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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

> It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the future slip away.

I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss. Among retrocomputing enthusiasts, Amiga users are an extra odd bunch -- often making and selling commercial shrink wrapped software for years.

While it's not entirely unusual for people to put effort into a special game or whatnot for their favorite retrocomputer, and charge people for a special nostalgia filled limited run, Amiga users seem strangely tied to trying to make creating Amiga stuff a viable commercial venture [1][2][3] it's as quaint as it is bizarre these days.

1 - https://www.amigaos.net/

2 - http://entwickler-x.de/emotion

3- http://www.pagestream.org/?action=Store

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The Amiga broke my heart. In some sense I will never get over it. At ages 12 to 18 I was a programmer on the Amiga, a music composer, digital image artist, I scoured BBS's, and so much more. I got together with groups of other people (from all over, and of all ages) doing the same things.

When it could no longer be denied that Commodore and the Amiga were dead, cold and buried, and it seemed the only alternative was a clunky, artless PC, I got so down on the whole thing that I left the field of computers entirely. I even went to university in a completely unrelated field.

I finally broke after many years, went back and got a computer science degree and has now been a programmer and systems architect for many years. But I have never forgotten my first love.

I feel the exact same way (and even did the same things on the Amiga), except the breakage is taking place as I write this. For the last 30 years I lived on borrowed time provided by Sun and SGI.

> it's as quaint as it is bizarre these days.

You wouldn't say that about an aftermarket for, say, vintage car parts, would you?

To be specific, if you buy yourself an original VW bus, you won't be on your own when you try to service it.

Amiga just might be the VW bus of retro computers (probably Commodore deserves this title better, but the analogy works the same way). It'll be alive for as long as the feelings associated with it are understood.

I think what really sticks out to me, more than other retrocomputer scenes, is that not only is software that should have long been turned over for free or gone open source being sold, but the business model for the software is all very 1990s. "Buy here, $199.99 and download" seems anachronistic to where most other scenes have gotten to.

I mean, these companies must move what, tens of licenses per year? I would bet that many of them would do better just to give the software away for free (as in beer) and put a patreon link on the home page.

I honestly really admire the Amiga scene's incredible tenacity, but can't also help but find it just a hair amusing.

Less like a VW bus, and more like a 1920's Lincoln (the 1980's is relatively ancient when it comes to personal computing), and not only do you have the community of vintage enthusiasts to help you restore it and get it in running condition, there's some company selling aftermarket entertainment systems, and they offer kits for the modern Accord and Camry, as well as 1920 Lincolns...

So yes, kind of quirky and bizarre.

Exactly.

Some niche products have such a following that they are recreated after the original producer stops making them:

http://polaroidoriginals.com/

History, if you're not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Originals

Here, though, I'd say it was not exactly a niche product: Fuji Instax has been on an upwards curve the whole time Polaroid was messing around with its product line.

But yup, I agree with your point.

Fuji Instax is still pretty niche and survived largely because of Fujifilm's extremely diverse portfolio. Polaroid didn't so much "mess around with its product line" as "go bankrupt twice in a decade". The revival of Polaroid instant film was difficult, painful and wouldn't have happened at all if it weren't for the fanatical devotion of a number of key players outside of Polaroid Corporation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaroid_Corporation#Bankruptc...

Polaroid arguably discontinued their instant film business because they bet on Zink[1]

Zink is a Polaroid technology that powers many instant cameras. I own a Polaroid-branded one (Polaroid SNAP), and it's awesome: it never ceases to amaze people. And when I tell them that yes, they can keep it, and it's also a sticker, their eyes light up!

I've made friends with this new digital iteration of the technology. But when the Impossible Project was started, that tech was still very far from being mature; and many people still prefer the look and feel of the instant film. They are different products.

Still, it wouldn't be fair to say that Polaroid didn't try to stay relevant in instant photography. Ultimately, Zink is a success - although it's a separate company now.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zink_(technology)

I can commiserate, I had the same feels of loss when Acorn closed down.

When I was a kid they held the same affection for me as some kind "nerd football" team that you'd support out of all reason. I used to think "if they'd have just done this then they would have won!". With hindsight, as an adult, that seems so sweetly, childishly naive; I was a funny kid. :D

It convinced me though that you shouldn't tie your dreams to someone else's commercial organisation unless you're a major shareholder.

The happy ending for me was that Gnu/Linux and Free software nicely filled the void in my heart. No one can take it from you and it's never "finished". Cheers Mr Stallman. (That's so naive of me; I must be a funny adult too. :D )

"The happy ending for me was that Gnu/Linux and Free software nicely filled the void in my heart."

How ironic, considering that exact same thing is the bane of my existence: for someone like me who skipped the primitive, clunky, derided PC and jumped straight onto Suns and SGI's, Linux and GNU are a terrible, utterly depressing regression compared to HP-UX, Solaris and IRIX. I lost all will to work on computers because of GNU and Linux. It's that terrible when I compare it to AmigaOS, HP-UX, Solaris or IRIX.

That's interesting to hear. Is there some particular feature that you miss? Would something like one of the BSD based OSs suit you better?

I miss tools which don't implement other tools within them (like GNU grep -r does).

I miss the fault management architecture.

I miss ZFS without having to jump through all kinds of hoops to get / filesystem on it.

I miss the no memory overcommit without having to jump through hoops to system engineer an image with it turned off.

I miss the advanced runtime linker which can check version dependencies.

I miss the brutal speed of Solaris on the same hardware when compared to Linux.

I miss the advanced features of SGI's inst(1M) and AT&T's SVR4 packaging.

I miss Solaris zones, especially the sparse zones, dearly.

I miss mdb.

I miss SMF.

I miss the strict adherence to standards.

I miss the working, reference implementations of NFS and fiberchannel.

I miss JumpStart™️ provisioning and Flash™️ compressed OS imaging technology.

I miss clustering software which isn't buggy as hell and which actually works.

I miss IPFilter.

I miss Crossbow, the network virtualization technology.

I miss the fanatical application and driver interfaces' backwards-compatibility.

You miss bare bones commands that haven't changed since the 90's?

Brutal speed of Solaris? Compared to what, SunOS 4.x? This article is a few years old but I doubt the situation has improved much: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=oracle_s...

Much has improved and illumos keeps getting better and faster: since 2005, no code which causes performance regressions was allowed into the Solaris codebase. Each speedup committed set the base higher. Nobody would be allowed to commit code which slowed the performance thereafter. Any case where GNU/Linux was faster was treated as priority 1 bug. Yes, a bug.

Implementing tools within other tools for convenience is stupid, as it kills modularity, which is the UNIX®️ philosophy: I don't need that kind of "convenience" since I know UNIX®️ and therefore which pipes to use to which commands to get the same effect. grep -r replaces find + xargs + grep and therefore goes against "do one thing and do it well" as well as against "design tools to interface with other tools". For example tar is a tape archiver, therefore it has no business implementing compression - that's what dedicated compressors like bzip2 or xz or 7z are for - they know best how to (de)compress and how to handle their own formats. Therefore, the GNU approach of convenience is stupid beyond retarded.

For someone accustomed to Solaris or Irix's good points, BSD is likely to feel even more archaic.

As a former Amiga owner, I don't think it is unique to Amiga but rather it was an end of an era and nothing burned as bright as the Amiga at the end of that era. I called it the tinkerer era where home computers where not just a box but rather something to be tinkered with.

Resources where limited and hacks where abundant to make them perform miracles (in their day). Tinkering gave way to homogenization and the whole landscape got sterile. I felt the same loss as I did with Amiga when Symbolics started to fade from the landscape, then there was DEC, SGI, Atari, etc. etc. The era almost took Apple and NeXT with them. Some burnt out longer than others but they all started to die then and there. It really was an epoch shift in computing and I think that is what we all truly miss. We pin it on our favorite tech of the time, but in the end, it was just a cooler time to be in computing.

> I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss.

Man you are so right. I reluctantly moved to the PC hoping till the very end that Commodore/Amiga would somehow survive the late 90s. That was a really bitter era when one had invested so much time and joy in the machine and its OS.

Well it has one advantage, it's a privacy focused computer disconnected from the wild internet and probably less likely to be back doored. I'd be happier using it a a crypto wallet or for personal finance spreadsheets than a modern PC.

Machines of that era were vulnerable to malware because they had no memory protection. The main vector is the floppy drive, rather than the network.

The modern virus killer as you know it today on Microsoft®️ Windows™️ was invented on the Amiga. As was the modern computer virus, for that matter.

I don't think you'd be doing many cryptography operations on a CPU that brutally slow.

Should be ok for a cold wallet?

To be fair to the Amiga enthusiasts, the Acorn / RISC OS group has a similar kind of -- well, I'll call it momentum.

Commercial software is still available (though not as much of it as was available in the past), and sometimes the prices are downright silly given the size of the market and the lack of maintenance on said software.

"I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss."

That is correct and my pain born of that loss has increased over the years. First Sun and then SGI provided some alleviation but when they both lost the pain came back in full force, since both ended up opening an old wound which had never fully healed.

Amiga Persecution Complex.

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