RANT!

[hitekvoop]

I didn't make the jump to the Win-tel architecture until 1997, and even then it was only because the college courses I was taking required a Windows box. Prior to that I was a die-hard Amiga fan. I've owned every Amiga ever made save for the original 1000, the 2500, and the 4000T. (My 4000 was a desktop, but I did have a Warp Engine '060 in it.)

Man, I sure do miss those days.

Adam

What I wouldn't have done back in the day for an Amiga 500. I was a commodore kid, a C128 to be exact, so I got to play with 8510 assembler AND CP/M on the Z80 side of the house. I was thrust into the PC world via college as well around 1990. It was right at the cusp of Windows 3.0 from Win 2.11 (which was a runtime environment to support the MS productivity suite at the time). It was a 80386 25Mhz, no coprocessor. The campus store had Macintoshes and the newly unveiled NeXT slab (pizza box). I was in love with that thing and nearly hawked my 386 for one but didn't. Stayed with the PC until 2007 when Apple adopted the Intel architecture, and guess what? A version of the Mach kernel that NeXT ran on underpinned OS X. SOLD!

In the intervening time, I've owned unix boxes from HP, DEC and did have a NeXT for a bit, Sparcstations, and an SGI Indigo 2 that I proudly used daily for my job at Hotmail (unix admin). I never got to to own my Amiga (or any of the Atari ST's of the time) but I remember sitting and watching the Newtek demo in 1990, it was amazing. 4096 colors in HAM, it was several years later that I got my first "hi-color" card for the PC... 16-bit color yo! I'm pretty sure the Amiga was on to 24-bit by that point ><

Adam, you still have an Amiga and QM to go with it? I think we need a retro table with a little HeNe and the Amiga rig on it!

[Bradfo69]

IBM XT was the first thing I really learned on at work.

My own personal first was a 286 machine, 12Mhz if I recall with 256k of ram. The sales clerk said it would probably run the entire Sears store and probably wouldn't need an upgrade for years. I remember taking the train to Philadelphia to find some high rise building with a tiny hole in the wall office where I spent $400 cash to buy 4 sticks of ram to bring it up to 1 meg and felt like I was making some sort of shady drug deal.

After a ton of research, I spent $1099 on the computer in a Boscov's Dept. store about an hour away and 5 months later saw it in Staples for $799. Should have learned right then and there that NONE of this stuff holds value. I've built everything else from scratch, since until about 5 or 6 years ago when it no longer made sense financially.

[ImageLight]

Mine was a IBM XT that I salvaged from a trash pile and rebuilt.. Loaded a Cakewalk midi sequencing program on it which ran my recording studio for years before the HDD finally died.. Loved that DOS monster...

[buffo]

I remember sitting and watching the Newtek demo in 1990, it was amazing.

Sure was. Especially since the demo was released in 1987 and would run on any Amiga (including the A500!) Here's a link, just for nostalgia's sake: (Note this is a true-to-the-original recording, right down to the sound of the floppy drive loading the demo.)

it was several years later that I got my first "hi-color" card for the PC... 16-bit color yo! I'm pretty sure the Amiga was on to 24-bit by that point

Amiga development stalled with the release of the AGA chipset (used in the A1200 and A4000, the ill-fated CD-32, and later the A4000T machine). AGA was great, but it was only an incremental improvement over the standard Amiga abilities, so it wasn't going to carry the company forever. Commodore screwed themselves by not pushing forward fast enough.

There was a new "AAA" chipset that never saw the light of day (apart from a behind-the-scenes look in an employee-made video shot just days before Commodore closed up shop for good), but it took them so long to get to that point that most Amiga users who wanted 24-bit color (or just really high resolution) were already running an aftermarket frame buffer of some kind. (I had the Cybervision 64 in my A4000. Up to 1600x1200, and up to true 24-bit color, all in in 1995.)

The crazy thing was that by that time Commodore as a company was already finished (they died in 1994), but other companies were still going strong releasing stuff that would run on Amiga hardware. That's how awesome the platform was.

The Amiga finally died out as a viable platform around 2000 or so, when it became clear that none of the companies who had purchased the IP rights to the Amiga (Gateway, and later Escom) had any intention of resurrecting the machine as a home computer. But even today there are people still using the machine, and the OS has been updated to run on several modern CPU's.

Adam, you still have an Amiga and QM to go with it? I think we need a retro table with a little HeNe and the Amiga rig on it!

I wish! I currently have a CD-32 with the SX-1 module (adds ram and an IDE HD) that is unreliable, and an old A500 (1.3 roms) with a GVP A530 turbo unit (68030 CPU and 68882 math co-processor + 8 megs of ram and a 200 meg SCSI HD). Neither one has been booted in at least 5 years.

I've never owned a QM-16 (that's the original Pangolin Zorro II card that would plug in to an Amiga), and I've never tried the Paula mod on the A500. (Paula was the sound chip - there was a mod to bypass the output filtering caps so it could output DC.)

That being said, it would be very cool to see an old-school Amiga sporting a QM-16 board and running the LD-400 Pangolin software at SELEM someday.

Adam

[hitekvoop]

Sure was. Especially since the demo was released in 1987 and would run on any Amiga (including the A500!) Here's a link, just for nostalgia's sake: (Note this is a true-to-the-original recording, right down to the sound of the floppy drive loading the demo.)

Wow, that brings back memories. Amazing how dated it looks now... like you keep waiting for the still life pictures to do something. People don't realize at the time its competition in the PC world was EGA graphics @16 colors. VGA was out on the PS2 around 88 but even that only had 256 colors @320x200. Remember how bad boobs looked at 320x200?