Happy 30th Birthday, Commodore Amiga!

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I loved the Amiga. I used them in Highschool and early College.

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Gotta make yourself ramen-profitable somehow.

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Ah, the original product.

interestingly enough, the joyboard was the source of the “guru meditation” error. One of the pieces of software that the developers wrote for the board was a silly little “meditation” thing. You were supposed to meditate while sitting on the board, and the program would indicate how “mellow” you were.

This took on a life of its own when they were developing the computer itself. When you got one of these software errors, to debug it, an expert would often have to go away and calmly think about it for a while, to try and figure out what was wrong- The old joyboard got involved in the process, and hence the error codes became Guru Meditations.

Edit- Actually, since you found the pictures, you probably knew all that, but it’s a cool story and I wanted to tell it, dammit.

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I did not know that - thanks!

We got an Amiga 1000 that replaced the C64 (allowing it to retreat into my bedroom). A couple of years later I was cleaning out my closet, going through old kid-oriented computer magazines (the kind that features cover stories on the “Whiz Kids” TV show, or had you-type-it-in Ramones songs) and found back that ad. Wish I had saved those things. But who had the room? Thanks, Internet!


Update: here’s the [text of the magazine] (http://archive.org/stream/k-power-magazine-02/K-Power_Issue_02_1984_Mar_djvu.txt) with the Ramones song.

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And I just got my Kickstartered iOS version of Wings! w00t!

I had a roommate in the Army with an Amiga in 1990. He let me play with it all the time, so many great games for that thing.

Wasn’t it the first consumer 32 or 64 bit system?

Amiga was the first true multitasking OS home computer. And of course the custom audio/video chips which put it way ahead of its contemporaries.

I remember how excited I was to drop the 68010 into my Amiga 1000 even though it made zero practical perf difference… I wanted to believe.

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