[dundee] ...and my FIRST computer

[James Le Cuirot]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2011 23:06:24 +0000
Rick Moynihan <rick.moynihan at gmail.com> wrote:

> It still sadens me that Commodore screwed up so badly.

They did but the story still ain't over. After a 10 year hiatus from
the Amiga world (not that I knew much about the community back then), I
caught up with the situation in 2005 when I bought an A1200 off eBay.
I've been watching from the sidelines with interest since then. You may
know already but for those who don't, the best news in years came about
a year and a half ago when Hyperion Entertainment unexpectedly won
their long, drawn-out battle with the evil Amiga Inc. and were granted
all the rights to OS4 as well as OS3.1 - the latter had been an
important issue. The community couldn't have asked for more.

At this time, the only commercially available machine capable of
running OS4 is the rather underpowered Sam440, though it's still more
powerful than an A1200. The new and much more powerful Amiga X1000 is
currently in the beta testing phase, due for release later this year. I
hear people tell me that the Amiga was really about the hardware and/or
the games and that OS4 isn't the "true" Amiga but I dispute that. I
haven't used it yet but from what I have seen, it is still very true to
its roots and putting these modern advances into a system that was way
ahead of its time has resulted in something that could hold its head up
next to today's operating systems. 

These new machines are both ridiculously expensive for what they are
though. I couldn't justify buying either and that's before I even
address my attachment to Linux. As much as I love AmigaOS, it's never
sat comfortably with the open source community and that's where my
heart is. There is dual-booting, of course, but I hate spreading myself
between machines and desktops. It just wouldn't be practical. If they
could produce a laptop, I'd consider it but that's highly unlikely.

James