Sometimes you happen to realize how old you are when listening to the radio where they announce hits from your days of youth as “oldies”. Or when todays youth asking you what a music casette or a 5.25″ floppy disk is. You’re even older than that when you still know 8″ disks. We have one of those on our pin board.
Or you may realize your age when your favorite computer of your youth will celebrate its 30th anniversary this year!
In 1985 the Amiga was introduced to the public – and 30 years later Amigas around the world are still running! Some are still operated under AmigaOS, some are running maybe NetBSD, but some are running the Debian m68k port – even though the port was expelled from Debian years ago! But some people still take care of this port and it is keeping up with building packages, although mostly due to emulators doing the most work.
But anyway, the Amiga is turning 30 this year! And what a great machine this was! It brought multitasking, colorful graphics and multi-channel audio to the masses. It was years ahead of its competitors, but it was doomed to fail because of management failures by the producing company Commodore, which went bankrupt in 1994.
The “30th Anniversary Event” will take place on July 25th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, USA – if the kickstarting the event will be successful during the next two weeks. So, when you earned your first merits in computing on an Amiga as well, you might want to give your Amiga history another kickstart! Not the Kickstart floppy as the A1000 needed to boot up, but fundraising the event on kickstart.org!
I think this event is not only important to old Amiga users from the good old days, but for the rememberance of computing history in general. Without doubt the Amiga set new standards in computer history and is an important part of industrial heritage.