Today is International Amiga Day, when retrocomputing enthusiasts are required to boot up the fanciest multimedia computer line to ever fail. I'm not really qualified to comment on the Amiga since the closest thing I'd used until recently was a Commodore 64, but I won't let such a trivial matter as not being qualified stop me from spewing uninformed opinions.

Amiga

I recently acquired an Amiga 500 and I've been having some (mostly Type II) fun retrocomputing on it. For a platform that launched in the US around the same time as the original Nintendo Entertainment System, the Amiga is impressive! N.B. The Amiga platform launched with the Amiga 1000, but I'm using a later model--the Amiga 500.

Unlike the earlier Commodore 64, the Amiga shipped with a bridge to the future: an RS-232 serial port. This enables:

• Copying small files to/from a serial port-equipped modern computer (cf. lrzsz)
• Dialing into Internet-based BBSes, using a modem emulator (cf. tcpser)
• Controlling terminal-mode programs on Linux/BSD-based computers

With a hard drive, I could theoretically even get on the web. Unfortunately, my Amiga 500 only has 1 MB of RAM and no hard drive, so I haven't gotten beyond single-floppy programs/games yet.

Amiga Basic

But, of course, the most urgent task on my plate is to add another programming language to the pile, and this brings me to Amiga Basic.

Amiga Basic is included on the "extras" disk of Workbench 1.3 (which came with my A500). Similar to Commodore BASIC, it was written by Microsoft and, also similarly, I didn't enjoy it. Here are my notes:

• There aren't functions (other than single-line DEF FN statements which... didn't work)
• It supports 32-bit arithmetic... except for MOD (ask me how I know)
• The environment is impressively small at 80 KB
• The Amiga Basic manual feels very dated--it spends a lot of time discussing UI that feels obvious to modern users, then moves onto "advanced topics", and only covers everything else in a reference section
• Thankfully, line numbers aren't required (as in Commodore BASIC)
• The UI was fairly slow
• The interpreter is annoyingly slow

Overall, I liked the older BBC BASIC better. And Turbo Pascal beats all BASICs handily!

Looking forward

I'm not precisely sure how much time (and money) I'll spend investigating the Amiga, but I would really like to get a hard drive so that I sample the true Amiga computer experience (instead of the game console-esque experience I've had thus far).

If you have any pointers to Amiga resources (or any advice on what to do with an A500), send me a mail. Thanks!