Commodore Amiga 2000

I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1984, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.

It was magical. Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background. And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music. I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.

I've mentioned this on various threads before, but my Amiga 2000 with a bridge board and SCSI controller was a wonderful example of 1980's convoluted heterogenous multi-processing: - The 68k, of course + an 68020 accelerator - The 8088 + a 286 accelerator - A Z80 on the SCSI card - A 6502 compatible SOC on the keyboard... As an Amiga user it obviously pleased me immensely that the 68k controlled the lot. Like you, I hardly used the bridgeboard, though. It's main role was to show off the ability to run a "PC in a window".

I ran an A-Max mac emulator on my 030 accelerated Amiga 2000. It worked surprisingly well! > ultimately what saved them was Microsoft Indeed. At the time of MSFTs surprise investment of $150M in Apple (supposedly arranged in a single phone call from Steve to Bill), more than one pundit opined that the Justice Department's anti-trust investigation into Microsoft was a major factor. I don't recall the exact timing of the suit being filed vs the investment but MSFT certainly knew well in advance that a suit was likely as the Justice Department investigated for years before filing. A key part of MSFT's anti-trust defense was that there were viable competitors, of which Apple was the best example. At the time of the investment Apple was, arguably, just months away from running out of cash. Jobs needed the money to buy time so he could rework the marketing and products. I've always thought that investment was a smartly pragmatic move by Gates. It was a relatively cheap way to ensure he still had one competitor on life support that wasn't quite dead yet - and, although I'm sure Gates didn't expect it, MSFT actually ended up making money on the investment (although Gates would have happily given up that profit to not have the iPod->iPhone->iPad to compete with later :-) ).

Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first ever sold - period. https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a... I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid. 1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92. I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.

I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my recollection was that even by the time of the introduction of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000) Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms of users by the mid-to-late 80s. It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab). Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal. It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death. Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers. Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me. In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story. I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.

I loved my 2000, but the 3000 was a step above (aside for the godawful choice of RAM chips). I loved the scissor-switch design on the keyboard switches though. These days you should get hold of an A600 and Vampire II - http://www.kipper2k.com/accel600.html