And none of my love for this wonderful machine has ever diminished. Sure, I moved on, but very few things since have given me the euphoric feeling of my Amiga days.

The Amiga was my first computer, an A500+ to be exact, which is at this very moment directly underneath me. (As in, it's under my bed.) I've never gotten rid of it - or, indeed, my software collection, a box full to the brim with 3.5 inch floppy disks. I don't know if the machine or my disks still work.

The Amiga was a real oddity in the home computer market back in the day. It arrived in the era of the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum - all the weird, bleepy-bloopy computers that you couldn't really use unless you were willing to put some thought and effort into it. You had to want to use a ZX Spectrum.

But the Amiga? Very casual. Just stick in a disk and go. Indeed, the very first thing you see when you switch the machine on is a big illustration unsubtly hinting that you should put a disk in.

The thing that made the Amiga so odd, I think, is that nobody in the market could really figure out what to do with it. Commodore, the company that owned the Amiga, didn't seem to have any idea who to aim their machine at. It wasn't suitable as a business machine, really, so you wouldn't expect businesses to do their accounting with it. It was very much a home computer, so that meant targeting it at homeowners and families.

But the idea of a "home computer" wasn't really established back then; parents weren't going to start using a computer to help with their day-to-day tasks, no matter how easy it was to insert a disk.

So that left games. The Amiga was pretty darn good for games. It had a very quirky, unusual graphics architecture that allowed it to do some pretty insane graphical tricks, and that made for some really inventive and cool-looking games. Some of the most famous games in the world (Lemmings, for example) started life on the Amiga.

Which was great, if not for one fairly massive problem: this wasn't just the Amiga's era. It was also the era of the games console. The NES, Master System, SNES, Genesis/Megadrive; they were all in ascendance during this time. And no matter what ingenious tricks an Amiga programmer could pull off, competing with these mighty machines was a real struggle. Games consoles were fast, dedicated, and even more casual than the Amiga when you just wanted to play a game. The SNES? You shove in a cartridge and I think that's it. You barely even have to wait for it to load, because the cartridge is the game. Want to restart the Genesis? I think there's a big button you mash to do it. On the Amiga, you had to hold down three keys at the same time. Console games were fast and immediate; perfect for the casual gamer, perfect for kids, perfect for parents of kids (because consoles were cheaper and didn't require any setup beyond figuring out how to plug it into the TV).

But, to flip-flop on this yet again, the Amiga did have a couple of things to boast about. Firstly, it had amazing sound which even the consoles couldn't match. The Sega Genesis sounds like someone bludgeoning a pig to death compared to the glorious melodic powerhouse that was the Amiga's 4-channel, 28 kHz output. It's been a long-standing annoyance of mine that when folks talk about 'classic video game music', they actually mean 'classic Nintendo and Sega tunes' (with a bit of Final Fantasy thrown in), because none of them know of the cornucopia of amazing Amiga music that exists.

Worth losing the game for.

The other thing the Amiga could boast was a near endless supply of games in the form of shareware. You don't hear people talk about shareware much these days; the internet has largely obsoleted the concept. But back then, it was kind of the only way you could actually distribute a piece of software without being a major software house. The idea of shareware is this: you give your game away for free, and ask people to copy it and share it with others. You might also put in a message asking them to send you some money if they like it, or maybe you might give them a cut-down version with the promise of extra features if they pay for it. It wasn't uncommon in those days for programmers to put their real, home address in the game so that you could contact them. (By physically writing a letter, of course. No email.)

Consoles had nothing like this, of course. Those systems were completely closed. The Amiga's floppy disks might not have been as fast as cartridges, but they were cheap, and they were rewritable, and they fit neatly in envelopes.

It wasn't exactly the world wide web, but compared to what came before, this was a veritable boom of creativity - not unlike that of the brony fandom, now that I think about it. Just like bronies, Amiga creatives had a marvellous zeal to their efforts, constantly pushing the boundaries and doing new and crazy things. The Amiga was the heyday of the demoscene for a good reason.

This also helped to fuel the computer magazine industry, because publishers could literally stick disks to the front of their magazines and lure people in with free software. The Amiga magazine industry is a topic that could fill a whole entire separate post, so I won't go into it, but I'll just say that to this day, the smell of a newly published magazine is still one of my favorite smells, and that's entirely due to the Amiga.

So what happened to the Amiga? Well, it died. By 1995, two new major players had hit the computing world: Microsoft released Windows 95, and Sony released the Playstation. The Amiga was already on shaky ground at this point - Commodore had literally lost millions in value, and they eventually went bankrupt, and the Amiga was no more.

Culturally, the legacy of the Amiga is better known than over here in the UK, and in Europe, than it is in the US. I don't think it ever really caught on in North America, where Nintendo and Sega were the undisputed kings. In the UK, it was a smaller battleground.

There is a small but thriving remix community for Amiga music at AmigaRemix, which produces some absolutely cracking tunes. Seriously, half my music collection comes from here. (The other half is brony music. Man, if I could get some of these guys to remix pony tunes... I wonder if they take commissions?)

There are a few YouTube channels devoted to Amiga games. Two of the best are LemonAmiga's channel, who does pretty in-depth reviews, and ZEUSDAZ, who plays games completely unemulated (that is, he's literally on a real Amiga that's plugged into a video feed). If you're an Amiga aficionado, you can even tell what joystick he's using from the sound alone. ;)

There have also been a few Kickstarters going around for Amiga projects which I've happily supported. Chris Huelsbeck, legendary game musician and one of my most favorite people in the world ever, released the Turrican Soundtrack Anthology a couple of years ago, and is currently working on a Piano Collection of his music. I'm really excited for that one.

A documentary is being worked on: From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years, with interviews with a bunch of Amiga personalities, and semi-related is the Commodore: The Amiga Years book.

The Amiga is what got me into programming, and without it, it's doubtful I'd have the career I do now. I don't think we'll ever see a machine quite like it again. But the wonderful community that surrounded it still lives on, and has carried the Amiga mindset to new places and new machines.

Happy 30th, Amiga.

Pre-emptive multitasking, separate sound and video coprocessors... it was way ahead of its time. If Commodore hadn't sunk all their money into the CD32 and the CD-TV and had instead kept up their advanced research for their next gen hardware I reckon we'd still be using Amigas to this day.

4574263 This does bring back memories, though my early system of deep nostalgias remains the Atari ST.

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I think the first time I got a computer was in the mid-90's. I'm not quite sure exactly when. I'm pretty sure it was a hand-me-down. My father's system had Windows 95, and mine had Windows 3.1. His could play Mechwarrior 2, mine could not. Not that I'm complaining, be a spoiled child if I couldn't be happy about getting a fucking computer, but I'm just trying to nail down the approximate year. It might have been 1994-11995.

Before then, I was used to playing games on my father's computer every time I went to his place. He had stuff like Commander Keen and some Micky Mouse game. My stepbrother has an NES at the time.

Anyway, I think my old Windows 3.1 system ran at a whopping 60 Mhz.

I'm surprised that you're talking about the 3.5s. I'd figure a computer from the eighties would be using floppy discs that are actually floppy. I've used those in a classroom before, but the thing was seriously outdated by that time. I was using 3.5's as late is a little over a decade ago, a bout the time that I was getting out of highschool.

I'm very, very thankful for the existence of flash-drives. I've lost a lot of work to hardware failure, and cds always proved to be horribly inconvenient in terms of backing up one's work often.

A friend at OSU got us into the developer program sometime in early '86. We got A1000s with a 2nd floppy drive and an extra 256K RAM. The Lattice C compiler performed terribly and I could see why then also include an x86 cross compiler. We tried writing communications programs at that time since I was doing that at work for MSDOS, but got nowhere.

I ended up trading in the A1000 in either '89 or '90 in CBM's "1000 + $1000 = 2000" program. My only regret in doing that was losing the case with all the signatures on the inside. The rubbing I took disappeared long ago. I poured way too much money into that machine over the years, adding an 030EC CPU/memory board and a de-interlacer card so I could use a better monitor.

By the early '90s my wife and I got into the BBS scene, and we became assistant sysops on a board, sometimes I think just to get a deal on a faster used USR modem. We spent quite a few Sunday afternoons at meet-ups in the pool house of our sysop's apartment complex. We were out of the warez scene when the board closed: They say that one day "Handyman" just unplugged his system and threw the machine in a closet. He had a bit of a temper.

We kept our tricked out A2000 for almost 10 years. It was the first computer my son used although he no longer has strong memories of it. The Amiga remained around long enough so that it was the first non-work computer I used on the internet. There was a guy I used to work with who ran a company out of his house. He had racks of Linux boxes and a few SGIs in his basement, but most importantly, he had a connection to the internet. He was nice enough to work as a MX node for me. My Amiga had a UUCP bang-path and I used ELM as a mail reader. It didn't last long: I bought a used HP tower and put an early version of Red Hat on it. Unlike Handyman, I carefully put the Amiga back in its original box when I took it out of service.

I sold my entire Amiga setup on eBay for less than $300 before 2000, although I did keep an image of it to run in UAE. It's around here on a CD—somewhere.

The machine is gone, the BBS scene dwindled to nothingness, and even my friend that my got me into Amigas has been dead for almost a decade. Only two things remained: The handles we used on the BBS and my fondness for that machine.

Greetz from Cutter & Tigerrose
Only Amiga Makes It Possible

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I thought about mentioning the ST, but I don't know so much about it. I know there was a brief period of rivalry in the Amiga's early years, but that was pretty much over by the time I first got my Amiga. It was a cute little machine from what I saw of it though. :)

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Wow, you're way more hardcore than I was. The deepest I ever got into the Amiga was coding stuff in AMOS Basic. I never used a BBS, although I remember them being advertised in magazines when they first came about. :)

I think it's also worth mentioning that the CGI on the TV series Babylon 5 was done in part on a network of Amiga computers. While the effects might look primitive to today's viewers, they were pretty damn good for the time, especially when you consider that this was done within the budget of a non-network weekly TV show. So yeah, factor in limited (non-movie) budgets, twenty years of technological progress, and short, frequently repeating deadlines, and all of a sudden that Starfury squadron starts to look really impressive. (Bonus: space battles using Newtonian physics.)

...

Oh, and speaking of video game music, this guy turned an Atari 2600 into a musical instrument.

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Never demo-grade hardcore, but I did write some simple C programs that used Exec and Intuition, again, mostly communications related. And even if I didn't write any commercial software from it, I learned so much from just futzing around with it and reading the ROM Kernel Manuals. Some of the best documentation I've ever seen.

The last thing I worked with was their pseudo-00 graphic/widget (gadgets?) lib that sat on top of Intuition. They were way late to the game with it and didn't have long to live. Such a bunch of smart guys working on that system.

One last old-man story: The Amiga was my second computer. Since early 1979 I'd had a TRS-80 Model I. I met my friend who got me into the Amiga at the TRS-80 SIG of the regional computer club. Although there were a few BBSs at the time (300 baud modems!), we went to the SIG to trade floppy disks. I eventual swapped my entire TRS-80 system for a color monitor to use with the Amiga to a skeevy dude from a TV station. When we made the swap, he was totally twitchy. That monitor, a very nice Sony with multiple, pro-grade inputs, was probably very, very hot. But why the hell he wanted a TRS-80 Model I in 1985, I'll never know.

4575804

I think it's also worth mentioning that the CGI on the TV series Babylon 5 was done in part on a network of Amiga computers.

Oh, yeah, NewTek's Video Toaster. I think they used a farm of them to do the rendering for the original B5. I never got to see a live one though.

About two blocks from where I work now, there is a place that was an official dealer of the Video Toaster in the 90s. They cater to professional and corporate systems, like conference rooms and ops centers.

4575817 Probably had some custom software to manage programming or payroll and needed the hardware to maintain it. There are some really weird and esoteric systems out there still. Banks running back-end systems on ancient PDP-30s and ancient big iron from IBM, TV stations that were running their weather graphics on Amiga 1200s past the turn of the century, airports that were running their entire traffic control systems on hardware older than sin...

4575875

There are some really weird and esoteric systems out there still. Banks running back-end systems on ancient PDP-30s and ancient big iron from IBM, TV stations that were running their weather graphics on Amiga 1200s past the turn of the century, airports that were running their entire traffic control systems on hardware older than sin...

Boy, tell me about it! Less than ten years ago, I was working for a sizeable investment firm. While the company's business was done on a user-friendly Windows-based system with lots of useful intranet tools, when it came time to actually send orders to the stock exchange for clients, well, that was another matter entirely. That involved stuff so old that several of my fellow trainees had no idea what they were looking at! I knew, though, that it was basically an emulator for an ancient "dumb terminal" system, and an interface to whatever beast was still running that kind of software. (I picture a room-sized computer in the NYSE basement that was programmed in COBOL back in the '60s.)

The good thing about it is that you would pretty much have to drop the code off a cliff to make it crash. Our own stuff for accessing customer accounts might go down from time to time, but the trading functionality never seemed to suffer more than a little lag now and then.

4575893

Less than ten years ago, I was working for a sizeable investment firm.

Whoa Elric! You just blew my damned mind! I've got more of that coming my way from don't I?

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Don't freak out too much -- it's not like I was a major mover/shaker or anything. I was a call center guy. I mean, yeah, I entered trades on stocks and mutual funds and whatnot, but I also did lots of mundane stuff like change-of-address updates and website password resets.

4576165 It's still freaking crazy to hear Elric.

4576663
Um... if you say so.

4576668 Well it seems like every time I tern around here I bump into someone who had a college background in Evolutionary Biology or something else way over my head. Like that financial crap, I can't make heads or tails of half of it. There is a highly eccentric blend of skills and talents in this fandom. That's why it's a little crazy.

4575804
4575842

I meant to mention Babylon 5 (as one of the big things the Amiga was used for) but I wasn't sure how to fit it into the retrospective. I was only about 10 years old when I first heard about it and I didn't really know what it was (and then I became an idiotic Trek fanboy for several years, so B5 didn't get a look-in until much later). But I do remember Amiga Format wowing over the Toaster and running a whole bunch of articles on it.

4576951 I craved a Toaster. Craved. Only problem was I had an A500+ and no money, so it was never anything but a pipedream...

The Amiga was the development platform for the Atari Lynx, and for 16-color games, D-Paint was an amazing program! I wonder if there's anybody still around who can do color cycle animation?

I must have played a gazzion hours of Lemmings. I wish someone would update it for phones.