ScuzzBlog: Diaries July 2024 Entry 29th July 2024: Post 1: Amiga 600 - Why the Amiga 600 was so important. Amiga 600 - Why the Amiga 600 was so important. More tales from the scuzz archives and today I recall why the Amiga 600 was so important to me. Post 1996 I had returned to Bournemouth to practice with a firm of architects primarily undertaking school, hospital and public service buildings. The hours were long and I was for the first time spending most of my time on a computer using AutoCAD R13 running on Windows 95. At home I had caved and purchased a Pentium 120 Colossus machine running Win95 and enjoying for the first time the joys of the internet. When not surfing I was playing Duke Nukem and Civilization. I had not given up on the Amiga. Far from it, she sat on a desk right behind and was hooked up with an AmiPC link up enjoying the scans I was able to copy over in the new jpg format. T A N K was still located in the workshop, though getting less and less usage. I truly always loved Sensible World of Soccer but it was a bit of a trek down to the workshop to view how the games went. I played on coaching level all the time where the Amiga simulated the games. It wasn't a difficult decision for me to buy an A600 for sale, given that it was only a journey to the next village in Ringwood to collect and it came with the Philips monitor. The computer would sit next to the A1200 behind me and literally run SWOS none stop all night long. That was until the monitor broke. In those days I had a local electrician that fixed my stuff and the monitor was soon back up and running. I recall the day I bought the memory stick for the A600 cus sadly that was the day one of my cats died. I shall never forget that moment. The A600 lasted on the bench until the Win98 machine arrived in 2000. After that it was boxed away under the bed. My Amiga count at that time was two A1200s, two A500s and the A600. By the turn of the century I had added a third Amiga 1200, and soon a tower and a fourth. In 2001 I had two eye operations and was rested for the most of the year from home computer activities. Even the A1200 was boxed away for most of that year. 2002 saw a rejuvenation of Amiga activity primarily because of the A600. I had become chatty with The Crypt Amiga group and the many colourful guys from Scotland that frequented the group. I had mentioned the A600 in passing and explained how I had failed to get the hard drive working. We must have spent night after night writing mount files to get the thing working. Only years later did I discover that the early versions of the A600 did not support hard drives. Duh ! The Crypt was an entertaining group of guys that were always good for a laugh. They published once monthly magazines and had members such as the author of the Big Book of Amiga Hardware. From The Crypt I received an invite to join Amiga_SA in Southampton, a very serious bunch of Amiga users that truly educated me on a daily basis on the ins and outs of the Amiga. The one guy there was heavy into Amiga music creation and he shared a lot of his creations with me. He also had a good friend in the creator of Awnpipe and again he shared loads of stuff with me. By now I had purchased my first Amiga 4000 and a larger Microvitec monitor. The tower was also added to the collection along with CD and ZIP drives off a GVP impact card. I had the A4000 connected to the internet and was mailing the groups from the workshop. From Amiga_SA I joined Just Amiga, Amiga Active, AMOS, SAMBA, AFB and CUAmiga. The early 2000s had a massive user base, and with the demise of the Amiga Format and CU Amiga the community moved to the Yahoo Groups as a way of keeping in touch. By 2004 I had built up a following of my activities collecting computers and so formed my own group Commodore Amiga Retro and also put together the website. In truth the revitalisation of the Amiga post my Win95 era was for the most part due to the interest by those guys on The Crypt in trying to get the Amiga 600 working. For that reason I can trace my post eye operation era directly to pulling the Amiga 600 out and working with other Amigans to get it working. It was instrumental to me building up a relationship with a still active community. I am truly grateful for every single email I got from Amiga folk who populated the Yahoo Groups, up to its demise some twenty years later. It is truly sad that those guys are still not collected on the groups cus in times of need they could always be relied on to answer the calling. These guys were waving the Amiga flag to the bitter end and had fought through all the wilderness years when the Amiga seemed lost and buried. The Amiga's demise was greatly exaggerated and I sense that if the call went out today they would again stand up and be counted. Eric Schwartz best described Amiga users as 'Survivors'. He was not wrong. For me I am proud to be a survivor, and the humble A600 was the one thing that held out a hand in my time of need. For that I shall never forget this wonderful little computer. Happy days. Amiga 600 - Why the Amiga 600 was so important.

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Last updated 29th July 2024

Chandraise Kingdom

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