Commodore Amiga 500

My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.

The Amiga was hardly a low end computer. I bought a 500 in 1989 and they were wonderful machines. The high end systems could run Unix and were used in commercial video production. You just can't compete with platform effects though, and there wasn't a gap in the market between the Venn diagrams of the PC, Apple and Linux behemoths. In the end not even Sun could make a go of it.

Seeing the juggler, and lots of other gee-whiz stuff in 1986 inspired me to buy an Amiga 500 as my first computer in 1988. I got a lot of mileage out of that system, with its whopping 1.5MB of RAM, and two floppy drives (after shelling out another ~$150 for the 1MB upgrade and however much for an external floppy).

I actually used an Amiga to browse the web, back in 1994 or 1995. I started with Lynx, but then I switched to a graphical browser (probably Mosaic). This was an Amiga 500 with maxed-out RAM (8 MB) and a hard drive.

You explained and elaborated very well on why I've always thought the PC was doomed to win. By the early 1990s, IBM compatible hardware was not under the control of a single company anymore. It was an ecosystem which could survive the death of any one company, and where innovation can be driven forward by any of its participating companies. Suddenly the Amiga's custom chips don't seem so sexy anymore; before 1995, PCs were rocking high-res video cards with their own blitters and sound hardware capable of CD-quality sound, in multiple channels sometimes (see Gravis UltraSound). The main proprietary link was now in software, to wit: Windows, but when Linux came along Windows was no longer the sole linchpin. So I think you're right. There's no universe in which the Amiga was a serious contender. Every company is at risk of management blunders or changing market tides, and the scene is littered with the corpses of proprietarily integrated platforms that fell with their parent companies: not just the Amiga but Atari ST, SGI, Sun, DEC, Lisp machines, etc. The PC ecosystem outlasted them all and just kept going on, delivering the advantages those systems had in a cheaper, more accessible package. The sole exception was Apple. I think Apple won in the long run by subsidizing Mac development with iPod/iPhone/iPad sales, and what this means is yet another market turn away from general purpose computing and toward devices that only run approved curated "apps" and are discarded rather th…

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.

What I really want is something that detects any EMF above 60Hz. When I was a kid I used to hook a coil of wire and a diode to a piezo earphone. I then listened to the emissions of various devices in my house. My Amiga 500 was particularly interesting. I ran across a few projects that do the same thing but add an opamp and recording so you can generate sounds for electronic music.

Getting from more than 200 EUR/USD down to less than 50 is a big deal IMHO, but also just the availability of of the Tang boards is so much better. This is at a point where it starts to be fun again for an average hardware enthusiast to play around again with different hardware emulations. I own both a real Amiga 500 and a MIST box. While pure software emulation might be great by now, it just deals so much more real on hardware (with my old micro switch joysticks).

I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition. I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.

I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it. It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB. It ran all games and applications that I tried to run. I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility. It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.

I remember that the "P" key was your friend... and I never thought the Amiga mouse was bad quality, but maybe those shipped with the Amiga 500 were still better, I used to clean it regularly, and of course I hadn't used optical mice until then :)

My friend and I both had Amigas in the 90s and they did feel special at the time. A few years ago we felt nostalgic and emulated a bunch of games, and while it was nice to play them again some of that magic had been lost. Some time later we were round at a friend's house and he had a real Amiga 500 hooked up to an Amiga monitor and a joystick. He loaded up Turrican 2. All I can say is playing the game on real hardware was a far more satisfying experience than playing on an emulator. My friend played it for about half an hour and was hooked! I can't really define why it is that real hardware feels better. It's probably placebo but that's not the whole story.

I got my feet wet in the BBS world during the mid/late 80s, when I bought a Commodore-branded model 6499 modem for my C64. Unfortunately it allowed only 1200/75 bps and 300/300 bps links, but all services I could try it on were either payware or of no use to me, also there still were no interesting private BBSes around, so I put it in a drawer and eventually sold it to someone else. A few years later (early 90s) the experience has been much better with my Amiga 500 and JR-Comm and later Terminus programs, 2400, then 9600 and 14.400bps, and of course Zmodem. The number of local BBSes in the meantime had grown significantly, and Fidonet was a thing. I met lots of interesting people online, arranged pizza and copy parties at our homes (back then we didn't even have a copyright law), some of them became also my colleagues and am still friends with them after all those years. Unfortunately the cost wasn't trivial: hardware aside, just a few years back we still had flat local landline calls, so for example 4 hours spent chatting or transferring files on a BBS would cost about nothing, but as soon as it became clear that an army of people was getting ready to spend hours online every night, the then only national phone company decided to introduce timed fees. I still recall my parents screams about my phone expenses, and luckily I had no girlfriend back then (of course, I'd say) otherwise they would probably have killed me:). The difference with today's social networks? Here's one: