Article 74306 of comp.sys.amiga.misc: Path: news.PEAK.ORG!engr.orst.edu!reuter.cse.ogi.edu!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!torn!news.unb.ca!cycor.ca!dgrant.peinet.pe.ca!user From: dgrant@cycor.ca (Dennis Grant) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Amiga war stories Date: Tue, 02 May 1995 19:34:27 -0400 Organization: Cycor Communications Inc. Lines: 99 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: dgrant.peinet.pe.ca Dave's video arrived yesterday. I'm #56/100 to get the limited edition. :) Popped it in the VCR. Watched. Laughed my ass off in spots. Shook my head in disbelief in spots. Even got a little misty in spots. And seing the dedication of these people, right until the end, got me thinking about my experiances with the Amiga, and how this silly little box of silicon and wire has affected my life. In 1987, I was attending le College Militaire Royale de St. Jean (the Canadian version of West Point, for the benifit of any Yanks who may be listening) and my personal computer was a C=64C, fully decked out with every GEOS program ever made. It was apperent, however, that I was going to have to upgrade to something with a little more umph. I had seen an Amiga 1000 two years ago, and while Deluxe Paint made an impression, I had worked with PC clones in school, and figured that a PC was the way to go. My roomate at the time though, a fellow C=64 hack, would talk about nothing else but how he was going to buy an Amiga - and I would just keep on shooting him down for it. He was nuts, everybody knew that the IBM clone was going to rule the world. One day, he grabs me. Someone in another squadron has a brand new A2000, complete with a 2088 Bridgeboard, and I just _have_ to se it. To humour him, I go along. Big beige box. Ugly interface. Not impressed. He opens a PC window, demonstates that he can compile a Turbo Pascal program at the same time as typing in a paper. Interesting. He starts playing F18 interceptor. Good graphics, smooth scrolling, awsome sound. I'm impressed. Then he flips screens, and drags down the WB screen to reveal F18 still running in the background, and honest to God, my bladder control flickered for a second. I was at the bank the next day, the computer store the day after. A2000, 2088, and two floppies. Amiga hog heaven. Two other friends of mine bought A500's. That started a crusade, where it was the mission in life of every Amiga owner on the college was to convert every soul lost to the PC or Mac over to the Amiga. We gave demos, presentations, composed MODs (and played them at dances over 1000W stereos) We tried, and tried, and tried, and converted a fair number, to the point where in 1991, there were more Amigas in rooms than any other computer, and the CS faculty were so sick of the word "Amiga" that they had stopped trying to argue with us. Noteable events: The presentations for a 300 level CS course we had to give, where 2 of us did interactive demos using the Director (How QuickSort Works!) that started with little anti-IBM animations. (Mine had a cherry bomb fall and explode on an IBM logo, 'Gate's shot an IBM logo full of holes) Downloading files from nasa.gov by mail on our DPS-8 mainframe, splitting the UUcode files into 360kb chunks so they would fit on IBM disks, downloading the chunks to an IBM terminal in the lab, importing the files onto my Amiga via the Bridgeboard, reassembling the files, and then decoding them. Whatever problems you have FTP-ing, I assure you mine were far greater. :) Discovering ASPICE, and simulating all my electronics labs on the Amiga, before ever going into the laboratory. If my results in the lab were not the same as the sim, I'd check the _circuit_ for mistakes - and find them. Running my own underground newspaper (now the truth can be told, it was me) using PPage 1.3, and a dot matrix printer that took an hour to print one page. Extended flame wars with one -MB- about Amiga vs. Mac on comp.sys.amiga. Getting help from one Dave Haynie (you know, the guy who's name is on the motherboard) and Dr. Kittel when I ran into a problem I couldn't solve. Working for 2 straight weeks trying to get an ML program to interface with Metacomo Pascal, and scrounging a VT100 to use as a RomWhack terminal so I could figure out waht was going on in there. Learning how PostScript worked, and reversing my download procedure to get Excellence!-generated PS files to the laser printer in the lab, when everybody else concidered dot-matrix the cutting edge. The list goes on and on. Now, in 1995, I work for an INet provider, as tech support, Gfx, and HTML. My 4000 is light years ahead of what I had in 1988, and I owe my current job to my Amiga. I owe a lot of what I am to my Amiga. I am not alone in this experiance. In fact, this seems to be the rule, rather than the exception where this computer is concerned. Dave, Randall, Scott, Peter, Bryce, Fish, Jay, and all the rest of you, thanks. You deserved better than what you got, and it wasn't wasted effort, not to me. Keep the faith. DG --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dennis Grant Cycor Tech (Amiga&Mac) Support / HTML & Graphic Design dgrant@cycor.ca Amiga 4000/040/6/970/17"IDEK/2XCD-ROM/14.4 AmiTCP http://www.cycor.ca/TCave/ Visit Trog's Cave! Article 74336 of comp.sys.amiga.misc: Path: news.PEAK.ORG!engr.orst.edu!reuter.cse.ogi.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!news.sprintlink.net!news.infi.net!larry!pkb From: pkb@infi.net (P.K. Birkmeyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Re: Amiga war stories Date: 3 May 1995 03:07:43 GMT Organization: InfiNet Lines: 20 Message-ID: <3o6s1v$16r@lucy.infi.net> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: larry.infi.net X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Dennis Grant (dgrant@cycor.ca) wrote: lotsa war stories. And I loved 'em. Another true Amiga patriot, veteran of the wars. I, too, had my life change when my Amiga entered my life. I was a lowly assembly language programmer in the U.S. Air Force; but since the Amiga I have spent countless hours studying its innards (both software and hardware). I am now a senior instructor for Sun Computers, and I owe a great deal to the best, most misunderstood computer on the planet, the Amiga. Commodore is dead. Long live the Amiga! -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- PK Birkmeyer __ | "Where do you want to go today?" pkb@infi.net __/// | To the computer store to buy Hampton, VA \XX/ | an Amiga.