Best things about owning an amiga?

[Franko]

Now, not so much other than bragging rights about being able to do all this way back in 1987 with the same hardware. ;-)

Gotta disagree with you on that point, everything computing wise I do other than the internet is still done on the Amiga and always has been for 25 years solid...

[B00tDisk]

What were the best things about owning an amiga, back when you got yours?

Whats the best things today?

(some) of the games.  The user interface (versus B&W Macintosh, DOS and its command line or all text-'n'-ASCII graphics "Windows"), the sound, etc.  Going from 39k free on my C64 (or 96k in my 128 I had for a few months) to a whopping megabyte of memory in my A500.  Then came my A1200 and wow what a disappointment.  I'd have gotten rid of it much quicker if a kind soul hadn't given me his DKB 030 card, then I put a 60mb HD and a 4mb SIMM in it.  Sweet little system.

These days, every once in a great while I'll fire up WinUAE and screw around with 3d apps (Scenery Animator, VistaPro 2, early versions of LightWave) but the hoops you have to jump through to get various things working on an Amiga, plus how ancient the software is, keeps me from considering it for serious work.

[JimS]

Gotta disagree with you on that point, everything computing wise I do other than the internet is still done on the Amiga and always has been for 25 years solid...

Well you can, sure. But my 5 dollar Compaq Athlon can pretend to be my old Amiga and run all that software as well as do the internet. ;-)

[Franko]

Well you can, sure. But my 5 dollar Compaq Athlon can pretend to be my old Amiga and run all that software as well as do the internet. ;-)

Ahh but... as you say it's just "pretending" to be a miggie, that can't even come close to the years of frustration & fun and poking about inside the real thing trying to get bits n bobs to work...

And as for the internet I wouldn't tarnish me miggies with that nonsense, what would they think if they saw the rubbish I post on here, they'd have a hairy fit and probably self destruct in cloud of purple smoke (mind you that would give me something to tinker with)...

[smerf]

Well you can, sure. But my 5 dollar Compaq Athlon can pretend to be my old Amiga and run all that software as well as do the internet. ;-)

Hi,

Agree with you on this point, but it still has some glitches like while it is playing music, the music will shut off while loading a picture off an Aminet disk. The original Amiga never misses a heart beat.

Let see the best thing about owning an Amiga when I bought it was that it could run IBM programs like Lotus 123, and Dbase with transformer. My IBM PC type machine gave out and I had to buy a computer, what made me buy the Amiga, it was something new and when the salesman showed me Transformer it impressed me. Since I was using Lotus 123 to program spreadsheets and Lotus worked on the Amiga I bought it. Never looked back from there. One thing I could never figure out is why they added more letters to the drives, A: is a lot easier to type than df0: and the sentences they used to make a diskcopy or copy a file. Later it just came natural and never noticed the extra key steps.

smerf

[fishy_fiz]

Best thing back then for me was largely the games. I was only a young man at the time and I was much more game oriented than I am now. Ive always been interested in graphics too, so deluxe paint was something I used a lot as a young teen. Additionally Ive been interested in making games since a very young age (made a simple rpg on tandy coco1 at the age of 6), so when AMOS was 1st released I started using that. Over time I kept using the Amiga and its big apps that appealed to me that appeared over the years. Blitz Basic2, Brilliance, Imagine and others of the era were big with me when I got my 1st a1200.
Despite all this though it wasnt until Amithlon came out that I really delved deeply into AmigaOS and the plethora of "enhancements" available. Being that some of the software Id used heavily over the years required custom chipset I was forced to look for alternative ways of doing things. This combined with the speed of amithlon really changed my perspective about the amiga and it's OS. It was no longer just a nice, albiet dated system to me lacking many modern features, but a blank canvas on which to easily build a system that behaves exactly as Id like. Perhaps a little ironic that amithlon, which can perform some of the modern functionailty that may normally be missing on an amiga (full speed movies, full speed mame and other emus, easily play mp3s, decent compiling speeds, high framerates in quake1/2, etc.), was what me made stop comparing the amiga to pcs and appreciating it as it's own entity.
I used amithlon/os3.9 exclusively for a few years (and still do sometimes), but in recent times have come to appreciate the classics again too. Sure theyre quite humble on paper compared to modern computers, but there's still a heck of a lot you can do with them, especially if you disregard modern standards. That's actually part of the appeal for me personally, seeing what results you can obtain from such an old machine. Not to mention theyre a heck of a lot of fun  

[commodorejohn]

Aside from the games, it's using a system that I know I can truly understand, from the hardware all the way up to the OS.

[kedawa]

When I first got an Amiga, everything was great about it.  The speech synthesis alone provided countless hours of hilarity.  I mostly used the A500 for games, drawing, and making music, though.

The best thing today, and in retrospect it was pretty cool back then too, is being able to find out so much info about my computer just by reading the manual.  It's a far cry from the documentation that modern computers ship with.  Even online, the schematics for my Dell aren't available.

It's also fun watching my modern PC and my A500 race to start up, especially since the Amiga always wins.

[runequester]

When I first got an Amiga, everything was great about it.  The speech synthesis alone provided countless hours of hilarity.  I mostly used the A500 for games, drawing, and making music, though.

The best thing today, and in retrospect it was pretty cool back then too, is being able to find out so much info about my computer just by reading the manual.  It's a far cry from the documentation that modern computers ship with.  Even online, the schematics for my Dell aren't available.

It's also fun watching my modern PC and my A500 race to start up, especially since the Amiga always wins.

Thats one of the nice things. For a commercial OS, they documented the hell out of everything, down to how everything worked. Very nice.

[Drummerboy]

Back in Time!,

Amazing and never seen before Real Mutltasking OS, Stereo Sound, 4096 Colors.. Yeah, was wonderfull Music Creator!, all in graphic environment, like Word Procesors, Spreadsheet, and more   And ofcourse, the games.

Nowdays,

The same.. now you can still using for many things..like Internet (some limitations 68k OS3.X but still working!), Word Procesors, Music, and many more.. Yeah...ofcourse play Games..

Anyway, all depend what do you want, and how many time you have for spend for use any real Amiga.

I do no blame those who choose emulate. Its any way to keep alive Amiga.

[commodorejohn]

Thats one of the nice things. For a commercial OS, they documented the hell out of everything, down to how everything worked. Very nice.

And they did it beautifully, to boot. The Amiga documentation is just about the best technical writing I've ever had the good fortune to read

[JimS]

Ahh but... as you say it's just "pretending" to be a miggie, that can't even come close to the years of frustration & fun and poking about inside the real thing trying to get bits n bobs to work...

I dunno.... one of the really cool things about the original Amiga was that you *didn't* have to do a lot of fiddly bits under the hood (bonnet), compared to the peecee. At least until UAE came along. ;-)

And as for the internet I wouldn't tarnish me miggies with that nonsense, what would they think if they saw the rubbish I post on here, they'd have a hairy fit and probably self destruct in cloud of purple smoke (mind you that would give me something to tinker with)...

Can't argue with that. ;-) I had my A2000 on the web way back in the early days of surfing... it may have forgiven me by now. ;-D

[JimS]

Hi,

Agree with you on this point, but it still has some glitches like while it is playing music, the music will shut off while loading a picture off an Aminet disk. The original Amiga never misses a heart beat.
smerf

Ahh... Can't say I ever tried that. It amazes me that UAE works at all. ;-) It was a hoot to run Deluxe Music and use the MIDI synth in my cheapo PC as an instrument. Pity DMCS was never upgraded to handle the newer midi files..

[lsmart]

It was the best machine you could afford and nothing came close. But the best thing was that you had the power to change everything and make it truly yours.

Today it's great that you can afford all the soft and hardware you once dreamed of and even take all your software with you wherever you go. Because machines can finally run UAE at decent speeds and your thumbdrive can hold 50 HD partitions withno trouble at all.

[Digiman]

Digi-View

Especially the jealous looks at my awesome grabs from my non Amiga owning friends heh

[lsmart]

Except for the fact that the desktop and window manager suck big time. This has to change!

I can't understand this statement, since my way of working is much more compatible with Workbench than KDE, Windows, Finder, GNOME and FVWM combined. You are confusing your preference with superiority!

If you take Workbench from me, you are taking a part that I really love from Amiga. I´d pay 60 bucks just for the "click to back" feature in Windows alone. I miss IconEd on a Mac and tooltypes beat registys & .ini any time!

So tell me how to make other OSs more like Workbench and you will find me grateful.