Computing

In this section, I take a little look back at some of the cool personal computer things I’ve played with over the years.  Most of this stuff deals with fun software, old computers, and games I played as a kid.  A little bit of computer history combined with a walk down memory lane…

You can also check out my recent posts related to computing for a quick sampling of my other computer musings.  Most of which deal with much more recent subjects.

Commodore Amiga 2000

Okay, I just have to start out with this one. One of the most amazing personal computers ever created. I still really can’t fathom how Commodore messed this product up.

In the lower left of this picture you can see the old Amiga 2000, apparently being ignored in this picture. Because it looks like I’m beginning to work with my IBM clone. (I can’t tell what that other machine is. It kind of looks like my 486DX-66. I’m probably using it for school or something. Or because I had to.)

Anyway, while IBM clones were real busy pumping out DOS 5.0 screens with all their glorious monochrome text, Amigas were pumping out 4096-color multimedia presentations that are still amazing to look at. And hear. Because the Amiga had four-channel, nine octave, stereo sound. And my clone went “beep.”

Now, granted, the Amiga 2000 was a fairly expensive machine. Actually, what I had was an Amiga 2000HD with a bridgeboard that made it IBM 8088 compatible. (That explains the 5¼” disk drive in the Amiga.) I still remember the price as being exactly $2,727.50.

The Amiga had a very intuitive GUI that was quite advanced for its time:

This is the Amiga OS 1.3 Workbench, complete with requisite bouncing ball demo running in the background.

My Amiga 2000HD came with 1MB (that’s megabyte) of memory, which was more than enough at that time, and a 40MB (again megabyte) hard drive. I split it 50/50, with half going to the Amiga, and half going to the IBM 8088. But later I would switch it so the Amiga would get more.

I’m not going to get into all the hardware specifics right now, check out the Wikipedia article and associated links within it for more info.

I did dabble in a little bit of AmigaBASIC programming, and became quite good at using the AmigaDOS CLI (Command Line Interface). Little did I know how handy that knowledge would be later when I started using Linux on PC’s.

I wrote a program I used a lot in high school to keep track of my grades and things. Hey, look it’s even Y2K compliant! Not to mention, it looks like I need to bring my A.P. English grade up!

More to come soon, but I wanted to leave you with a couple of Amiga videos I watched on YouTube tonight. I actually had both of these videos on VHS tape at one time. One I can find, one I can’t.