What is it with Amiga that people keep tinkering with it and HN is full of Amiga articles? I once had an Amiga 1000 but for me that's just a sweet memory. Why is it different for other people, and why Amiga and not Spectrums or the like?
I think Amiga find themselves at the perfect border of extendable and retro. Mine has 1024x768 (over hdmi/dvi), 128MB of ram, a cpu almost 5x faster than it shipped with (66MHz vs 14MHz), and an ethernet (pcmcia) card. I don't have usb yet, but it's possible. I also have unreasonable amounts of storage (compared to the design) via an sdcard.
Much older and you lose all of this. Much newer, and you just end up replacing a PC with a crap PC.
Retro computing is a hobby. People generally like their hobbies. Like, why do people like old cars? There are better cars out there but some people are attracted to them.
Amiga was a computer that was way ahead of its time with its hardware AND software and provided so much fun until it was deemed obsolete - and it was a long time. Nothing like that existed for a long long time. But all of it doesn't matter - it is like the classic car analogy, it is just a hobby of some people, to reminisce on their childhood etc.
>challenge to make it do something it couldn't do
This is another hobby altogether. You can do it with retro computers, or with modern computers and artificial limitations (think of the demoscene and their 4k or 64k competitions) and actually this mindset does not even require a computer. Making things do things they are not supposed to do is just a fun time for some people, a creative outlet.
The thing I find interesting about retro computing is how far one can take the platform in terms of productivity. In other words, how far can the platform be taken if one ignores content consumption.
There's also a minimalists/efficiency mindset at play. If I confine youtube to the living room, can I satisfy my daily desktop needs with an older system? Is that older system actually faster (because of less software bloat) even though it's running on much more constrained hardware? Do I actually need an operating system that supports multiple logged in users for my desktop use cases? Are modern UIs more distracting and actually an impediment on productivity?
I can't speak for others but these questions are interesting to me.
I have an DEC VT320 terminal hooked to one of my Linux machines, and when I need to heads down, no distractions, pound out text, I pull it into a room without a computer (or TV) and close the door. It's a great way to block out distractions. George RR Martin famously writes his books in Wordstar on a DOS PC not connected to the Internet for similar reasons.
The big limiting factor with using a vintage computer for a daily driver is that very few of them have a browser that supports modern web standards, have relatively low resolution screens and are painfully slow doing modern crypto (TLS & SSH), so much of the modern internet is inaccessible or unusable.
For me, almost purely nostalgia. As silly as it sounds, meeting goals I set for myself when I was 12. (Plus a sprinkling of convenience; the scan-doubler lets me use a leftover flatscreen instead of a hulking CRT, ethernet saves me a lot of heartache transferring files from my desktop, etc).
But mostly just games. I didn't really play games from roughly 1995-2010 for various reasons, so Amiga (and megadrive) are still where a lot of my old favourites are. Thanks to Catalina, my desktop can't play civ5 anymore. But my Amiga can still play civ1!
I have a Vampire 2 Card for My A600. I can do quite a lot of more modern tasks on the machine and connect it to a modern monitor. In my A1200 I have 16GB of storage on a CF card, VGA / DVI and a Music card (I can play back MP3s etc. So it like using a Pentium Era computer.
The OS is pretty decent considering its age and there are plenty of decent applications to use.
I don't find 8bit computers particularly interesting. I had a BBC Micro and a Tantung Einstein (hand me downs) and they are extremely primitive compared to the Amiga. The Amiga is very much like a modern computer.
I really wish there was Amiga OS for a PC computer (I believe MorphOS is being ported) as even the aging OS 3.1 with some extensions is in some ways better than Desktop Linux. But that is highly subjective.
You don't need to run AROS on Linux. It's one option among many, including running bare metal on a number of hardware platforms, including on real Amiga hardware.
But for someone who wants to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, it's a convenient option as it makes it irrelevant whether AROS supports your underlying hardware as long as Linux does, and so makes it easy to install; it also makes it easy to run it alongside a regular Linux desktop for someone who doesn't want to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, which frankly still has lots of limitations.
MorphOS to me is to divorced from AmigaOS to be particularly interesting, and the fact it isn't open source is another dealbreaker.
> You don't need to run AROS on Linux. It's one option among many, including running bare metal on a number of hardware platforms, including on real Amiga hardware.
Yep. I did have AROS running on a real machine (which has died). I have a real Amiga though so I rather use Amiga OS.
> But for someone who wants to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, it's a convenient option as it makes it irrelevant whether AROS supports your underlying hardware as long as Linux does, and so makes it easy to install;
Yes I am aware. I don't like Linux.
> it also makes it easy to run it alongside a regular Linux desktop for someone who doesn't want to just run an AmigaOS-like OS, which frankly still has lots of limitations.
I just don't see the point of running Linux with a Amiga like DE (which is really what you are doing). I am sure it suits many people's needs. It just not something I am interested in.
> MorphOS to me is to divorced from AmigaOS to be particularly interesting, and the fact it isn't open source is another dealbreaker.
I haven't used it myself, but I've read that many Amiga third-party desktop software exposed an API to be programmed via a scripting language (called ARexx). You could easily automate tasks that cross application boundaries this way.
Also it is just a decent desktop OS. One of the problems with Linux (and OpenBSD / FreeBSD etc) is that the OS really isn't a desktop Operating System. It is a Unix operating system with a desktop.
There is a big community of people supporting the 8-bit home computers too. I'm subscribed to r/c64 on Reddit for example, and people recently posted a "top 10 C64 games released in 2019" video, for example.
What makes the Amiga interesting, though, is that it represented a transition from the 8-bit environment to modern machines that is modern enough to resemble modern systems (GUI, multitasking, reasonable graphics, lots of people had harddrives etc.) and that was revolutionary at the time.
At the same time around 5 million Amigas were sold, making it one of the most successful lines of home computers ever; not that many of the alternatives have as large a pool of potential supporters, and many of the rest are "too old" in that their users had one of the earlier ones and moved on to one (or more) of the later ones, and their nostalgia may have another focus.
E.g. we first had a VIC-20 briefly, but I really started with a C64, and while I love the C64 too, you can't imagine the C64 as a replacement for a PC. But my Amiga stood up very favourably to PCs for years, even after Windows gained traction. It was faster for a while. It had better graphics. It had proper pre-emptive multitasking. It had better sound. More of my nostalgia is focused on the Amiga.
Part of it is probably also down to what and how you used them. For the first years we had a C64 I mostly used it for games. I spent more time on my Amiga on creative endeavours, from writing code to drawing in Deluxe Paint, and writing.
And in retrospect there are still aspects of the OS that feels ahead of today. E.g. one of my favourites includes pervasive scripting. OS X comes closest to that with AppleScript, but on the Amiga AREXX become so integral that some applications have their central event bus built around AREXX to they point where every keypress and every menu action gets passed through the same mechanism as the AREXX commands. Another is datatypes: You'll find Amiga applications published in the 90's that happily supports WebP images for example, because someone wrote a datatype library for it, and so every application that supports datatypes can load WebP without modification or recompilation or anything.
But of course there is an element of rose tinted glasses and all that, which I think largely comes down to how big a part of your life it was, and to what extent it was part of your formative years. For me, my computing interest dominated my life (and still does), and so the Amiga dominated my life from I was 13 until I was around 20, and it was practicality more than anything that made me switch (to Linux): I moved to a smaller flat, and I could only fit one machine and needed a Linux machine due to work, and it had to take preference.
> that was revolutionary at the time.
Amen to that. An Acorn Electron was what got me hooked on computers and programming. The Amiga was a giant leap forward and dominated my life as well, during the same period of my life.
I guess I'm just not a nostalgic type of person, so I never bothered to make it run again. One of these days I'll have to go up to the attic of my mother's house to see if it is still collecting dust.
It was popular in Europe when people had mostly lost interest in the US. I remember when the magazines I read were withering away, but there were these imported ones from I think the UK that were huge, with ultra-glossy paper and full color.
Commodore always sold far better in Europe than in the US, even for most of the 8-bit days, and they managed to totally burn their dealer network in the US in the early 80's and never recovered (the final straw was when Tramiel lowered the price of the C64 drastically overnight without warning dealers or offering refunds, leaving dealers with large stocks of C64's bought at the old wholesale price that they'd be unable to sell with much if any margin).
As a result Amiga sales in the US were small and driven by things like the Video Toaster on the high end where people for some time bought Amigas for the Video Toaster rather than the other way around, while sales in Europe were far higher volume and more focused on the low end models that there just wasn't a decent dealer network to handle in the US.
For every classic computer there is someone who fetishizes it (even Spectrums) and a community they can belong to and talk about it (looks at the VAX-11/730 in the corner). I think Amiga's are that mix of cool, still usable (for some values of usable) and nostalgic for those of HNs average age, so you hear a lot about them here.
