You Tubular Dude!

[pasithea]

I've been listing to this Retro Arcade Radio station again and it has a bunch of Commidore and Amiga commercials on it, as well as Atari, TRS80, etc, but I was thinking about how the computers I've owned influenced where I work now.

(If you're bored, this link will get you to a bunch of the Commidore commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=796KD4SNzwE&mode=related&search= )

So just for fun, (and because I'm doing a bunch of merging and have a little free time this morning) I typed 'Amiga' in on YouTube. Predictably, most of the videos are teen girls making some drivel about their friends.

Surprisingly, a lot of videos are idiots with camera phones showing their Amiga emulations running on various other machines. (Yes, you're a dork AND you don't know how to take decent video)

Then we got to the stuff I was actually looking for. Animations done by amiga fans.

Sorta vaguely in order of watchability with the more watchable ones nearer the top.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=glydlECUOZ0 (Truly the finest Amiga animation ever done)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=P4Y8hz-xbzQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=G26jkcNyBZg soooo stooooned
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSiYh1qX0A&NR
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sQrsvOPDUdw
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8fjXC4HpG-w
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HEqWt7_4l6c
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nvGZinQR-KM&mode=related&search=
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zTtFFjw74H0&mode=related&search=

Bonus: Woo! I really like this 'drag the whole desktop off the screen' thing.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kWmMSPJZprQ

I was always envious of Commidore/Amiga owners. We had a TRS-80 which could do... spreadsheets and text editing and dull stuff like that. It made me what I am but how I would have loved to have played with some of those graphics and sound tools. I wonder how my career might have gone different if I'd actually gotten one.

Anyhow... In later years I came to hate amiga fans because they touch that same nerve as the 'The South Will Rise Again!' sorts. It's dead.

For example: Here's are a bunch of the current Apple Ads with Amiga inserted into them. This is about the best of them as a commercial for OS-4, but it's still bad jump cuts and audio patches that really fail and look sad and pathetic.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xgObNfDhvBI&mode=related&search=
You can view the related ones if you want to see sadder fare.
I need some spare time and a few friends that look vaguely like these characters and a smelly old beardo with a Fedora with pins stuck in it to play the part of Amiga, chugging beer and shouting at them.

And for a hefty dose of the 80s, I bet Amiga fans still wank to this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=yckH20ngY4Y

Here's a video of someone touring the Commidore/Amiga plant on the last day before it was shut down. Kinda sad I suppose. They weren't bad machines, even if their commercials were aimed at paranoid yuppies and the people who evangelize them make me want to slap them upside the head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRI7hHwiRxk&NR

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

When the Amiga was still alive, having one had the same kind of effect owning a Mac does: you have something that works a hell of a lot better than the crap everyone else you know owns, and it's damn hard not to evangelize it.

Some people kinda got stuck on it. And still evangelize it. The way I look at it, it was ten years ahead of its time, but mismanagement meant it didn't stay ten years ahead - it sat in one place, and everything else caught up with it and surpassed most of its capabilities.

I'd go crazy trying to use one now.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I really liked my A3000 when I first got one but the A3000 suffered from the fact that it was smaller than A2000 and A4000 and a lot of expansion cards literally wouldn't fit in it. It was either hunt around for the lone maker of A3000 expansion cards or cut a hole in the side of the case as let the card poke out the side (as one person suggested).

Eventually as Commodore failed all local support for Amiga failed and I was left with hunting around dubious sources just to get stuff that worked on it. It stopped being worth the effort. It eventually got packed away and is in mom's basement storage somewhere.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I remember one great bug in AmigaOS 1.x --

Create two new folders -- I'll call them 'A' and 'B'. Open them. Drag A's icon in to B -- Drag B's icon in to A... close both folders.. and POOF! They're gone forever! (unless you use some disk recovery tool)

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Sorry to spam your commments but I just saw one of those AmigaOS4 commercials and you're right -- it's really schlocky and looks like a badly narrated PowerPoint presentation on public access TV.

Which, by the way, is one of the places I still see Amiga 'Video Toaster' effects being used.

[yetanotherbob.livejournal.com]

Ahh. The undead system. It was once alive, but now it is neither alive nor dead. Instead, it walks the earth, feeding off the processors of living systems, craving the computer braaaiiiiins.

One thing that Apple believed in the 80s was that third place was a deadly dangerous spot to be in. That's why they acted as if the Amiga and Radio Shack systems did not exist. It was only Apple and IBM. A ruthless strategy, possibly, but it held.

One thing I noticed once, however, was that I was geeking out somewhere, and mentioned macs. Those there hewed forth vitriol and hate unlike I ever saw, with the standard misinformation (one-button mice, etc). So then I mentioned Amiga. An almost Pavlovian effect, as praise for the boing ball was similarly unanimous.

Since all I have to go on is anecdotal evidence, I shall state my hypothesis as unconfirmed, that while the Amiga diehard might hate Microsoft, they hate Apple even more so, because while Amiga and Apple had similar stories and trials, Apple was the one that survived. Is this at all accurate for some?

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting those, I had never seen the Warners looking cartoon. Nice work, no matter what system it was made on.

My band still uses Amigas for a couple video chores in our live stage shows... there's a couple things they do very easily that are (still!) a bit more work to do on other platforms.

[torley1.livejournal.com]

I had an Amiga 500. It was in lieu of a Mac. Later, I'd get a real Mac. And later on, I'd get onboard Windows. Curious how things change.

Great selection of videos — have you ever seen the Beyond the Mind's Eye series? If not, this is worth a look:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YT7W7hBj31c

Music's by Jan Hammer — yeah, the Miami Vice composer. How 80s is THAT?