Workbench Nostalgia

Some of the things in Workbench were really nice. For example "datatypes" that basically provided a pluggable way of adding file support to applications. If a datatype was written for the new QOI image format, then all the image manipulation programs written 30+ years ago would be able to use it.

Another thing that comes to mind was the ASSIGN command for setting up and manipulating search paths. These search paths were used extensively in the system. For example, libraries would be looked for in "LIBS:" and if you wanted to add a new path with libraries, you would just do "ASSIGN LIBS: <SomeNewPath> ADD". No need for messing with colon-separated lists of paths.

Plenty of downsides too.. Notable no memory protection. A program going haywire could easily bring down the whole system. Graphics performance in Workbench was generally pretty dreadful, especially with higher color counts.

https://datagubbe.se/ltmag/

Some people loved the Amiga just because of its games, but Workbench, its desktop OS, did an awful lot of advanced desktop features very early, many of which are now common, and some which still aren't.

Last time I turned it on, I remember the audio was not working. Hopefully, it will not be too hard to fix. I would like to get everything back to working order, I know I'm not going to use it daily, but it would be cool to play some of the old games and listening to some of the old ProTracker modfiles.

So many awesome applications and games. I remember spending hours with this music creator where you could put notes on the scale and then assign instruments (very fuzzy memory) and it would faithfully play it (I presume midi). There were existing songs you could load, or you could start from scratch.

Of course as ~8-10 year old this resulted in me just putting as many notes on the scale as possible and making it play really really fast.

2.0 was a huge upgrade from the 1.x line. It looked much more professional, was more stable, etc.