult following?

From my POV using Windows has more of an "cult following"...

[Dandy]

Andeda wrote:

...
using it for a everyday use for example web and mail is way too painful

No idea why you think so - browsing with IBrowse works flawlessly on most of the pages I visit - and compared to InternetExplorer for me it has the advantage of "tabbed browsing".

And what exactly do you think does Outlook better than YAM?

I really cannot see what is causing you such pains...
 :-?

EDIT:
O.K. - I forgot - it works quite well for me on an 68060 @ 50 mHz - on an 020/030/040 system it might suck nowadays...

[Dandy]

Ilwrath wrote:
 
...
The lack of CPU horsepower is noticeable, but it can be worked around.  

Fully agreed...

Ilwrath wrote:

The lack of current software... That's not as easy to deal with.  As mentioned, web-browsers, flash, reader, etc...
You just don't even think about them until all of a sudden you don't have them.

It may depend on what you intend to do.
Latest AWeb or IBrowse are quite O.K. for me, as most of the web sites I visit are displayed properly.
For me browsers are not so much of an issue.

Someone else already mentioned that even a basic flash reader is available.

PDF-readers are available as well - there are even applications that can create PDFs (e.g. latest FXscan)

Ilwrath wrote:

(Sure, you have AWeb and Ghostscript, and sometimes they even work for more than an hour or two before they drag the OS off into Guru Meditation oblivion...)  

Overpatched system?

Ilwrath wrote:

But I can't see using an Amiga as a primary system, anymore.  It's a fun machine for what it does, but what it doesn't do kills it from consideration for primary use.  

For me it does most of what I want.
Of course it does it differently than a WIntel machine does...
I'm suspecting that what it doesn't do is due to the unflexibility of some users -

Ilwrath wrote:

...
(It'd drag my old A4000 out behind the barn and beat it senseless..)

Fully agreed - more hp hardware-wise would be more than welcome...

Ilwrath wrote:

but again... The lack of software makes it not really usable as a primary system.  :-(

Well, that might depend on when you jumped on the Amiga train. I joined in 1988/89 and have loads of software that isn't available anymore. Such an software-pool can help a lot if you want to use an Amiga on an everyday basis nowadays.

In the WIntel world you have big applications and you can do everything with them (well, most of the time).

In the Amigaworld I possibly have to use some more, smaller apps to get a task done, but nevertheless its possible most of the time - if one has enough knowledge about Amiga apps (and where to get them) and enough creativity to combine them in a reasonable manner for the task at hand.

[paolone]

I still use my Amiga 1200 for my everyday job: it's the USB keyboard I connected to my PC with the Keyrah.  :-P

Well, I have my personal thoughts about "what Amiga is" and, IMHO, it's just the spirit that led me embrace the AROS project before, and made me starting whis VmwAROS adventure today: a funny way to do computing.

[taunusand]

@quarkx
Ford Taunus are from Germany. In England they were sold as Cortina.
Compared to american cars it's very little, it has a nice little V6 engine with 90hp ;-)
It does not look as Ford Taurus, witch is a bit larger.
In Denmark it was one of the larger middle class cars back in the 1970/80'ies.
Pictures of me and my Taunus: Link