Commodore Amiga Lives

[Noskipallwd]

Don't know if anyone else was an Amiga user way back when, still have my Amiga 2000. Surfing around and saw a press release for Commodore USA, they are bringing the Amiga back. I have a feeling it will be about as successful as the first release. It looks like a Mac Mini clone that runs a Linux distro and costs more than the mini. The first Amigas were great machines, just never any software support. Don't think I will own a new one, but thought it was interesting anyway.

Cheers,
Shawn

[Doc B.]

My first computer was an Amiga 500. IIRC a 5 Meg external hard disc was $1500. Couldn't afford that, had to live with 720K floppies. Eventually succumbed to a 286 for exactly the reason you mentioned, Amiga was a great computer with not much useful software. I was trying start a CAD rendering business. Back then the competition was from big architectural houses with $50,000 Intergraph workstations that could do distributed processing of the renderings (tortuously slow process back then) across all the PCs networked in the office. Before I gave up on the Amiga I did an animated 3D rendering of the Barcelona Pavilion, complete with midi soundtrack of Bolero. Gave up on the idea completely when I realized I needed about 6X the funding I had available to be competitive. About a year later I was restoring antique radios, starting VALVE magazine and thinking about our first kit.

The new Amiga will need to be as unique as the old one, with some outstanding feature the competition doesn't have. Back then it was the relatively inexpensive very high quality (for the time) graphics.

[Grainger49]

I first saw an Amiga about 1993.  My Coop had one and demonstrated it to me.  I never knew it was an iteration of Commodore.  All I remember about Commodore is the Commodore 64.

More about my computer ignorance in my corner.  I need help!

[Paul Joppa]

My first programs ran on an Alwac III-E (written in Algol, which no one remembers either); later I wrote on the 650 and the 709 in Fortran - all were tubed computers; the 7094 was a later transistorized version of the 709. My first home computer was a RS Color Computer, with 4K of RAM - that's kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes! I made it do spectrum analysis using the game ports for A/D conversion - Nyquist frequency was IIRC 7Hz.

[rif]

The bottom of audioasylum's webpage says:

This site optimised for 640x480 using ALynx, a ASCII-Web-Browser for Amiga,
(AmiTCP | MLink | AS225), ported from Lynx version 2.4-FM.

I don't know if that's serious or not

[Noskipallwd]

Don't take this the wrong way Doc, but I am glad the whole CAD rendering thing didn't take off! Kinda sad but I still have my Commodore 64 as well.

My first programs ran on an Alwac III-E (written in Algol, which no one remembers either); later I wrote on the 650 and the 709 in Fortran - all were tubed computers; the 7094 was a later transistorized version of the 709. My first home computer was a RS Color Computer, with 4K of RAM - that's kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes! I made it do spectrum analysis using the game ports for A/D conversion - Nyquist frequency was IIRC 7Hz.

Algol, that is obscure. I still remember carrying boxes of cards for my old man for the tubed IBM he ran for Kroger, thought I was big stuff. After Basic my next 2 Computer Science courses back in school were Fortran and Cobol, that was fun. My first home computer was a kit! For some reason I cannot remember the name, it ran the first version of DOS, before Microsoft bought the rights to it from the original developer.

Cheers,
Shawn

[RayP]

Ah, the bad old days of computing. You were lucky to get one compile and test per day and the computers were about as reliable as my amplifier builds.

I never programmed in Algol though it really was more forward thinking in terms of architecture for its time compared to Cobol and Fortran. However, those other languages did well in their specific applications.

But then again, there was always coding in assembler which was fun though laborious at times.

And if you ever thought boxes of cards were bad, there was paper tape.

This post is getting to be like the four Yorkshiremen.


ray

[Noskipallwd]

Ha, Ha... I've never seen that sketch before. A rolled up newspaper in a septic tank!

Cheers,
Shawn