[phs318u]

I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be.

However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.

[mickelsen]

I'm a millennial and I discovered the Amiga, the demoscene, the lore and so on way after its era thanks to the catchy tracker music and demos. I've had several different re-introductions over different stages in my life, but the first was by trying to figure out as a kid how the tunes of my games could pack so much in less than 1MB per song, when my mental model was only MIDIs, WAVs or MP3s. Then I figured it out and got Modplug Tracker from the school's computer lab (had no internet at home) and that whole rabbit hole.

I'd notice the recurring nicknames of the scene groups, composers (skaven, necros, siren, etc), and so on always in my favorite games, it piqued enough interest in me to see what the Amiga was all about. Tried to emulate it to no avail back then, today it's really easy. Even without having lived through it I could feel that thing was something else. I really liked all the clever tricks programmers did to output cool graphics, like the tunnel sequence in Super Stardust (which also had some really catchy tunes), later saw the same trick in Iridion for Gameboy Advance, I think some people behind the studios of both games were also from the scene.

There's this video from Ahoy, about how the Amiga tried but couldn't survive in the end, told in his signature way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ

[anthk]

A millenial there; I could emualte it with ease under UAE and floppies and multiple guides in early 00's.

[krs_]

I recall also getting it working around that time. I gotta admit though that being used to the very straightforward NES, SNES etc emulators Amiga emulation was pretty confusing with all the different models and kickstarts and workbenches.

[vidarh]

I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.

My file manager is custom (and wildly promitive) because almost everyone has abandoned the idea of a spatial file manager (I don't want a "dogmatic" one that insists on one window per folder and reopening at the last position, but I do want Amiga-style ability to explicitly snapshot position and size).

My wm is custom because I want one floating Workbench-like desktop and a bunch of "screens" without floating windows.

My shell is custom because I wanted assigns and was willing to put up with a bunch of brokenness to get it.

I have a large design document I had Claude work on on a modern take of Arexx (I hate the language, but loved the ports; no Dbus is not the answer - the complexity runs directly counter to what make Arexx work, hence why we have a billion separate IPC command channels for apps today) that I intend to tackle soon.

I badly want to do something datatype like, but now we're firmly in territory that needs some community uptake to make sense.

I miss the excitement of the hardware too, but that is a lot more rose tinted, while a lot of the affordances AmigaOS provided are things I still actually want.

(Also, for anyone who wants to understand why we care about the Amiga without the couple of thousands of pages of Brian Bagnalls works on Commodore - which I hear ily recommend, but they're for people with a special interest - Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here"[1] is excellent)

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535694/the-future-was-here/

[doener]

> I'm still chasing the idea of recapturing some of that.

Me too. I wrote a blog post about it: https://text.tchncs.de/r3nun0mxs9

[phs318u]

I love this so much. Did you ever take it further? Did you find anything close to ARexx?

[phs318u]

Love it! Any chance you'd be willing to share what you've got on GH? Also, I wonder if anyone has tried creating an Amiga OS style Linux distro? Sounds like your work could be the guts of it.

[quadpro]

That last sentence of the article about waiting for the rest of the world to catch up really describes how I felt for way too long after 1994. In addition to the things mentioned in the article and the comments here, by that time I was used to having a standard OS-supplied scripting language that every self-respecting software program integrated with (ARexx), a standardized localization mechanism for software (locale files), and a generic OS-wide mechanism for handling file formats (datatypes). Finally switching over to Windows and Linux really felt like a big step backwards in some ways, and it took quite some time for the rest of the world to catch up (subjectively at least).

[vidarh]

I'm still waiting...

I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing.

Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit.

I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations I'm unaware of that we've largely forgotten about.

[dosisking]

Being able to simply write to the SPEAK: device was nice

[khazhoux]

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.

[pjmlp]

I sign the sibling comment about being magical.

As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas.

However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one.

Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.

[TacticalCoder]

> ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be

Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing.

> A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period.

Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V.

> And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.

How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic).

GenXer signing off.

P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).

[phs318u]

Almost. I'm technically in the first year of Gen X ('65). I knew a some guys a few years older right into the hobbyist computing scene in the early '80s. I lost touch by the time the Amiga came out but they would definitely have been into it.

[vidarh]

Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people.

Personally it still felt like a step backwards when I felt I no longer had a choice but to switch to Linux in '97 or so (I'd used a souped up Amiga 3000 until then)

Sure, you could get far faster PCs with better graphics, but even Linux still felt like a step back in usability.

By '99 I was using Enlightenment with draggable virtual desktops to get back some superficial familiarity and still wishing I had a new Amiga instead.

[MattPalmer1086]

> Boomer is a tricky term now - it's starting to become a generic term for old people.

We Gen-Xers are used to being completely ignored as a generation. That is not new at all.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, apparently we suffer from too much "I don't care attitude". :)