I really, _really_ miss printed magazines as a concept. Everything has moved online and there it commenced racing to the bottom. Back in the 90s you could make a business case of selling a printed magazine written by talented writers with insight and expertise. Now? Not so much.
I tried purchasing a few magazines about music production this summer but they read mostly like advertisement brochures, all “reviews” read like ghost written blog posts and there was no soul, for the lack of a better word, to be found.
In short - get of my lawn you damn kids, things were better in my days.
Membership to the Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org) is affordable and comes with a high quality monthly printed magazine. - https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm
It also bundles in O'Reilly Learning membership, and is cheaper than you would otherwise pay for the same...
It's $99 per year for regular membership, or $198 per year to get access to all the journal archives etc. There are special rates for students and for those living in developing countries.
I honestly joined because of the O'Reilly Learning membership, but since joining I've found value in the magazine and community.
I also rejoined ACM last year (after a 10 year hiatus), mainly for access to the O'Reilly stuff (what used to be safarionline). Tremendous value, and the monthly ACM mag is actually quite interesting.
I don't. I had to drive out 150kg of printed amiga and pc magazines to local recycling center, because they didn't want to take it and I got less than I spent on fuel. Noboty wanted to buy it and it was too hard to just burn it, because nice glossy paper with special anti-flammable additives burns rather awfully. Re-reading it is almost pointless, maybe for nostalgia about how AGP will be THE BEST in graphics soon.
No, I didn't even try. I gave them to a company which gave them second life as recycled paper. I'm still missing my amiga, that was a fine piece of hardware and started my programming career, essentially made me who I am.
Me too. In the early 2000s when I was a teenager I earned money from a paper round and would regularly buy a PC magazine (Computer Shopper) and the Playstation 2 magazine. I would read them cover to cover.
I'm sure there are good articles online, but it seems very hard for me to justify spending the time reading them when there is so much else. There is too much choice.
I remember a teacher at school telling me how once he bought all his favourite films on DVD he never watched them again. Once it becomes a conscious choice to spend your time on this rather than that it often ends up spent on nothing at all.
I've come to realise that choice (or freedom) is just not the greatest thing for humans. I firmly believe most people benefit from some kind of external structure and constraint. I think declining happiness, especially for women, is mostly due to this structure being removed. I also notice that the best art tends to be made under tight budgets and strict constraints. Artists tend to produce worse work when they are given freedom to do whatever they want.
Interesting, thanks!
I got a book [1] covering similar topic from Bitmap books earlier this year - was stunned by quality of production and ordered a bunch of others. Turns out I don't actually have time/inclination to play through a bunch of games from my childhood - but tremendously enjoy reading quick blurbs for that hit of nostalgia :-)
Well, it doesn't help you, but supporting independent online "magazines" give you much more quality articles than in the good old days.
I support "The Pod", a german-based video- and computer game podcast. The quality is beyond everything I had in the years before and I bought magazines since the mid 80s.
I am pretty sure there are far more magazines/podcasts/blogs which work with just supporting readers, but you have to find them.
I just ponied up for the first issue, I really hope this meets the minimum requirement. Just the other day I subbed for Retro Gamer. It's expensive af at $92 with a 20% discount, but worth it, imo.
Something about having a physical magazine that's an unchangeable snapshot in time is so appealing to me lately. I have no nostalgia for the Amiga (never had one growing up), but I do have an Amiga 500+ now and love discovering this thing 30 years later. Community is incredible and the Amiga's ongoing development makes it a really fun system to own.
Edit: On a side note, I still subscribe to National Geographic Magazine. If you are interested in that type of content, Nat Geo magazine is just exquisite. Photography is stunning and the long form articles are usually months/years in the making and written beautifully. It's absolutely loaded with substance, even the ads are interesting. I can't recommend it highly enough and I think it's only $19/year. Paper quality is slightly lower than what I remember as a kid, but that's pretty minor.
The nice thing about 64-fandom is that the fans are aware that it's history. So you can't sell them a $5000 "new" C64 that promises to have a four core 64-bit ARM CPU because that's not what they're here for - they specifically like the Commodore 64 which they're aware is not a modern computer.
Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.
I think part of it is that there is clearly a much larger theoretical space of possibilities in hardware & OS software than what we currently see with the Linux/Microsoft/Apple triopoly. There really were some compelling ideas in old systems, such as AmigaOS, BeOS, LispMachineOS, Altos, etc etc that still need to be fully realized at some point in the future.
Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this.
I'll never forget the excitement as a kid of walking into an electronics store in the UK in the mid 80s!
So much choice and an amazing array of machines! It seemed like endless possibilities! It was fun and interesting.
It's perhaps similar to the early days of the web design when we had experimentation with Flash interfaces and all sorts of crazy browser experiences! Now it's all the same same on the web :-/
I love macOS - but it's so boring these days. It's kinda joyless. Feature rich, but just no fun any more. I've been a life long Apple users, and used to work there in the late 90s.
I tolerate and use Windows for gaming and to mix it up a bit.
But right now I've been using and enjoying Ubuntu on older Intel hardware with cobbled together updates. And it's more fun.
I like things to be fun :-)
That is part of the point of the Amiga and retro computing - it's actually fun!
> Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this.
AROS showed that it can be done. The OS is aimed at AmigaOS compatibility and it's really fast and small. Porting it to smaller ARM single board computers would give unprecedented performance on small hardware where a full fledged Linux could not run at proper speed.
I would love to see this, but unfortunately cost of entry is too high for it to happen. There would have to be a truly overwhelming USP/benefit, and that's unlikely with current technology.
Most of the 8/16-bit interest is really just personal nostalgia. I don't know how many people really care passionately about recreating AmigaOS in 2020, but I would be surprised if it's more than four figures, most likely with a median age over 40.
Part of the issue is that there are still things many people - even those of us who haven't used an Amiga in years - miss from AmigaOS.
The tight integration of everything via AREXX, for example (though AREXX is an awful language, the expectation of a tightly integrated AREXX port in applications was important).
The device model that led to a plethora of device drivers and filesystem drivers doing interesting things (e.g. FrexxEd, an editor co-written by Daniel Stenberg of Curl fame, exposes a filesystem where you can find all open files, so anything that can read or write a file can manipulate the editor buffer directly). Datatypes. Widespread "standard" libraries for pluggable compression. A culture of tightly controlled APIs to the point that e.g. the default file requester etc. was easily replaced across huge swathes of applications just by dropping in new libraries.
It's especially notable that none of it is down to technical limitations of modern OS's, but cultural differences. You could do the above trivially in Linux (or any other OS) if you wanted to, for example, but it only matters if it gets wide traction. Amiga had a culture of quickly coalescing around standards that promoted reusability and modularity and sticking to them.
And that is also part of the reason why some of the hardcore fans stick to it: Their 30+ year old applications can open modern file types if someone writes a datatype for it (and they often do). Their 30+ year old apps can transparently compress and decompress new formats if someone writes a suitable library for it, and so on.
I'm not going back to AmigaOS, but I do still wish we'd see a resurrection of that culture, because in the ~25 years since I used AmigaOS as my primary OS, while we've surpassed it in a whole lot of areas, there are still areas where it was more pleasant to use an Amiga.
Yes, I think the high degree of integration, the ease with which you could work with the full capability of the hardware, and the lack of cruft made the Amiga a highly immersive environment for the enthusiast user.
I think about this a lot. I really want to know what the "Amiga feeling" was made of so I can reproduce or encourage it today. It was one of the main things I enjoyed about computers in the first place.
I also think its important for Amiga people to pass these notions along somehow, in a similar way to people who've worked with Symbolics Lisp machines or other innovative technologies whose core ideas were not taken up by a mainstream that surpassed them for reasons unrelated to the actual value of those technologies.
It's tricky, because it's difficult to separate the things we remember with a feeling of nostalgia but that do not really matter from the things that were genuinely useful.
I keep wanting to build some libraries and tools to experiment with this, but a lot of it is about culture, as I mentioned, which is often harder than the tech.
One simple example is the AmigaOS ReadArgs() call. It provides a standard mechanism for parsing command lines. An important consequence of it is that auto-complete for Amiga terminals that supports it can do typed auto-complete for any application that uses it without anyone having to write auto-complete script or specifications.
It's not a hard thing to do. The ReadArgs templates are really basic. Probably too basic. There are tons of good open-source command line parsers. All that's really needed is for people to settle on one with a suitable static spec format, and a mechanism for making it easy to extract that format from an executable.
But it serves very little purpose unless you convince a lot of people to do it.
There's a chicken and egg scenario there, in that it's a lot harder to find people prepared to spend time creating "standards" like that and pushing them than it is to find people to work on solving an issue with a more immediate payoff. Especially when you really need a critical mass of applications that supports these specs before the benefits starts becoming obvious.
Well... the C64 was an 8-bit computer, so the platform was simply too limited for doing anything other than games, simple BASIC programming etc. Of course there were some "serious" apps available too that pushed the limits of the platform, but I guess once more performant computers (like the IBM PC/clones, the Apple Mac, the Amiga or the Atari ST) became affordable, people wouldn't think twice about using a C64 for those tasks anymore.
The Amiga however was already from the next generation, with a "real" OS and really suitable for business, productivity, multimedia and other "serious" applications. Two of those 16-bit machines (or rather their evolved descendants) are still with us today - the PC and the Mac. So you can't blame people for phantasizing about what could have become of the Amiga platform if Commodore had managed it better. But today of course thinking that the platform could be revived and updated to become mainstream again is a pretty fringe view...
> Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.
I think there's more to it than that. I want to push beyond the base A500 (in fact I don't even own one of those at present, even though that was the machine I had back in the day), preferring instead the A1200, but don't in any way see Amiga or AmigaOS as "the future".
This manifests as a (very slow) mission to build what would have been my ultimate Amiga circa 1992. So, yes, I'm adding a 68030 accelerator board with a 68882 FPU, and I'm taking advantage of modern conveniences like Flash storage, but fundamentally I'm not departing too much.
I may add an FPGA accelerator at some point but, with that, it feels like you can quickly stray into "Is it even an Amiga any more?" territory.
Its especially weird/funny when you consider 99% of existing Amiga software was specifically hardcoded to floppy only A500 with 1MB ram, and doesnt benefit from any acceleration. It was also one of the reasons for its downfall.
Just purchased a single issue. It looks a worthy cause I think and the team look passionate about it. Would be happy for it to be a quarterly though which might make more sense.
Oh wow! As the owner of an Amiga 500 and someone who actually does productive hobby work on a "Pimiga", I find this really exciting. The Amiga is really the TR-808 of personal computers, and those who grew up with its distinct personality will cherish it forever.
AmigaOS 3.x is still common by people running emulators, and legacy hardware, and the Vampire V4. AmigaOS 4.x is still under active development for legacy hardware with PPC accellerators and "modern" PPC Amigas.
Then there's the open-source AROS and the commercial MorphOS too.
"It's complicated" with Amiga. There is a whole span from dedicated fans of "pure" legacy Amiga's with legacy expansions, via modern/new expansions, some of which replace so much of the functionality of the original that there's not much left that's actually used, via pure FPGA reimplementations, some which aims to significantly improve on the original, to new-ish PowerPC machines that can run AmigaOS 4.
So there's new hardware (that's not branded Amiga for legal reasons, but can run AmigaOS), old hardware, and everything in between.
Can't believe a modern Amiga is like $1700 for 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to 4 GB),when I just bought a Pi4 with 8 GB RAM, quad-core processor, and 128 GB micro SD card for like $150 with a case, fan, heat sinks, hdmi cables...etc.
That's because you're paying for an extremely small-run PowerPC machine for dedicated fans who absolutely want something that can run latest AmigaOS4.
For those who "just" want the cheapest way of running Amiga software, and don't have any particular reason for wanting one of the PPC boxes, an x86 PC with UAE (Amiga emulator) or AROS + UAE is a far cheaper option.
For those who wants something closer to the "classic" hardware, there are a number of FPGA based options with various degrees of advances over the classic hardware.
I think it's both for legacy Amiga users and users of modern Amigoid machines, such as the Vampire V4 and the AmigaONE line, that can run AmigaOS 3.x or 4.x.
I think back in the day they used to do those photos of disks too, and you'd get the actual disk at the counter as people were stealing the demo disks from displays.
I tried purchasing a few magazines about music production this summer but they read mostly like advertisement brochures, all “reviews” read like ghost written blog posts and there was no soul, for the lack of a better word, to be found.
In short - get of my lawn you damn kids, things were better in my days.