Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Why do fans of the long-eclipsed computing platform keep the faith?
Jul 23, 1998 | If you're not already part of the Amiga flock, entering the cramped exhibition hall at an Amiga convention can be profoundly disorienting. Browsing through the software racks and glancing at the aging Amiga 500 and Amiga 1000 machines running demos at the AmiWest conference earlier this month in Sacramento, I felt as if I'd entered a parallel universe where software development stopped in the early '90s. There was no Photoshop, only ImageFX. No Premiere either, but instead the granddaddy of desktop video, Video Toaster Flyer.
How could I take applications with copyrights from 1991 seriously? And these machines were from 1987; how could they be anything other than toys? To me these were inevitable questions, but they didn't seem to trouble anyone else: I had entered the Church of Amiga, and Mass was underway.
While most operating systems profess to have fans zealous enough to form a religion, they fail the fundamental test of faith. It takes no faith to be a Windows user; every application, it seems, will make its way to the platform, and the number of hardware manufacturers who cater to Wintel grows by the minute. Even the Macintosh's "Evangelistas," who were staging their own tent revival at the MacWorld Expo in New York last week, can expect new versions of Photoshop to arrive via FedEx at about the same time Windows users' will. But Amiga users never receive reassurances like these. They're on their own.
Who are they? "They tend to be not average, not mainstream, not in the bell curve," says Joe Torre, senior hardware engineer at Amiga Inc. "Not ho-hum. They're the mavericks, the secret weapons. The entrepreneur, the one that gets the worm. Not the one in the herd. The one that does his homework, and is quite proud of his prowess. They've turned their machines into personal creations. The users have by now filtered out their weak. The ones that remain are an elite club. We're not all in detention hall; we're the honor students."
They purchase machines from as early as 1985 and run applications from 1988. They bear the judgment from the world-at-large that theirs is a dead platform, a relic, the Tucker automobile of their industry. (The last new Amiga model shipped in 1992.) To be an Amiga user is to know that everything Windows and Mac users know about processor speed, memory requirements, bigger hard drives and application upgrades is wrong. It's to know that an Amiga 500 with a 16MHz processor and 4 megs of RAM -- the raw equivalent of an outmoded Intel 286 machine -- can run circles around a Pentium II PC. You just need to believe.
I can't. The world-at-large doesn't seem to, either. But Amiga devotees still do. And now, for the first time since Amiga's original parent company, Commodore, went under in 1994, there's hope their platform might rise again with its new owner, Gateway.
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