Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Computer?
And within 10 hours they’d gotten 2,700 responses.
Commodore 64, TRS-80, Atari 800, Compaq Presario… People posted names you haven’t heard in years, like they were sharing memories of old friends. Gateway 2000, Sony VAIO, Vic-20, Packard Bell… One person just remembered they’d had “some sort of PC that had an orange and black screen with text and QBasic. It couldn’t do much more than store recipes and play text based games.”
And other memories started to flow. (“Jammed on Commander Keen & Island of Dr. Brain…”
“Dammit that Doom game was amazing, can’t forget Oregon Trail…”)
Sharp PC-4500, Toshiba T3200, Timex Sinclair 1000, NEC PC-8801. Another’s first computer was “A really really old HP laptop that has a broken battery!”
My first computer was an IBM PS/2. It had a 2400 baud internal modem. Though in those long-ago days before local internet services, it was really only good for dialing up BBS’s. I played chess against a program on a floppy disk that I got from a guy from work.
Can you still remember yours? Share your best memories in the comments.
What was your first computer?
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‘Turn an Old PC Into a High-End Amiga with AmiKit’
AmiKit is a compilation of pre-installed and pre-configured Amiga programs running emulated on Windows, macOS, and Linux (as well as running on classic 68K Amigas expanded with a Vampire upgrade card).
Besides original Workbench (Commodore’s desktop environment/graphical filemanager), AmiKit provides Directory Opus Magellan and Scalos as desktop replacements and its “Rabbit Hole” feature allows you to launch Windows, Mac or Linux applications directly from your Amiga desktop! Anti-aliased fonts, Full HD 32-bit screen modes and DualPNG Icons support is included and this package comes with exclusive versions of the Master Control Program (MCP) and MUI 5 (Magic User Interface).
The original AmigaOS (version 3.x) and Kickstart ROM (version 3.1) are required, also the recently released AmigaOS 3.2 is supported. You can also get the needed files from the Amiga Forever package(s). It even supports emulating AmigaOS 4.x (for PowerPC) easily through Flower Pot.
Here’s an extensive overview video by Dan Wood. An Amiga Future review of an earlier 2017 version can be read here.
“Everything began in 1994 when my parents bought an Amiga 500 for me and my brother,” explains AmiKit’s developer.
“I was 14 years old…”
Fast forward to 2005, the AmiKit was born — an emulated environment including more than 350 programs. It fully replaced my old Amiga and it became a legend in the community over the years.
Fast forward to 2017, a brand new AmiKit X is released, originally developed for A.L.I.C.E., followed by the XE version released in 2019, Vampire edition in 2020 and Raspberry Pi in 2021. The latest & greatest version was released in 2020.
When someone, who has never heard about Amiga before, asks me why I would want to turn current modern computer into something retro and old fashioned, my short answer is: “Simply because I love Amiga!”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.