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1992... Around the last year someone could fully understand a contemporary computer.


This is it exactly! I wrote this back in 2019 on my "Back To The Floppy" post[1]:

  I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.

  It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.

  That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible.
[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy...




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