I think Amigas occupy such a cool middle ground between eminently discoverable - one can learn how everything works in them - while at the same time, with a heap of extra RAM and a faster CPU - you can run an almost modern desktop environment on them, including development environment.
30 years from now: “HardwareGPT, make me an Amiga but with ZX Spectrum keys”
I suppose we could just use contikiOS, it has a browser of sorts even. But I think the thread model that allows premptive threads has some footguns to adopt as a general desktop system, and a browser for these systems needs a more elegant way to handle web pages that are several times its ram size than just grabbing text.
Still, it's amazing to me that we can build stuff which is vaguely comparable to our current commercial capabilities.
Another similar observation... I loaded an LLM (local llama.cpp) on a 2015 laptop, almost a decade old, and had a coherent "conversation" with it.
If someone had time-travelled back in 2015 and started for me that very same program on the same laptop in 2015, it would have been confusing and downright scary. I would have started looking for network connections to the remote super computer which surely must be running this thing...
But it's not really from scratch. IIRC, Amiga's used a lot of custom ICs, and it looks like those were scavenged for this project.
Nobody donates anything. so don’t bother. Looks like only Youtubers get all goodies LOLOL ;P
——
This guy so honest. Which adds bonus parts to his already incredible magic.
I owned an Amiga 2000 back in the day and learned the C programming language on it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daretodreamhardback/dar...
I mean a Raspberry Pi Zero would run circles around this thing and that is awesome but it also loses a little of the charm at the same time.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/02/rool_530_is_here/
It is more or less usable as a daily-driver OS except for the modern WWW.
Some users VNC to a Windows PC for the browser, and use RISC OS for everything else.