| I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985 or 86, and hung in there with a 2000 or 3000 (can't remember now) until 1996. Only about a year ago I finally tossed all the old floppies, but I kept several thinking I might write an Amiga retrospective someday. Here are some highlights. It's been a long time, so I'm sure to make some technical mistakes. Rexx Plus Compiler -- by Dineen Edwards Group;
Implementation of the Rexx language (ARexx). You cold easily hack together the OS and many applications as well. ARexx was one of the things that kept the Amiga alive. UEdit -- by Rick Stiles;
One of the first great things available for the Amiga. A highly programmable editor. If Rick hadn't passed away too soon UEdit may well have lived on past the Amiga. Migraph OCR -- by Migraph, Inc.;
I was scanning financial data from Investors Business Daily, compiled quite a database. Descartes! -- by Mindware International;
Some sort of AI-ish thingy I never found a use for. Magellan -- by Emerald Intelligence;
Expert System generator I never found a use for. The company ran into some sort of trademark infringement and later renamed it Mahogany. Boole -- by URSIC Computing;
Fuzzy logic and Bayesian Inference. Actually a DOS program, but you could run it on the Amiga. The Amiga was really a hacker's machine. Thanks to programs like ARexx and UEdit you could really do some interesting stuff at a time when a DOS computer mostly just ran stand-alone programs. It was greatly stymied by Commodore's terrible marketing and lack of commercial applications. I think in a way I was scarred by investing so much learning effort in a technology that dead-ended. It was probably a factor in my taking a career detour to more business, less technical work for several years. |