The Amiga’s 30th Anniversary

The Amiga 30th Anniversary Event at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View this weekend looks like it should be really fun. Too bad I’m in NJ and not CA.

I get nostalgic about the Amiga once in a while. I keep thinking I should try the emulator from Amiga Forever, but I never get around to it. (There’s enough current technology that I don’t have time for; not much point in messing around with a 30-year-old dead OS. Heck, I’ve done almost nothing with the Windows 10 preview that’s installed on my laptop, and working with that would actually be useful.)

The Amiga 500 was my third computer. (The first was a TRS-80, and the second was a Commodore 64.) I bought it when I was in college. It was the first computer I owned that had a real OS, and multi-tasking, and all that good stuff. I could actually use it for some of my programming assignments! (Prior to that, they were all done on the school mainframe, or on shared Unix machines.) I remember that picking up a copy of the Lattice C compiler was a big deal for me. It wasn’t hugely expensive, but it was a significant purchase for a college student.

I wonder if I have printouts of any of my old programs around here somewhere. If so, it’s probably best to leave them buried. I’m sure the memories are better than the actual code!

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