05 june 2022
Yesterday evening, something arrived from Amazon that I've been waiting for close to 37 years for. I had preordered an Amiga 500 mini (from Amazon because they were the only place I could find in the US that were going to stock them) and it finally arrived.
I had this absolute sense of awe and wonder around the Amiga from the time I had heard about the thing. Adolescent and teenage me was obsessed with various kinds of computers, and I owned tons of magazines detailing how the Amiga worked, what software was the best, and how people were using their Amigas. But what I never actually had was the physical computer. Closest I ever got were a few Commodore 64s that I had owned over the years.
So I unpacked this thing last night, set it up, played a few games, and then felt strangely melancholy about it. I've been spending some time since then trying to suss out what is going on - why am I not having the jubliation that my 10 year old self would have imagined had that person fufilled the dreams of owning one of these.
A partial answer is that time has moved on. I'm still enamored by older computing technology, but for different reasons. I think that the charm of the Amiga, the C64, and computers like them was that they were really never mainstream in the way that the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the IBM PC became. Computing has now become this thing where outside of a few places (tilde.town being one of them) computers are a gateway to the WWW and not much else in and of themselves. Innovation now requires a market.
It comes from a time of hacking - and I mean that in the sense of taking something and tweaking and twisting and hammering and investigating until it fits your needs and desires. I had patience for that kind of hacking of that kind of thing during that time in my life, but now I'm spending my time hacking other things. I see being trans as a way of hacking gender, for example. I see some applications of technology that I do currently that are hacking as a more immediate and pertinent part of my self and my identity than I do this device that harkens to long ago.
So I'm struggling with where to put it, not in a physical sense but in a "where in my life does this fit" sense. I'm going to power it up every now and then, poke at it, feel some nostalgia, but I don't see it becoming a daily driver in the sense that it would have been when I was younger. It's nice to place it into a library of tools, thoughts, and ideas and see what became of them. A lot of modern game studios originally cut their teeth on the Amiga, and it's interesting to see the lineage between these older games and where they're at today. I'm also interested in the multimedia and digital art aspects of the Amiga - how did we craft a vision of the future back then, and in what ways has that differed from where we found ourselves?
Edit: I just found out about the mass shooting in Philadelphia last night. Fuck guns. Fuck gun apologists. Fuck gun hobbyists. Fuck our culture of death. But mostly fuck guns.