We all know the original Amiga was far ahead of its time, and the Amiga really doesn’t need more retrospectives and glazing. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t want more Amiga retrospectives and glazing.
I’m not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn’t able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great.
↫ David L. Farquhar
It’s 2026, I have an incredibly powerful Linux gaming computer, but since I grew up on DOS and Windows, to this day, I still feel the need the close every other application before launching a game. I don’t need to – modern operating systems handle such things just fine, mostly – but it’s so ingrained in me it’s hard to drop this habit. I wonder if people who grew up with more capable computers than whatever DOS nonsense I grew up with are less inclined to do things like this? Or did memory constraints act as an equaliser?
Anyway, the linked article doesn’t mention it, but the Amiga is still, somehow, going relatively strong for a platform that’s supposed to be dead. Modern(-ish) hardware is getting a bit harder to come by, but AmigaOS 4 and especially MorphOS are still actively being developed, and even running them in virtual machines on x86 has become about as easy as it could be.
I still have and use my A1200, it’s set up just behind me, It has a few modern bits inside but in all the important ways it’s the same machine. The community for them is very much alive and quite active with new hard and software/games coming out often.
When I got mine I never expected I might still be using it at my age, I might still be using it after I retire at this rate 🙂
A few things I appreciate about it, Mostly consistent UI, Visible buttons, borders, scrollbars etc, Each time I boot it is exactly the same as the time before. And fun, It’s fun to use.
I still force close apps on phones. Old habits die hard, I guess.