Andy Warhol lost Amiga collection

[Matt_H]

Don, Alessandro, thanks for chiming in and reminding me of the details. It's both interesting and frustrating how a story of early digital art is inextricably linked to issues of digital copyright.

[Ral-Clan]

This story finally trickled its way down to my small town local newspaper (I guess it is a syndicated story now).

Unfortunately, now all reference to the Commodore Amiga has been removed - the story only mentions Andy Worhol was demonstrating a "new computer design".

Sort of takes some of the point away from the story, because newspaper readers must be wondering why they couldn't have found a PC with a 3-1/4" drive from six or eight years ago (or purchased a USB floppy drive) and read the disk.

One of the whole challenges in reading the files was, or course, the Amiga's proprietary disk format.

[SSRockman83]

A documentary about the collection was put online today.
http://vimeo.com/92583299

The documentary was interesting.
Though, I'm not too sure about the computer club they had working on the project. They didn't realise the disks had copies of the program itself along with the files. That was a common thing back then.

[Ral-Clan]

A documentary about the collection was put online today.
http://vimeo.com/92583299

The documentary was interesting.
Though, I'm not too sure about the computer club they had working on the project. They didn't realise the disks had copies of the program itself along with the files. That was a common thing back then.

The use of the descriptors "worldwide Amiga experts" and "hacking" in the video seemed a little like hyperbole.  These guys just read the files off the floppies with a Kryoflux and then figured out how to load them into GraphicCraft in UAE.  Now, I'm sure these fellows are extremely clever (one works for NASA) and they've certainly done a good thing. Heck, I'd probably like to hang out with them and talk old computers, but the fact that the one fellow (using the laptop) only had a very basic grasp of what an IFF is didn't give me the impression that they were "worldwide Amiga experts".