Amiga turns 38 #commodore #amiga #computers
It is 38 years since the Commodore Amiga was launched today.
My Amiga 500 was the second computer I owned, the first being a Commodore 64. The Amiga however was the first one that I could use for communication - I bought a 2400 baud modem first year of high school and got a 40 GB "Tiny Tiger" harddisk (connected to the parallel port(!)), got connected to FidoNet (2:230/149) and I was hooked.
It was on my Amigas I learned scripting, mixing the power of a mouse driven multi tasking graphical user interface with a useful command line interface (oh, how we laughed at the sysops running BBS's on "monotasking" DOS PC's!), started programming in C, realized why Shareware was an annoying waste of time, and learned about the idea of Free/Open Source software.
After high school I switched the 500 out with an Amiga 4000 which I ran my BBS on and eventually, through Fidonet technology, I even got email and usenet access on.
At some point the writing on the wall regarding the Amiga's future was pretty clear, and I managed to sell my Amiga 4000 without losing too much money on it, fortunately.
After not having a computer for a while, I assembled a PC of reasonably low priced parts and installed Yggdrasil Linux (Fall 1994) - even ran X on a Hercules monochrome display! Shortly after I tried Slackware, before finally settling on Debian (around 1.2 (rex)-1.3 (bo)).
Still here!
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