Op Ed - How to Cook for Amigans

[MobbyG]

Eddie Cejvan, co-host of Amiga Roundtable, takes a look at what makes an "Amigan".

It has become somewhat of a personal and professional quandary over the past five or so years; how does one cater to the needs of an Amigan? Before I could even come close to having any chance at answering the question I needed to identify and codify what it is that makes an Amigan...


Read the full Op Ed here:
http://www.amigaz.org/2010/09/24/op-ed-how-to-cook-for-amigans/

[Trev]

Sounds like an Amievolutionist to me. Hasn't he heard? Somewhere in Revelation there's a reference to the Amiga. Right around that Alpha and Omega bit.

(Seriously, though: "Amigarati?" I'd never heard of him before now.)

[agami]

It's a role performed, not a mark of status. In market research, roles specify behavioral rule sets.

[Pyromania]

I think it's important to have things like Amiga OS 4.x, MorphOS & AROS around in todays world because you never know where the next great developer or company will come from. They usually come from smaller tech savvy platforms like this. If there was never an Amiga 1000 would there have been a DiscreetFX or a NewTek? If the Amiga did not stun the world in 1985 with concepts like multitasking, more colors, animation, stereo sound, hardware assisted accelerated graphics and more would computers be a good as they are today?

Probably not.


The original Amiga set the stage that we have today and made all computers better. Let Amiga OS 4.x, MorphOS & AROS thrive and maybe they will give us a better tomorrow.

[Tension]

Are you sure you dont mean, 'How to cook forty Amigans'?

[lsmart]

If the Amiga did not stun the world in 1985 with concepts like multitasking, more colors, animation, stereo sound, hardware assisted accelerated graphics and more would computers be a good as they are today?

Probably not.


Sadly, I think that is not true. Amiga was ignored by pretty much everyone in the PC industry. They simply called them toys, despite the fact that everyone else was building inferior machines for a while.

Macs didn´t include multitasking until Linux had become a hit. PCs didn´t have real sound until Yamaha and Roland were entering this market. None of them had custom chips on the main board and Multimedia and DMA were "inventions" of the 90s. Steve Jobs even faked his first CD-quality-sound Demo, because NeXT couldn´t do it in 1988!

Business wasn´t getting Amiga and they weren´t even looking at it. It was the hobbyists who bought them and only video-professionals on a tight budget would realize their potential.

[Vanilla]

Macs didn´t include multitasking until Linux had become a hit.

The "Real Mac" OS9 was quite good at multtaksing depsite not having the "proper" version. At least it was better than Windows 3.1. I bought a black PowerBook to learn about non-Amiga computers and about Macs. I was impressed. From the OS, to the floppy workings, and the RAM disk it was very Amiga-like. And I could see how a lot of Amiga people would convert from the Amiga to the Mac in the OS9 days. IIRC the Gordon-Heywood ads in Amiga Format/CU Amiga told us to do exactly that,

[lsmart]

The "Real Mac" OS9 was quite good at multtaksing

Right, I should have said "preemptive multitasking". You can get away with cooperative multitasking as long as you really keep the workflow in mind. And if you go back to MacOS 8 (9 is 8), you will notice that there are some limitations on what you can do simultaneously that feel arbitrary today. And they sold OS 9 until March of 2000 (OS X came April). So they certainly weren´t inspired by the marvellous Amiga 1000 ;-)