The Amiga as “a computer built to last 50 years” | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga as “a computer built to last 50 years”

datagubbe.se

30 pointstodsacerdoti5 comments

The Amiga cult is interesting - a machine that simultaneously occupies two niches: a "coulda been a contender" machine remembered most fondly for gaming while its proponents insist it was a serious machine. I don't think anybody outside those who owned one ever saw it as anything more than the dead end of the 8 bit era taken to an extreme. I do miss the diversity of personal computing in those days though.

I always get a bit of a chuckle out of the whole "yes you can use the 'net, but you have to hook up a Raspberry Pi". Just use the Pi!

I guess the Pi is meant to replace HW that’s no longer available/easily procurable, as there were/are Ethernet adapters for Amigas.

I think the thing that Amiga users love(d) about it (I had one) was that at the time it had the type of tight integration between HW & SW that we’re starting to see again in modern devices (the level of integration of Apple’s products come to mind).

It was the start of modern computing, before the Modern Computing Ecosystems took hold.

I had an Amiga 3000, and the significant thing for me with it was that I could run my multiline BBS at the same time as I could play games or do other things. Before Windows 3.0. During the MS-DOS era.

Amiga was assured world domination (due to physics) until somethingBad happened. A fight in the boardroom led to the CEO who orchestrated this path quickly departing the company and hiring an Indian to create a knock-off which they then marketed under the Atari logo that they reportedly bought for a mere $45K. The knock-off was a cheap imitation (due to physics), but the CEO knew exactly how to market it as the real deal. Because it wasn’t the real deal, it couldn’t do much, but that was okay because, as you point out, most of the public didn’t know what the real deal could actually do. The result was predictable. The traditional buyers of computers from that era (businesses) began associating Amiga with Atari, a brand that they had grown up to associate with video game kiosks at Pizza Hut and later, the 2600. It is a foregone conclusion that you can be fired for procuring video games for your business computing needs and so Amiga lost access to that vast market (while the minicomputer companies like DEC got a few years of extra life, enabling the rise of Windows NT that today is called Windows 11). Commodore BUSINESS Machines went under, the creative team it bought from Amiga Inc (which had always considered gaming to be an important market, but not necessarily a viable one at that time) disbanded and some died of personal self destruction. Of course Atari died too, there really was no market for such expensive gaming systems then, whether they were knock-offs or the real thing. The last I heard, the sons of the bastard CEO who did this had taken over Atari. (In fairness, despite human carnage created by his Boardroom war, that CEO had survived the atrocities of Nazi death camps as a youth, but his family did not.) To your other point, I had a stack of Amigas “on the Net” back in the 80s (via UUCP). If you’re talking about web surfing via broadband, I could write the drivers and solder the Zoro card together, but why —Amiga is for NTSC video (which I suspect is as familiar to you as vehicles with distributor caps.)

As for rPi, they’re great, but how surprised would you be to find out what’s in that proprietary ROM? That proprietary British ROM (insert evil laugh). Smell you at CES /not

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