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From the Bookshelf: The Future Was Here
May. 30th, 2012 05:38 pmWhile I never play as much interactive fiction as I think I "ought" to, I do still manage to keep up with the Planet IF aggregator. One of the more notable weblogs I've come to follow through it is Jimmy Maher's The Digital Antiquarian, working its way through the history of home computing and certain kinds of computer games. At the moment it's just rounding out 1981, with the IBM PC just introduced but the games continuing to be presented in their Apple II versions. When Maher mentioned he'd just had a book published that stepped several years ahead of that, though, I began thinking about getting a copy of it.
I can't remember ever having seen a Commodore Amiga computer in the 1980s and 1990s, just as I can't remember ever having seen an Atari ST or even a Commodore 64. My family does have one issue of Amiga World magazine, though, from late in 1992, right around the time I suppose my father must have been thinking it was about time to lower the Tandy Color Computer flag at last with Radio Shack no longer selling them and spend rather more money than that home computer had cost on a new system. For all that the magazine must have helped me be aware on some level of the Amiga's existence, it might also have suggested things were no longer quite what they'd been with that computer. Whatever the exact cause, we wound up following a path first put down when my father had managed to get his employer to pay for a pricy Macintosh SE/30. In the years since then, though, I have grown as curious about the Amiga as about any of the other "old computers" I hadn't quite seen when they were still being sold, even if I was aware I lacked the attachment others maintain to it, dwelt on as both ahead of its time and taken before its time. Learning something about the Amiga from someone whose breadth of view I already had a sense of did seem interesting.
( A platform study )
I can't remember ever having seen a Commodore Amiga computer in the 1980s and 1990s, just as I can't remember ever having seen an Atari ST or even a Commodore 64. My family does have one issue of Amiga World magazine, though, from late in 1992, right around the time I suppose my father must have been thinking it was about time to lower the Tandy Color Computer flag at last with Radio Shack no longer selling them and spend rather more money than that home computer had cost on a new system. For all that the magazine must have helped me be aware on some level of the Amiga's existence, it might also have suggested things were no longer quite what they'd been with that computer. Whatever the exact cause, we wound up following a path first put down when my father had managed to get his employer to pay for a pricy Macintosh SE/30. In the years since then, though, I have grown as curious about the Amiga as about any of the other "old computers" I hadn't quite seen when they were still being sold, even if I was aware I lacked the attachment others maintain to it, dwelt on as both ahead of its time and taken before its time. Learning something about the Amiga from someone whose breadth of view I already had a sense of did seem interesting.
( A platform study )
