Amiga Nos­tal­gia

I’m not entirely cer­tain why, but I found myself on Wikipedia read­ing the Amiga arti­cle. Things started to get very nos­tal­gic when look­ing through the list of var­i­ous Amiga mod­els. I’ve owned five dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, and the first two were Ami­gas, specif­i­cally the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000.

Would you just look at those sys­tem specs? About half a megabyte of RAM, a ~7 mega­hertz proces­sor, no hard drives…

I admit to being a naïve lit­tle child, but I thought those com­put­ers were awe­some. I could hardly imag­ine any­thing bet­ter until mid­dle school! I dis­tinctly remem­ber a con­ver­sa­tion I had on the bus to school (fifth or sixth grade) about com­put­ers; my friend asked if my com­puter “had win­dows on it.” Win­dows? Well, when­ever I opened a folder, it popped up in a win­dow thing. Was that what he meant? Seri­ously, I had no idea that there was some­thing called “Microsoft Windows”!

And to this day, what made my Amiga sys­tems great has yet to be taken away by Win­dows: the games. Whether it was the ele­gant sim­plic­ity of The Talk­ing Col­or­ing Book when I was really young, the clever courses of Minia­ture Golf (exact title unknown, though it had two sequels, which I also had), or the may­hem of Men­ace and Tur­ri­can II, there was always fun to be had on the Amiga. If I use a Win­dows com­puter for another ten years, I doubt I’ll sur­pass the amount of time spent gam­ing on the Amiga with what passes as games for com­put­ers nowa­days. Blah.

Other games that stand out: Sim­C­ity, SimAnt, Pop­u­lous, Lem­mings, James Pond II, and so many more that I can recall the game-​play of but not the title.

I also loved that I could cus­tomize what the cur­sor looked like very eas­ily. I kept it cus­tomized as a lit­tle sword or magic wand, rem­i­nis­cent of some­thing you may see in the orig­i­nal The Leg­end of Zelda game for the NES. Why can’t I do that eas­ily on Windows?

As for *real* appli­ca­tions… Well, the word proces­sor is the only one I ever remem­ber using. In all hon­esty, I wish I could still use it to write. I don’t recall there being a full gram­mar check (or even a spelling checker?), so I actu­ally grew up with a com­puter that allowed me to actu­ally improve as a writer while typ­ing, rather than rely­ing on var­i­ous tech­no­log­i­cal aids. Addi­tion­ally, there was an awe­some lit­tle tool that, in addi­tion to word count, gave var­i­ous gram­mat­i­cal sta­tis­tics about the doc­u­ment — what per­cent­age of sen­tences were pas­sive and so on. It also reported at what read­ing grade level the doc­u­ment was writ­ten at (which per­haps led me to believe I was a bet­ter writer than I really was), even com­par­ing it to other well-​known doc­u­ments such as the Get­tys­burg Address and half a dozen oth­ers. Why can’t Microsoft Word do this? Why can’t Writer?

You don’t have to take my word for it that the Ami­gas were great com­put­ers. Do you remem­ber in Star Trek IV: The Voy­age Home when Spock is using the Vul­can super­com­puter (the one that asked him, to his con­fu­sion, “How do you feel?”)? Yep, you can thank Amiga for that. So great, an alien civ­i­liza­tion 300+ years down the road are still using them!

While I still had my Amiga 2000, my sis­ter received a Mac­in­tosh Sys­tem 7 com­puter from her school (for free!). I think it was some­where in the 7.6.x line. We both got a lot of use out of it, until I finally entered the age of mod­ern com­put­ing (and the inter­net!) in 2000 with a Hewlett Packard sys­tem. I had it for a few years until I real­ized I was mak­ing enough at work to build my own com­puter piece by piece. It was that self-​built com­puter I recently replaced with my new Dell system.

Both of my Amiga sys­tems belonged to Dad, and he gave them to me, I think, as he upgraded to some­thing newer and better.

If you ever get a chance to use an Amiga, don’t pass it up — espe­cially if there are games to be played. And if any­one knows if the games I men­tioned above are avail­able for Win­dows (prefer­ably for free — and by free, I also mean not pirated), please let me know. I miss those old games!

And that’s my story. I’d love to hear yours — what got you started with com­put­ers? How old were you?