I think, maybe, somehow, probably unintentionally, the Amiga captured the 1970s/early-1980s "hacker spirit" better than any of the other personal computer systems. It wasn't a Lisp machine, and it wasn't a PDP-11, and it wasn't particularly used for artificial intelligence, but its users thoroughly enjoyed tinkering with it and making it do awesome things.
And awesome things it did.
I still have things like this, floating around in my brain somewhere[]:
.loop: move.w $dff006,$dff180
btst.b #6,$bfe001
bne.s .loop
[] Somewhere slightly shady, since I mis-remembered the two first register addresses, and also the sign of the /FE0 bit being read by the third instruction. Still, it's been 14 years since I switched to Linux, so I'm kind of happy.
In plain-speak, it renders vertical green/blue/cyan gradients in the background until the left mouse button is pressed.
(as a side note, I spent 4-5 years coding on the Amiga in the early 90s.)
Here are some highlights. It's been a long time, so I'm sure to make some technical mistakes.
Rexx Plus Compiler -- by Dineen Edwards Group; Implementation of the Rexx language (ARexx). You cold easily hack together the OS and many applications as well. ARexx was one of the things that kept the Amiga alive.
UEdit -- by Rick Stiles; One of the first great things available for the Amiga. A highly programmable editor. If Rick hadn't passed away too soon UEdit may well have lived on past the Amiga.
Migraph OCR -- by Migraph, Inc.; I was scanning financial data from Investors Business Daily, compiled quite a database.
Descartes! -- by Mindware International; Some sort of AI-ish thingy I never found a use for.
Magellan -- by Emerald Intelligence; Expert System generator I never found a use for. The company ran into some sort of trademark infringement and later renamed it Mahogany.
Boole -- by URSIC Computing; Fuzzy logic and Bayesian Inference. Actually a DOS program, but you could run it on the Amiga.
The Amiga was really a hacker's machine. Thanks to programs like ARexx and UEdit you could really do some interesting stuff at a time when a DOS computer mostly just ran stand-alone programs. It was greatly stymied by Commodore's terrible marketing and lack of commercial applications.
I think in a way I was scarred by investing so much learning effort in a technology that dead-ended. It was probably a factor in my taking a career detour to more business, less technical work for several years.
Having to choose between a Core i3, i5, Athlon, Duron, Sempron, Whateveron, or between embedded, ATI or Nvidia doesn`t really feel like having any choice...
Or, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you can choose any architecture, as long as it runs Windows.
Even my beloved Commodore 64 is long gone, but I haven't been able to part with the Amiga. Not saying this is a good thing. Just saying.
(More of my school friends back then had Ataris than Amigas, so it was a no-brainer decision for me.)
I'm curious what spurred the insane die-hard mentality though. Most of us left the Amigas and Ataris for the PC in the early 90s, except for a few who swore by their Amigas and loved them to bits even though their relative performance grew more and more pathetic.
So what caused it? First love? Or was there something genuinely good about the system? I'm genuinely curious.
http://www.sabrina-online.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q
That said, I ended up on Macs, and for the longest time, I though we were going to end up in the same boat. (And in a way, we did. To me, OS X isn’t quite the joy to use due to it’s complexity and design compromises for interoperability versus the classic Mac OS.)
EDIT: Every time this topic comes up, I’m reminded of an old USENET thread I posted to back in the day.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/brows...
I’m the first “Mac user” in that thread.
1) because it was a really powerful system that was just under the complexity curve such that a dedicated person could learn literally everything about the system from top to bottom and do cool stuff with it.
2) It's stock form was insanely powerful out of the box, while PCs were from different vendors, with different configurations and no particular standard "thing" was a PC.
3) It wasn't really meant to be tinkered with, but almost everybody who had an Amiga had done some crazy things to upgrade it. The hacker community on it was vibrant and technically awesome (see #1 above). Whereas if I wanted to upgrade my PC I simply inserted a new card or something, these guys were soldering new OS ROMS and SCSI interfaces into a system that really wasn't supposed to have these things. I remember reading about Power PC expansion boards for the A500 and wondering "where's the expansion slots?"
4) Because of #3, systems took on very individualistic flavors, like muscle cars tricked out by their owners. You knew that a guy with an A500 that had the latest OS ROMs, two hard drives, a VGA monitor, a couple of floppy drives and was on his 3rd keyboard had put a lot of personal time into the physical aspects of his box. The same couldn't really be said (at least not to anywhere near the level) with PC owners.
5) Amiga user group meetings were a blast with people bringing and showing off their machines, trading pirated software (anybody remember "Fish disks"?) and generally have a great time trading trick out secrets with each other. It felt like a car club community event rather than a computer community event.
You do realize that thems is still fightin' words? The Vi/Emacs war is a pillow fight compared with the Amiga/Atari ST wars.
"Another Visitor. Stay a while. Stay FOREVERRRR"
The platform in this case being the PC.