Its a slow day at work and I'm feeling a bit nostalgic so I thought I would post some questions I've had stored in my head for a long time now:
1. Does anybody know the names of any of the Microsoft programmers who wrote AmigaBasic? I always thought it would be interesting to hear their stories.
2. When the Amiga 500 was first introduced they did a roaming tour and I went to their 'show' here in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They were showing off Amiga technology at the university here (IPFW) and also showed the Amiga 500. It had the Commodore Key and Amiga Key at the time.
During the show I asked them about loading older Kickstarts since 1.2 would not load some older games that were playing on the Amiga 1000 they had. (Archon and ACS, I think.) Anyway, the Commodore folks thought about it and even called Commodore HQ to ask about this question.
Now, the answer has always been interesting to me: The people on the phone told us to hold down CNTRL - CBM - AMIGA for a number of seconds and the Amiga 500 should ask for a Kickstart Disk.
We tried it several times and conversations went back and forth but it never worked. In the end, they said that this was a demo unit but the production Amiga 500s will have this feature.
I swear I'm not making this up. If you are from the Fort Wayne area, Computer Corner (THE Amiga store at the time) sponsored this and Kevin, Bob, and Tom were there with a bunch of other Amiga people from the area.
Has anybody else ever heard of this before? I often wondered if this was something they thought about but decided against later on…
3. Like most of you I bet, I get tired of the Apple/Microsoft computer history that tends to leave out the major contributions of other companions like Commodore, Atari, Tandy, etc… I enjoyed "On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore". Are there any the books like this that I might be missing out on?
4. In many ways, I wish that "On the Edge" would have a sequel because there are many questions I wish were answered about other Commodore products. Does anybody know who designed the Commodore SX-64? I thought it was a great design for the time and easily head and shoulders above competing products (for the time).
5. I wanted to share a Rob Peck story with you: When a very early copy of Kickstart 1.4 leaked on the Amiga 1000 my friends and I got a copy from the usual places (Fear and Loathing, I'm looking in your direction). This was before there were any Kickstart relocater programs…Anyway, the Kickstart was located at $F8000 but having Amiga 500s we need it to be some place else so we were writing a program that would relocate the KickTags to $200000 I think…anyway we got stuck. In a flash of brilliance, we decided to call Rob Peck because he wrote the ROM Kernel manuals. His 'bio paragraph' listed the city/state were he lived so we called all the Rob Pecks there and left a message on the answering machines.
He actually called us back and we told him what we were trying to do. I was worried he would get mad and call the Police/FBI/NSA/CIA/Bil Herd/Bryce Nesbitt (Hey I was just a kid) but he actually helped us along and we created a program that moved Kickstarts around in memory.
I was really sad when I learned he passed away a few years after that.
Thanks for letting me ramble,
-P
