I can relate
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| r_a_trip Jan 07, 2010 7:04 AM EDT |
I was late to the PC party, spending my early computing years on a very pleasant Amiga 500. After reality caught up with Commodore and ultimately me, I was introduced through necessity to the x86 universe. It was by way of an It's 80Mhz Cyrix 486 DX2 clone, with 4 MB Ram and DOS 6.22 w/ windows 3.11. It was then that I was introduced to "Teh crappy". In the coming years I have succeeded in convincing myself that the PC platform has evolved and has become better than what I used to on the Amiga. Linux has made my computing experience a lot better on x86, but a dark area of my mind secretly fears the possibility that I've just become accustomed to the rinkydink nature of the x86 PC. Today, Amiga (the real Amiga, not the weird revival attempts of late) isn't representative anymore when it comes to GUI technology, but back in the day Commodore proved with Amiga Workbench that an OS could both be pretty and snappy to work with. PC has the pretty nailed down, now the hope is that "snappy" will return someday. |
| jacog Jan 07, 2010 7:46 AM EDT |
An the OS booted up in 5 to 10 seconds. The "weird revival attempts" as you put it, runs on more recent hardware, and boots up even faster. |
| dinotrac Jan 07, 2010 9:06 AM EDT |
r_a - The Amiga was an amazing box. It all but invented multimedia, and, when equipped with the Video Toaster (Amiga 2000 only) could, for $5,000, nearly match $100,000 worth of then state-of-the-art video gear. Makes you weep to realize that Microsoft became king of the hill emphazing the no in innovation. |
| bigg Jan 07, 2010 10:13 AM EDT |
Some days I think back to the Amiga when I am talking about Linux to others. The Amiga was pretty much the same as Linux, so much better than DOS/Windows, but absolutely nobody had heard of it. I only knew because I walked into an Amiga shop. The guy had them on display to play around with, and anybody who could afford one, bought one. |
| jacog Jan 07, 2010 10:14 AM EDT |
Pah, we were so proud of that multimedia capability, but somehow "they" managed to turn that into a bad thing. "This 'Amigo' thing... sure, it can draw pretty pictures, which is fine for playing games, but obviously it's no good for serious work." |
| ComputerBob Jan 07, 2010 11:31 AM EDT |
I didn't buy one, but I remember seeing Apple (I) kits for sale in the back of Popular Science magazine. Each kit came with the guts, a keyboard and the drawings to build a wooden case to hold them. I started in 1979, in the days of the Apple II, the Atari 400 and 800 (with 8 KB of RAM), and (a little later) the original Timex/Sinclair. From there, I graduated to the Texas Instruments TI 99/4a with its massive 16 KB of RAM (cassette tape storage, anyone?), which I bought for $400 at K-Mart -- and returned a month later for a full refund, when I had outgrown its nearly non-existent graphics capabilities. (Tip: Always return stuff to Kmart at night, when the teenagers are in charge.) Then I bought the original Amiga (1000) with its 512 KB of RAM, a color monitor, and a single floppy disk drive (no hard drive) for $2500. Two friends bought Amigas, too, after seeing mine. A few years later, I took it to a suburban house in a nearby town and paid a stranger $200 to solder chips into it to double its RAM to 1MB. While working on my undergraduate, graduate and doctoral coursework, I took class notes on my little Radio Shack Model 100 (with orthodontic rubber bands under its keys, to reduce the clattering sound), and did all of my course papers and my entire Masters thesis on my Amiga, back when all of my classmates were paying typists $1/page to type their papers. Those were the days, my friends. |
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