The Amiga was such an impressive computer for its time. I remember having an A500 when it was still fairly new, and compared to anything else out there it was way ahead in terms of graphics and sound. I had mine hooked up to an old amp and big speakers, and the sound that came out of this thing was amazing. Graphics were so colourful and fast scrolling too. It’s amazing to think that the Amiga series is only one generation newer than the Commodore 64/128. There were also a lot of good games for it, so the game developer community must have embraced it too.
The Amiga I grew up with only ever had AmigaOS 1.3, but I’ve heard a lot of praise surrounding ARexx, a scripting language that I believe shipped with 2.0 and later.<p>From the AmigaOS wiki:<p>> The ARexx programming language can act as a central hub through which applications - even those created by different companies - can exchange data and commands. For example, using ARexx you can instruct a telecommunications package to dial an electronic bulletin board, download financial data from the bulletin board, and then automatically pass the data to a spreadsheet program for statistical analysis - without any user intervention.<p>On a more personal note, I’ve been working on a game for classic Amiga over the past couple years, and it feels like such a novelty to have OS bindings for things like memory allocation and file handling while working with a machine from 1985. Especially for file handling, I have the assurance that my game will run off of floppy, hard disk, or even a RAM disk on any generation Amiga, because I get to use modern file path logic via the DOS library.
The Amiga 500 and 1200 of my father were the first computers I got in touch with as a boy growing up in Germany in the 80s and early 90s.<p>I think every generation feels more or less nostalgic about the things they grew up with. But oftentimes I get the impression that this is especially true for the Amiga community (in comparison to, let‘s say, people growing up with Ataris). If true, I wonder why this is.