Amiga reborn...

So the main disk failed in my Amiga. By failed I mean completely stopped spinning, does not even get warm when I plug it in. While I work to save any data I can, hopefully more on this later, I decided to "start from scratch". The value in starting over is I can take a fresh look at Amiga OS and what it's like to use the various websites for software. I was able to install the OS and all the updates in a matter of minutes with little hassle. Thinking back to the early days of OS 4 it's really progressed well. For those who don't know the Amiga and the latest official OS (yes there are less official ones out there...) started in 2002 by a small team of under paid coders around the world. Now they are still under paid but there are more of them and working every day to add features and improve the system. It's really a tremendous see how their efforts can come together in to the system as it is today. Don't get me wrong, we still have a long way to go before I think it would be ready for a casual user, but the progress this far has been encouraging! So here is another screen shot, this is on my new drive

Viva la Amiga!

With Amiwest 2011 coming around the corner I thought I would do a little more to share about my favorite computer, the Amiga. Born 1985, the Amiga 1000 was an amazing achievement for a small band of software and hardware hackers. It featured color screens and 16 bit sound back when MAC's where grey scale and PC's green screens. In addition to having great looks the Amiga also had a classy personality with full multitasking and DMA between a custom chipset. DMA means Direct Memory Access and that one of the BIG secrets of how it worked. The idea was the CPU tells the Sound processor (Paula) to play a sound, then Paula reads the memory to play it. Super cool stuff I'll kick this off with my current home Amiga's desktop: