Topic: Happy 25th Anniversary Amiga!

[Clive]

In an era in which the most common form of microcomputer was an IBM PC-compatible system with a text-only display and a tinny internal speaker, the Amiga had dazzling color graphics and stereo sound.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/amiga25yearslater

[GillE]

I moved on to an Amiga after a Commodore 64.  It was great!  You could program those early computers to do all sorts of nifty things, and the games were not far below the standard of those which are available now for PCs.

[Den]

I went the 64 -- 128 -- Amiga 1200 route and changed to Windows 95 just to run decent accounts packages. I still think that Workbench on the Amiga was superb or is that just by memory playing tricks 

[Rodders]

I loved the Amiga and had four in total.  At a time when the cost of PCs ruled them out for most home users, the Amiga, with an OS that was light years ahead of anything else, was the only game in town.  I personally used to delight in producing compilations, where in some cases I'd cram as many as 10 games or utils, plus with a snazzy front end, onto a single floppy.  Yeah, I know...  I'm not proud, etc.   

[Simon]

I don't think I ever encountered an Amiga, although, I might have done.  Before I had my first computer, a mere 11 years ago, I borrowed a thing which played games using tapes, and got hooked on Lemmings.  Can't remember what it was now, though.   

[sam]

I never owned an Amiga... too young for a lot of that.

My first computer was a passed down Atari 65 XE.

[GillE]

Ach, Sam, you'd have loved being there at the birth of home computing with us old 'uns.  I remember recording a BBC radio programme called Chips With Everything onto my cassette recorder (ever had one of those ?) which was completely unintelligible to the human ear but when loaded into a computer contained BASIC programs.  It took about half an hour to load programs with a tape deck, but it was exciting and novel so you didn't mind.  Then some programs would crash and you'd have to re-load the program from cassette again.  Very irritating, but somehow you felt as if you were pushing the boundaries of technology.

[sam]

yep I recall that noise with the atari - good old waiting 30 minutes to play games. I wrote some of my best software on that machine. Now I'm a RAM whore. 

[sam]

wasn't the birth of computing in the 40s though?

[Rik]

It was.

[GillE]

wasn't the birth of computing in the 40s though?

If it is agreed that Charles Babbage's contribution was too remote to be regarded as the birth of computing, then yes; computing began in the 1940's with the likes of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.  But home computers didn't come about until the late 70's/early 80's when affordable machines such as the BBC, C64 and the various Sinclairs came within the price range of the general public.

[Clive]

I started off in 1982 with a Sinclair Spectrum 16K which I upgraded to a 48K.  I then bought a BBC Master 512K in 1986.    

[Rik]

BBC B in 82...

[Clive]

MORE about the Amiga. 

[Simon]

As I said, I had a play on a borrowed machine previously, but I never owned a computer till 1999, and that was bought second hand.  Windows 95, later upgraded to 98SE.