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Amiga

My system

On or around Dec 1989 I bought my first amiga, an Amiga 500. Eventally this was expanded to include the clock and ram in the bottom and more ram on the side, resulting in 2.5 meg. Protracker still runs on but not much else. It's good for running older software such as DCTV. I even expanded it to have three floppy drives. Oooh.

On or around late 1994, I finally got fed up and made a jump to an A4000 with WB 3.0 and a 120 Meg drive and 4M ram. Eventually this system was tricked out by adding more ram (now up to 8 meg), a Warp '040 board and a second internal drive (this one scsi, the first one is IDE). A cheap used hand scanner, a toccata 16-bit audio board and a cd rom drive were added. That is the current state of the machine. This hardware would be too slow for anything except AmigaDOS.

The future

The new Amigas will actually be a different machine because they will be incompatiable with all existing Amigas. We'll all have to buy new software. Latest news from the Amiga Inc site is very ominous. They are saying that they are intending to somehow put a win32 "api" in the new workbench. Now, in order to run windows, it's going to have all the buggy bloatware features of windows. Which will mean it will be a windows clone. First of all, that's stupid; If one wants a windows clone, just get windows. Secondly, by the time the Amiga developers finish making a win32 clone, MS will have come up with a new version. Then Amiga Inc will waste all of its development time on playing catch-up; this time would be better spent developing and polishing something new. The Amiga must (as it always has in the past) go its own way. Make no effort to run windows programs. Instead, make something better.

In the meantime, at least one group of folks has announced their plans to make a freeware PD AmigaDOS compatiable OS, which will be developed for multiple CPUs. The portability and price of unix without the clunkiness of unix. I'll put a link in here when I remember where it was.

More info will be here later on. For now, try the links section for a few Amiga stites.

Update 2001

I have a PC now. Couldn't take not being able to browse the web any more. Could not take not being able to buy software: there are more choices on the PC. Emulation runs most of my old Amiga stuff, except for Interstel Empire, which is very cool.