Yea. Not only heard of the Amiga, but hacked on it for a while. I had a couple of roommates who were starving musicians who moved to LA, slept on my couch/floor for three months while they were getting their Amiga/MIDI business up and going. Within a year, they had their Amiga business up and going and were getting good interest from professional/established musicians and producers for the capability of MIDI on the Amiga. Seeing as how they were musicians and I was the EE/hacker, there were times when I'd help 'em out in return for at least an introduction to some of the rather attractive women who always seem to hang around even the starving musicians.

Summary of the Amiga: Fantastic hardware. Clunky software. Horrible marketing and management by Commodore.

Two things killed it, IMO:

1. The business acumen, or lack thereof, by Commodore. They tried to make it all things to all people, when there clearly wasn't a base of developer applications to make it so. They tried to recruit developers, but gave the developers mediocre support in comparison to the IBM PC and Mac.

2. The early AmigaOS implementations were, to be as charitable as possible, "crude." When the OS required users to configure their memory partitioning for the stack, that was strikes one and two. And of course, if you partitioned it too large, and the heap ran over the stack, the system crashed. Why should the user have had to care about stack sizing? The vast majority of computer users have no clue what a stack is, what it is used for and why it has to share memory space with a heap, which they also cannot describe, much less detail which grows in which direction in a linear address model system. Heck, most computer users don't even know which systems have a stack and which don't.

And the way AmigaOS crashed -- the whole "Guru Meditation Number" was cute for programmers. It left users feeling stupid and gypped - again, not good marketing.

So yea, the Amiga gets +10 points for the BitBlt, the whole concept of sprites, the audio/music capabilities, synths, etc, etc. Good on 'em. Showed good - no, great engineering at the hardware level. But the OS guys spent too much of their effort impressing other kernel-level programmers and not enough making the system stable and usable for Jimmy Joe Jim Bob user.

As for proprietary systems: You're 100% right Ed. And that is what Vista's DRM is going to make Windows: the mother of all proprietary systems. Right down to the media you put into your CD or DVD drive, as well as the drive itself, and the BIOS, and the hardware, and the hardware certification process and on and on and on. The difference is that MSFT is going to make Windows proprietary to an insane level not just to protect their own intellectual property, but to protect someone else's IP - Hollywood's - without compensation. That's the mother of all stupid moves, IMO. It is one thing to piss off my own customers in furtherance of my own agenda, which might or might not make me money. It is utterly insane to piss off my customers for someone else's agenda, for which I have only a chance of making money.

In Vista, Microsoft has decided to take Door #2. Stupid.

The latest Intel Macs offer the best solution to the problem, IMO: yep, Microsoft has more applications. No problem: With virtualization, I can run a Windows OS (like XP) inside Mac OSX and keep all my applications that I have already been paid for. Done deal. They run at native speed -- the nirvana of application migration.

Then, when I want to play with digital media, there is no DRM necessary to play digital media on the Mac, and the Mac does digital media better than Windows anyway. I don't see a problem anywhere but in the price of the system.

Ed, it is now official: since you not only know of the Amiga, but you're impressed by the Amiga, you're no longer going to be able to use that "I'm just an ol' dirt farmer" line on me. You're simply posing behind that "aw, shucks, I'm just an ol' dirt farmer" shuck-n-jive. You've probably get yer thumbs hooked into your suspenders and rockin' back on your bootheels while you do it, too.

If you were/are impressed by the Amiga, you might make your money as a dirt farmer, but you are a card-carrying propeller head.