Experiences of running a business on an Amiga

[Jpan1]

When I was studying Art and design at college in England, the TV studies department who were using Genlocks used with Amigas and it was affiliated with the arts department. I produced some of my final pieces with an Amiga. Technically, it was not a business and more of an educational tool which the college had invested in. Not many knew about Amigas and computer graphic capabilities and so the examiner were quite satisfied with my D-paint animation and presentation, maybe even impressed . I even showed some of the beauty therapists at college how to digitally paint on digitized photos on an Amiga and change the colour palette of make up to get an impression of how the final result might look. I was using Digi view for digitizing which was lent to me by the college to get photos digitized. As a business the college was interested in Amigas as cutting edge technology, where as the art department were more interested in creative applications of this new tech. But for me Amigas weren't for spreadsheets and organizational system control. I wanted to discover new ways to make music and do art through a digital medium, whilst playing games and getting into the demo scene at the same time

[dandelion]

Thank you all for your posts. Inspiring to read of all of the varied non-gaming uses Amigas have been put to use on.

Interesting too how the Amiga seemed to inspire productivity, not just in a business sense but also for the average home user. This might not be to do with the Amiga per se and more to do with its roots in pre-internet computing (a procrastinators dream).

[prowler]

A Sci-Fi/Fantasy book shop I used to frequent back in the mid to late 90s ran his entire business on an Amiga3000. When I saw it I asked him why the Amiga and why not a Windows PC. His reply was that he had been using Amigas for a years and on top of that, he tried using a Windows PC but it was unable to do what he needed it to do.

The Amiga 3000 though, was able to handle Fax, answering machine, receipts, catalog inventories etc basically everything his business required. He used it for a number of years. In the end, he had no choice but to set up a Windows PC because the system used for ordering in stock was changed to one which had to run under Windows.

[tonyvdb]

The trend I see here seems to be that the Amiga did things right and just ran without problems. The Amiga let us be creative long before Mac and PC had things ironed out.

[ciVic]

My father is a butcher in Germany. In 1989 he replaced his old Z80 with an Amiga 2000 to calculate the amount of spice which has to be used for a certain amount of sausages. It was an AmigaBASIC program written by me where he had to enter the type of sausage and the amount to calculate the list of spices. Some years later the Amiga was replaced by a CDTV which was not in use anymore and finally replaced by a Notebook some years ago when the CDTV disk port was broken. Today it could be done by any mobile phone or microcontroller with a small LCD display. But back in 1989, AmigaBASIC was very cool :-). If he would need another computer today I would buy some old iBook to run MorphOS but I don't know if it would be possible to run this old AmigaBASIC program. Maybe by compiling it? And why should I try this? Because I can :-)

[Paulie85]

No personal experience but Paul Robinson had an Amiga 500 in his office of Lassiters Hotel in Neighbours.

Lol, I remember that. Also Todd Landers from Neighbours used an A500 to hack into a bank and steal money from accounts. Don't remember if he got caught.

[Thorham]

But back in 1989, AmigaBASIC was very cool :-).

:laughing: