I know you are asking yourself, why are you still messing with a dead machine/OS? Why? Loyalty could be a factor and that was certainly part of what has carried me through all of these years. Like the Macintosh crowd, you could say faith in a better OS or a better machine. However the march of time has burned all of those things down to meager amounts. Frankly, the Amiga for me is about nostalgia and fun. There are still things my Amiga does as well if not better, than current operating systems. This is on hardware that is now ancient in the technology world. While I do appreciate working on an OS that has industry support, I still enjoy using my Amiga more than most items on your current PC or Macintosh. I bet Mac OS8, Commodore 64, and Atari ST afficianados know what I'm saying.

So what could the Amiga possbily have had that was so good or revolutionary? First you have true plug and play. There isn't a doubt if you have a card installed in the machine. After the A2000, all first generation Amigas have SCSI as a stock feature. Later generations (A4000 and A1200) used IDE due to cost, though SCSI is easily added. Custom graphics and sound chips on the motherboard gave much faster rendering and video capability. The Amiga 3000 even had a full 32bit motherboard long before that became standard in the 486 and later Pentium based machines. I will grant you that time has allowed other platforms to catch up and surpass the Amiga in most of these areas as development for the Amiga has been pretty much nonexistent.

I actually have two A3000 desktop machines. I just prefer the 3000 to all of the other models and I haven't been able or willing to buy an A3000 tower to this point. My primary machine is a Rev6 Motherboard with all of the chips updated (WD8 SCSI, Buster Rev 11, Ramsey Rev 7, and DMAC rev 4) including the full 16 Megabytes of ZIP RAM. The hard drive is a one gigabyte unit and I haven't even remotely come close to filling it up. I have a CV64 3D video card running a 19in KDS monitor. I have upgraded the processor to a 68040 at 40MHz (yes, you read that correctly) with and additional 32 Megs of RAM. I have added an external CD-ROM drive and I have a state of the art HP550C printer.

My second machine is of similar configuration. It is a Rev9 Motherboard and it also has all of the updated chips though it only has 12 Megs of RAM on the Motherboard. It has a 720Meg HD and a CV 64 3D video card running a Commodore 1942 monitor. I haven't used this machine much though I plan on breaking it out and experimenting a lot in the future. Especially since I recently purchased a used Cyberstorm MKII with a 50MHz 060 processor. This machine may become the primary unit with the jump in speed.