A Half-Life's Depletion Recalled
Jul. 3rd, 2023 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAlthough focused on typing and retyping my latest “quarterly review” to the point where I couldn’t toss off a different comment on the day a specific computer magazine cover emerged from the queue of my Tumblr side project, I was at least aware of coming to the end of one more magazine. Five years after Commodore went out of business, the Amiga magazine Amazing Computing reached its own end. I have to admit that, just as I once shocked a comments section with the impression I hadn’t known anyone who used a Commodore 64 (although I didn’t go over to a lot of friends’ houses), I hadn’t been that aware of the Amiga when its parent company had been operating. There was one relatively late issue of Amiga World in my family’s house (with an article about the latest iteration of the Macintosh emulator card for it, should you be capable of lowering yourself to the use of such an unsophisticated operating system for the sake of its productivity applications), and I did write a story (but not a good story) a little while later with a Commodore named “Parry Amiga” in it, but that was about it.
In tracking the half-life of the Amiga through the post-Commodore issues of Amazing Computing, though, I have happened to think “as a family who moved from the Tandy Color Computer 3 to a Macintosh, we could have been there too...” A few columns in Macintosh magazines in the middle of the 1990s did have the same “buck up; we can survive” air as certain comments in the Amiga magazine just years before. Conscious mere aesthetic reactions have made the Macintosh look-and-feel appeal to me since its black-and-white days, I have wondered how configurable Windows could have wound up with no commercial alternatives; of course, I’ve also discovered at least some Linux distributions can have their application menus moved into a single bar at the top of the screen. The casual certainty of Amiga users starting off that their superior technology would conquer the world sometimes feels a bit much for me, but it did turn into complaints the only thing holding the computer back was the company its creators had resorted to joining to maintain some independence for a crucial while. There, I wonder about whether “Commodore ‘won’ in the low-end market, but in the process shaved its profit margins to where it couldn’t afford to promote its new high-end acquisition starting off.”
In tracking the half-life of the Amiga through the post-Commodore issues of Amazing Computing, though, I have happened to think “as a family who moved from the Tandy Color Computer 3 to a Macintosh, we could have been there too...” A few columns in Macintosh magazines in the middle of the 1990s did have the same “buck up; we can survive” air as certain comments in the Amiga magazine just years before. Conscious mere aesthetic reactions have made the Macintosh look-and-feel appeal to me since its black-and-white days, I have wondered how configurable Windows could have wound up with no commercial alternatives; of course, I’ve also discovered at least some Linux distributions can have their application menus moved into a single bar at the top of the screen. The casual certainty of Amiga users starting off that their superior technology would conquer the world sometimes feels a bit much for me, but it did turn into complaints the only thing holding the computer back was the company its creators had resorted to joining to maintain some independence for a crucial while. There, I wonder about whether “Commodore ‘won’ in the low-end market, but in the process shaved its profit margins to where it couldn’t afford to promote its new high-end acquisition starting off.”