When I was an adolescent circa end of the 80’s / beginning of the 90’s, I owned the best computer available at that time: the mighty Commodore Amiga 500.
It was powered by a 16/32 bits processor (the Motorola 68000) at 7.14MHz and four coprocessors (Gary, Agnus, Paula, Denise), had 1Mb of RAM, had 4096 colours on screen at once, had stereo sound, ran a powerful operating system featuring a graphical windowing environment and was very well technically documented. As a result, I spent many nights learning programming (BASIC, C and 68000 Assembly) on my Amiga 500.
My new Amiga
Twenty years later and I still like using the Amiga. But now it’s in software form. I run E-UAE which is a Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator. I run it on my Linux Mint PC and performance is fine (the PC is only 1000 times quicker…) I even love getting a Guru Meditation from time to time. This brings back a lot of memories.
I get the same kinda pleasure when running the old Prince of Persia game which launched from a DOS command line :)
I didn’t play Prince of Persia a lot.
I had a PC before the Amiga. It ran MS-DOS 3.2 and I played games like Frogger and Karateka (the ancestor of Prince of Persia) on it. Then I got the Amiga around 1989 and I discovered games like Kick Off, Sensible Soccer, Eye of the Beholder, Monkey Island, etc. But, to be frank, I was more of a geek than a gamer so I programmed a lot too.
Hello,
Computers are very powerful in terms of calculations.
But one thing which is puzzling me is we as humans we use A-Z, 0-9, symbols, +/*-, etc
But computers use only 0,1 and +.
Can you enlighten me on computer arithmetic please.
Thanks,
Shakti
Thanks for asking me to help you but I have to admit that computer arithmetic is a very broad topic. Have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_arithmetic
In essence, computers use binary states, 0 or 1, to represent everything else like numbers, characters, etc. Computer processing is, in fact, only calculations being done on long strings of 0’s and 1’s. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system
Those were the good times ^^ … seriously has there been any other breathtaking stuff like the Amiga 500?!? Protracker, deluxe and photon paint HAM 4096 colours, the demos – hardwired, cebit, red sector and the GAMES :)
Videos of Amiga demos…
Nice Amiga. I remember my uncle’s Sanyo 8086 8Mhz, 1MB RAM with only 640K available, 16 colour 13″ screen, MS DOC 3.2… I remember playing Digger, SSR, Monopoly and learning GW-BASIC. I did screensavers back then 1990…
Yeah. Those were the time when geeks were geeks. Oh. Wait. We have Linux now :-)
Hello Mr Avinash,
I have heard that you have a great knowledge in programming languages. Can help me in that case?
Could it be possible to change encryption codes in sun wireless toolkit for cldc 2..5.2. I’m using the software to configure the encryption in bluetooth but I’m stuck. Sun wireless has a feature in which bluetooth can be emulated, but the problem is accessing the codes and changing the default encryption. I’m planning to use the one-way function encryption used in php. Can you please help me?
Hi @SKS,
Thanks for thinking that I “have great knowledge in programming languages.” :-)
I don’t know a lot about Connected Limited Device Configuration though… I guess your best bet would be to ask someone from the Java ME community… Sorry for not being more helpful.
Yeah I had an Amiga 500, and also a A1200 with a souped up 68030 processor. I used Deluxe Paint III to make some animated GIFs here: http://www.funk.co.nz/archive/funk99/visuals-old.html
dammit!! i was born too late!!
i used play karateka on my cousin win95, i was just a kid but i remember that particular memory really well!!
my first computer had win98 second edition on it….lol
Poor boy ;-)
Windows is a good operating system… for secretaries! Geeks need more control. That’s why geeks tend to love Linux or even Mac OS X with its BSD underpinnings.
Last night at 1 in the morning, I was having some fun with a Debian Linux virtual machine running in my current Fedora Linux laptop and I was telling myself how cool those technologies would look to 16-years old kids. Pity most of them won’t ever know those things.