RJ Mical and Dave Needle at Amiga 30th in California

[@vertigoz]

Amazing how the words from Dave Needle are validated by R.J Mical expressions, it's as if in that very same moment RJ was back in time reliving it altogether. That was quite a passion!

[@hectorae86]

It is a question that has been haunting me for quite some time...... how can we create a modern day machine (preferably with the name Amiga) with the same feeling that the Amiga came with, it is such a special thing. Amiga was and is not just a machine that can do a whole lot, it creates feelings like no other object.

[@aceyage]

I think modern Macs fill that void quite nicely. It was quite a rough ride having to switch to DOS PCs in the mid-90s. Even Windows didn't feel quite right. The switch over to Mac OSX in the early 00s felt like a breath of fresh Amiga air.

[@hectorae86]

***** I have a PowerMac G5 but other than that..... I don't like Apple at all. I see them as overpriced shiny mediocre machines. While the OS is indeed very nice for the average consumer, as a programmer, I pretty much stick to Ubuntu and Windows. By the way, that PowerMac is absolutely awesome and I don't think I will ever sell it. What I do have problems with though, is the browser and Flash. I can use an Amiga 1200 with PowerPC blizzard add-on and use Timberwolf with the latest version of Flash, I can't even watch a simple movie on my PowerMac though, since the latest version of Flash doesn't support any of the browsers I can still get on the PowerMac.

[@quantass]

Thanks

[@traveling.down.the.road56]

RJ stated that he thinks that it was the Amiga's greatness that causes it's fans to come together so many years after its creation, but what I think he fails to realize is that old Mac and PC users don't come together like Amiga users because their platforms succeeded and are still in development today. The Amiga and its fan base continues to pine for something that should have happened, but didn't. They long for the superiority of the Amiga to be recognized by all people, and it will never happen. That isn't the only reason, but it does differentiate Amiga users from Apple and Windows users. Amiga users were frustrated because they clearly had the best system, but it failed to reach its full potential, so they have all this "What If" pent up inside of them, along with their enjoyment of the Amiga during its heyday years. The Amiga should have evolved into what Windows is today, with everyone using Amigas in an evolved form, what ever that may have turned into, instead of Windows systems that dominate the world. They had the lead in technology, but it was squandered by Commodore management and marketing, plus the financial woes that Commodore suffered at a critical time in the early years of the Amiga.

[@turricaned]

+David Morris - With respect, while some of what you say is true, I believe that the overall conclusion you drew couldn't be more wrong. What the Amiga represented to many of us who grew up with it was a portal into computer-assisted creativity that in the late '80s no other platform could match period, and even in the twilight years of the mid-'90s no other platform could match without spending an order of magnitude more money to do so. Speaking for myself, as an awkward adolescent I couldn't paint to save my life and struggled with trying to play traditional instruments - but the Amiga gave me DPaint and MED/ProTracker, which unleashed a creative side within me that I didn't know I had. Similar tools eventually made their way to the Mac and PC, but not until some time later - and even then the machines required to run them were still several times more expensive. Dave Needle sadly passed away very recently. But as his emotional introduction here shows, another thing that made Amiga special was that the engineers who made it genuinely *cared* about what they were doing and strived to make something that helped users realise their potential. Compare that to the PC - which IBM treated as an afterthought and only later achieved success when the platform (as a result of IBM losing a court case) became a commodity - or the Mac, which Steve Jobs considered beneath his attention until his pet project ("Lisa") tanked. I'd suggest that it's somewhat fitting that while the Amiga name has passed into history, with modern Mac and console platforms nominally derived from "PC" technology, the fundamental architecture (based around using DMA to offload graphical and media operations to the GPU) bears a far greater resemblance to the Amiga design than it does the original IBM PC. In short, while no mainstream modern hardware bears the Amiga name, it sure as hell acknowledges that the Amiga engineers got it right.