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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

I have very fond memories of my Amiga 2000. There were Atari guys in my hood and Amiga guys, and I was an Amiga guy apperently. It was a hell of a computer. I'd go to a book store, browse through those fat AMIGA ROM Kernel books (could not afford all), go home, hack assembly code, hack C code, compile it with a copy of the Aztec C compiler, all night, go to school sleepless, and talk about graphics, sprites and whatnot with my friends. This was a hell of a time.

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Growing up in the 90s DOS/Win9x era I feel like I missed out on a crucial part of computing by only using my Dad's C64 for playing games. That same level of computing knowledge necessity just wasn't there for me outside of learning DOS commands.

I'm glad I can navigate a CLI easily all these years later, but still feel like I missed out by not having the same drive to learn computers on a more bare metal level.

Eventually I subscribed to the point of view that DOS/Win was the way to go. (Amiga was going nowhere with a management that could not draft a vision for the company that was bright enough.) How wrong I was! - A Mac was way to expensive here in Germany, so that was not an option. So I bought a boring PC, learning Wordperfect and whatnot.

But the Amiga taught me what 68000er assembly is, what a hex editor is, and all of this (the Amiga Workbench, the games, the graphics) was so much more fun and beautiful then a dry DOS box.

I was the PC dude among the gang that was focused on the Amiga, I use to dislike being the only one diving into Peter Norton and PC Systems Programming books, while only being able to do Amiga programming (in pairs, apparently we were already doing agile!), and music (hey Protracker!) during our weekend meetings.

Apparently I was the lucky one, although like everyone else on the group I always kept trying to find the Amiga soul in newer systems.

BeOS seemed to be it, but it wasn't.

Nowadays I would give that place to macOS and Windows, in what concerns being multimedia desktop computers, although it isn't the same.

In my case, I loved my Atari 800 and 800XL, but when the Amiga came out and someone brought theirs in to the university lab where I was working, I knew I had to have one. I finally got a 500 a couple of years later and still have it.

because the Atari OS was named TOS, some Amiga guys called the Atari guys "tossers"

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