HA! You have a good point here.

I remember finding a 300 mb harddisk at the local flea market back in the Commodore heydays, at the time when most people had a 20 or 40 mb HD, spending hours and hours trying to make a script to mount it properly. I didn't have the specs, we didn't have the internet (I had a BBS...but...no one knew the specs on that thing), so it was all trial and error based. Man that sucked, but it felt good to finally make that sucker work. Imagine the collection of SoundTracker / .mod files I could fit in there :)

Well, Used Amigas are in fact notoriously expensive, as much as I love Amiga...I've never truly understood why Amiga lovers wants so much for their old beloved computers, for example - Amiga 4000 sells in Scandinavia (err...they TRY to sell them...) for around 600-2000$...I kid you not! You can pick up an Amiga 500 for around 100$ so that's still affordable if you want to play SuperFrog or watch some cool demos from the glory days of the DemoScene. The action is found on the AGA platform though (A1200 - A4000)

There are so many things wrong with your statements here I hardly know where to begin, but I'll bring up a few:

Emulating hardware isn't perfect, there are things you can do to the original hardware that would literally be impossible to do with an Emulator. There are also numerous timing issues with emulated hardware that would make it very hard to achieve a 100% perfect emulation, especially as you are running under another OS as the host of the emulator (just a program anyway). If you've never coded on a Commodore 64 or an Amiga, you can't possibly know or appreciate this.

A basic Amiga or even a Commodore 64, provides programmers with several challenges. I find it stimulating to code on old school computers simply because we don't have to waste years on classes, libraries and being "nice" to the OS. On C64 this is even easier, but you're limited to a 8 bit system, on the Amiga you're starting out with 16 bit numbers, and this makes coding in Assembly a little bit easier (also compiling with C compilers if that is your taste, I'm an Assembly coder myself).

The good thing with simple basic computers like C64 and Amiga, Atari etc...is that they have relatively known hardware, and you can pretty much ensure that your code will work on 99% of the computers as long as you stick to the basic specs. Try to do that with a PC. There is also a challenge to overcome, the systems limitations makes it very challenging to make your software run faster, 3D routines to work faster, new effects, more colors etc. This may sound trivial to those who have NO understanding why we'd do this, or challenge ourselves to this - but just like coding for an Atari 2600...this can be so much fun, you can only appreciate this...kind of like a good game of chess...albeit chess is a little more predictable than hardware from the 80s :) Sure it's old, but it's fun, and that's what it's all about.

One of the things I used my Amigas for was Animation. We used it at the Animation studios as a Line Tester (Pencil tester).

We had a camera attached to a digitizer, and pencil-test software that could run a sequence of sampled images in real time, according to a so called "Dope Sheet", as the Amiga wasn't strong enough to decompress video in real time without external hardware - it was just bitmaps stored in the Amigas memory and the "Fatter" the Agnus...the more Blitter memory could be used to display these images in sequence - direct and raw from the memory, this made it possible to show 25/30FPS movie sequences (typically those photos we took of our hand drawn characters) and could thus check upon our own hand drawn animation to see if it worked as it should.

The Amiga was an awesome tool for this purpose. I think some of the schools still use Amiga for this, it wasn't that long ago I serviced a few for them.

I can tell you I absolutely LOVED the Amiga 2000, this is my most re-purchased Amiga ever. I've had the A1500 (sort of a scaled down 2000) and it's bigger sister (Amiga 3000), A500, and even the A1000 with it's signatures inside, but the Amiga 2000 was exciting to me because I could expand it into oblivion.

Unfortunately cool stuff like the Video Toaster...never made it to Europe (AFAIK, I never saw one except in promos on American TV), but I remember I always wanted one, instead I had to make do with the lame VLAB that bugged out most of the time.

I remember paying $$$ for even the A2091 harddisk controller, and even a small fortune for any xx-mb harddisk back then. The Amiga 2000 was a reliable work horse, I ran my BBS with several modems on that one back in my Demo-Heydays. I loved it for its external keyboard, it felt so much better to code on when I had my Amiga keyboard in my lap instead of that HUGE oversized A500.

Ah, the demoscene, fond memories!

...on my Commodore 64, since we didn't have any games when it came out.

Interestingly enough, I sucked at "school math" and flunked math entirely. Imagine the expression on my math teacher when he saw me coding in assembly at the new computer-park back in the 80s, when he barely could understand basic.

Since, I've made numerous demos in the DemoScene with Amiga, and later on coding robotics AI with MCUs (as a hobby, nonetheless).

So no, you can absolutely learn to code quite decent software and hardware without deep math skills, but it helps if you want to do real advanced stuff like coding your own Render-Engine (but then again, how many are they?) My advice - learn whatever you need to achieve what you want.

Very, thanks for the tip. I'll remember that!

Sure, thanks. Changed!

...I just delete it though, I have absolutely NO NEED for peoples personal data. Maybe NSA does, but the average Joes (small businesses included) have NO need for these, it's material for the local newspapers though. OOOOH...security break, someone sold an unwiped harddisk and someone else took notice instead of formatting it.

Selectively Reusing Bad Passwords Is Not a Bad Idea, Researchers Say

This article has been approved by the NSA!

Has it all anyway.

...broadcasting beautiful scenery 24 hours a day, on a window near you.

Why am I reminded of the game: Halflife, level: Unforeseen consequences right now?

My first smartwatch was a Seiko Data 2000, it was released in 1983 - and had a 4-line dot-matrix LCD display that lasted surprisingly long. It had an external keyboard with induction technology to transfer the data from the keyboard to the watch.

Since then, there has been numerous PIM watches released over the years, some with icons, some databanks etc. And 5 years ago - I bought a Chinese Watch-Phone with mp4 playback/recording, spy-camera, GSM-phone, Bluetooth (stereo) headset and a color touch screen with a mini stylus hidden in the wristband itself.

I used it the first 2 weeks to show off to my friends, I had to make numerous phone calls with it because no one at that time would believe that it actually worked as a phone, but yes - it most certainly did...and this was WAY before the well-known brands came with their limited "smart" watches, this thing could already do more than their stuff today.

I think I wrote...I used it for 2 weeks, gave it away to a watch-collector as a christmas present, because honestly...I'd never use it.

Ah, of course - who in their right mind would want Rule 34 of Bryan Cranston and god forbid...Robin Wright, right?!