patrick.net

HeadSet says

As I recall, the Amiga 2000 sold in very high numbers because of the Video Toaster. The Amiga 3000 was what did not sell well, because they designed the case specifically not to accept the Video Toaster card, as Amiga did not want to be a one trick pony. Bad idea as sales crashed. The 3000 was kick ass though, I remember one guy at a user's group who had an Amiga 3000 set up running Mac OS in one window, Windows 3.1 in another window, along with the AmigasOS.

That's what is so infuriating about it all. It was WELL AHEAD of anything else of the time, yet it failed. I knew a few people that worked at Commodore and they blamed marketing and management. They were so furious they could barely discuss it, and I mean literally. They were so pissed off.

I really hate the x86 architecture and I've worked for AMD. It's just a terrible shit design. I'm actually trained as a VSLI chip designer, that's my actual matriculation from college, glad I didn't go into it though. ARM is a contender, but you can't get that as a desktop really, and I have hope with the RISC-V system, but that seems dead in the water. We're stuck with little endian forever it appears, I can see the point of view of both though now. Networking is big endian and everything else is little endian, makes network coding a pain in the ass but since we've all moved to little endian, you can basically just ignore it. I've not worked on a big endian system in 20 years now. I've been habituated to work with both systems, I have to drop the assumption I'm ever talking to a big endian system, they are so rare now. Even ARM has moved to little endian.

Blah blah blah, more technical bullshit and frustration that the public picked the worst system possible. There's no question in my mind that x86/Windows was the worst design, but it's prevalent. It's kind of infuriating to see the worst possible solution become the dominate one.

If anybody wants to try out Linux, I will help them. It's just a USB flash drive, the difficulty will be interrupting the boot screen to get it to boot. Let them try it out, and see. Alternatively, I can make a virtual machine copy. They won't see the use of it, initially. The great thing about a Linux machine is once you get it up running to your satisfaction, it stays that way, for years. It doesn't slow down or corrupt itself.

richwicks says

You ran Linux on an A3000??????

It didn't run well, that's for sure. Very slow. There wasn't really a "distro" to speak of either. Just a handful of archives for the various file systems, like etc.tar.gz, usr.tar.gz, the mkfs tool to format the file systems and, if I recall, an executable that ran under AmigaDOS to kick off the kernel. You created your partitions, used mkfs to format them, then untar the archives into their respective file systems, set the fstab, copy the booter in (maybe there was a boot-sector tool as well, my memory is foggy on that) and away you go.

Don't think I ever got X11 working. Not like it would have been usable on that system anyhow. The 16MHz 68030 processor struggled at the command line with that OS, and it was pretty much the minimum you could run it on due to requiring an MMU for it's memory management, which lesser Amigas lacked.

I think it was called Watchtower Linux.

My first x86 Linux was also Slackware. Ran OpenBSD for a number of years as well. Upgrades with that OS were a terrible hassle though.

Patrick says

Worth repeating:

And repeating again.