Amiga Memories
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So I grew up on borrowed computers until in 1987 my family bought an Amiga 1000 as the first computer that we actually owned - bought for the express purpose of me being able to program. We had the 256KB memory expansion giving in 512KB and it ran AmigaOS 1.1 originally. Dual floppy drives, the 880KB 3.5" floppies. This was an amazing machine.
I had a lot of games for it, of course, like King's Quest, The Faery Tale Adventure, The Bard's Tale, Pool of Radiance, Deja Vu, etc. But the real goal was programming and I learned AmigaBASIC and C on that awesome computer.
Using that same Amiga 1000 I got my first commercial internship at Eastman Kodak in 1989 doing database development for them (actually making the database software!!)
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@coliver said:
I think I used my first computer in '93... way before my time.
Damn. I used my first in 1979. Had really regular access at home (borrowed machines) since 1984 (both Mac and IBM PC running DOS.)
In 1994 I moved from Amiga as my main machine to Solaris and haven't looked much beyond UNIX since then.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
I think I used my first computer in '93... way before my time.
Damn. I used my first in 1979. Had really regular access at home (borrowed machines) since 1984 (both Mac and IBM PC running DOS.)
In 1994 I moved from Amiga as my main machine to Solaris and haven't looked much beyond UNIX since then.
To be fair, I was only 4 years old.
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
I think I used my first computer in '93... way before my time.
Damn. I used my first in 1979. Had really regular access at home (borrowed machines) since 1984 (both Mac and IBM PC running DOS.)
In 1994 I moved from Amiga as my main machine to Solaris and haven't looked much beyond UNIX since then.
To be fair, I was only 4 years old.
I would say that makes me feel old but I think I am looking quite young for 44...
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@scottalanmiller said:
So I grew up on borrowed computers until in 1987 my family bought an Amiga 1000 as the first computer that we actually owned - bought for the express purpose of me being able to program. We had the 256KB memory expansion giving in 512KB and it ran AmigaOS 1.1 originally. Dual floppy drives, the 880KB 3.5" floppies. This was an amazing machine.
I had a lot of games for it, of course, like King's Quest, The Faery Tale Adventure, The Bard's Tale, Pool of Radiance, Deja Vu, etc. But the real goal was programming and I learned AmigaBASIC and C on that awesome computer.
Using that same Amiga 1000 I got my first commercial internship at Eastman Kodak in 1989 doing database development for them (actually making the database software!!)
Oddly, I programmed a heck of a lot more on my Vic-20...even programmed my own BBS program on a Vic-20. Programmed some on my C64 and NEVER on my Amiga...I become more of a consumer and multi-media producer than programmer...
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I still have the Amiga 1000 along with a Commodore 64 and VIC=20.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I still have the Amiga 1000 along with a Commodore 64 and VIC=20.
I get my fix for all of those via Amiga Forever and C-64 Forever...they actually work quite well and when I had time some years back, you can really set up a custom "VM" if you will...
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I recently went back and played a little of the Faerie Tale Adventure, that was one of my favourites, on an Amiga emulator.
I've been playing through the King's Quest and Space Quest originals with my kids but we are getting them from GOG so it is the DOS versions that they are seeing. Same era, though.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I recently went back and played a little of the Faerie Tale Adventure, that was one of my favourites, on an Amiga emulator.
I've been playing through the King's Quest and Space Quest originals with my kids but we are getting them from GOG so it is the DOS versions that they are seeing. Same era, though.
GOG has been a blessing (and sometimes a curse when I can't spend the money)...got my Grim Fandango finally...I'm playing through all the Tex Murphy games again and I hope GOG get's all of the old Star Trek Games...25th Anniversary, Judgment Rites, Elite Force I and II, the Armada games...Trek games were mostly usually not that good but those were my favorites...
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@garak0410 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I recently went back and played a little of the Faerie Tale Adventure, that was one of my favourites, on an Amiga emulator.
I've been playing through the King's Quest and Space Quest originals with my kids but we are getting them from GOG so it is the DOS versions that they are seeing. Same era, though.
GOG has been a blessing (and sometimes a curse when I can't spend the money)...got my Grim Fandango finally...I'm playing through all the Tex Murphy games again and I hope GOG get's all of the old Star Trek Games...25th Anniversary, Judgment Rites, Elite Force I and II, the Armada games...Trek games were mostly usually not that good but those were my favorites...
Grim Fandango is available in a remastered edition on Steam now... not sure about GOG
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That reminds me of a funny story. I never had an Amiga, but friend of mine did. His sister was writing a paper and had spent all weekend on it without saving at all. Of course the computer froze up. They called me over and I was able to escape to shell prompt. I wrote a little script to page through the entire memory searching for English words so that we could find her writing and copy it down. After running for 12 hours it found where the paper was located and I was able to see the text. I wrote up another little script to print out that section of memory to the printer. Unfortunately the printer driver wasn't loaded in memory by default. It went to the drive to grab the printer driver - and guess what section of memory it loaded it into? Yep, right where the paper was. In retrospect I should have had her write it down by hand.
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@Nic Twelve hours? How long would rewriting the paper have taken?!?
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She'd spent all weekend on it, so most likely longer. Plus that was overnight, so she was sleeping
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Was this for her PhD?
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Nah, was for some college paper.
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@Nic said:
Nah, was for some college paper.
I made it all the way through undergrad and grad school and never had a paper over two hours, most were minutes!
Really sad when college students don't think to save papers. That should be an F right there!!
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Well this was in the early days of computers. But yeah, save early, save often
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@Nic said:
Well this was in the early days of computers. But yeah, save early, save often
The Amiga wasn't made until the second or third generation of computers, and that was the very first Amigas in 1987. By that time people not saving was already an old joke. The Amiga was a full decade into the home computer era. Popular television was making fun of people who didn't save documents on Growing Pains by 1985 and that means it was well into the social conscious already by that point or their audience would not have understood the joke.
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@Nic said:
Well this was in the early days of computers. But yeah, save early, save often
The Amiga wasn't made until the second or third generation of computers, and that was the very first Amigas in 1987. By that time people not saving was already an old joke. The Amiga was a full decade into the home computer era. Popular television was making fun of people who didn't save documents on Growing Pains by 1985 and that means it was well into the social conscious already by that point or their audience would not have understood the joke.
No it was not. You are missing perspective on this. Computers were not even common yet. Yes, it may have had a joke made on a TV show, but computer simply were not common. The joke in that show would have been lost on almost the entire audience.
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This was in Australia, so we didn't have Growing Pains
