New print Amiga Fanzine / what's holding Mac fans back?



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Author	New print Amiga Fanzine / what's holding Mac fans back? (Read 13754 times)
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	on: February 02, 2022, 13:20 I came across a new (as in 2022!) printed Amiga Fanzine here in Germany. Here is their HP (modern browser required): https://www.mister-fpga.de/amiga-germany-abo-international/ Apart from me totally digging new Fanzines and all, I came to wonder about why the Amiga scene seems to active & vibrant while the Mac OS scene isn't. Don't get me wrong, there' some cool developments in recent years, but it pales in comparison to the stuff happening over in the Amiga camp. Is it that the Amiga scene is just exceptionally creative? What do you deem is the reason and what should be done about it?

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #1 on: February 02, 2022, 16:31 Its unfair to compare the Amiga community to antything ... but the Amiga community. ;-) To be honest, I started my 68k war drive with UAE and didn't waste a moment's thought about switching to B2. It wasn't until I got frustrated with the lack of good DTP software, that I was willing to give Basilisk-II a try. And then MacOS Platinum just blew me away. I am still a big Amiga fan, but for me nothing compares to MacOS 8.1 - even including modern OS's. The control panel and system extension architecture is just unrivaled in my view and the way that I can customize my system - w/o a shell! - ist light years away from anything that Amiga ever achieved. For sure the Bouncy Ball could have ruled them all, if Commodore would have just spend the few extra bucks to give the A a decent Desktop (called "Workbench"), good font management and some basic postscript support. But alas, they did neither of those and so to this day we are stuck with a machine that is a lot of fun to play with, but has next to no value for doing serious work with it. So maybe Mac afficiados are just too busy being serious? ;-)
Last Edit: February 02, 2022, 16:41 by 68040
wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #2 on: February 02, 2022, 18:29 I enjoyed your post 68040. I moved from the Commodore 128 to the Mac, always feeling maybe I should have went Amiga. After I retired I figured I would go back and revisit that decision and check out the Amiga world. It was filled with lots of folk touting its greatness. But in the end as you noted, it is really hard to be productive on the Amiga. I was never interested in games on the computer, the "demo scene" just seemed more oddity than interesting. I gave Morph OS a try and have it installed on an old G4 mini. But is does seem pretty clear that the very active and vibrant world of Amiga, just has little interest in what I consider to be productivity. MacOS 8.1 was an exceptionally nice OS. Very personal, and very easy to configure and control, with lots of features still very relative in more a modern tech world. There were a great many solid productivity apps available that could help with an honest day's work. It did fell like something you could say, "This is mine, it is not something I am renting from a corporate giant."

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #3 on: February 03, 2022, 02:03 "This is mine, it is not something I am renting from a corporate giant." - you took those words right from my heart wove.

Knezzen Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot	Reply #4 on: February 03, 2022, 09:41 Never really liked the Amiga, it was more or less a games console with a keyboard for me back in the day. My dad had a small music studio where he used an Atari 1040STfm with Notator SL. Kick-ass system of course compared to the Amiga toy To get a bit more serious, I think we would have some fanzines and an Amiga and Atari like retro community if Apple died in the mid 90's before Jobs returned. The Mac is still around, so it's in the same place as Windows. We don't really see fanzines for Windows 3.x or DOS etc. It should have died (or not)!

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #5 on: February 03, 2022, 12:36 Actually there are a lot of vintage forums for MS-DOS, some for OS/2 and there is even an active community for Win3.1 out on the Net. In my view this depends much more on the way the "left behind" community perceives themselves. DOS purebreads never took a liking to the GUI based Windows and OS/2 fans (rightfully) saw themselves as being disciples of the mother of personal computers, bestowing them with a superior operating system (which it was compared to anything else running on Intel at that time). Likewise the Amiga ran on a hardware platform unmatched in its day. And then they all got abandoned - sometimes for clear cut reasons (like the move from DOS to Windoze), but often in a mess were cause and effect were shrouded in myth and conspiracy theories. I still remember the sense of deep injustice I felt, when the Amiga market collapsed. The same when IBM cut their ties with OS/2 - not just downsized their engagement, but just cut of anyone completely. That sense of betrayal can turn anger into energy, which then fuels a "I'll stand my ground" kind of attitude. And over time that inspires others to join in ("well, if they held out for that long, then there must be something to it"). The "problem" for the vintage MacOS community is, that Apple took great pains to leave no one behind, when they transitioned from one platform to the next to the next. You can't really make an argument in an Apple forum that "we got the short end of the stick handed to us here ..." That makes it much harder to motivate folks to "fight back" ... fight back against what? I've never read a post were Apple fans rage about being treated unfairly by "their company", but that's a common theme in Amiga or OS/2 discussion groups. In short, most Apple boiz are just too happy with their platform to get out onto the barricades and burn some stuff.
Last Edit: February 03, 2022, 12:43 by 68040
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #6 on: February 03, 2022, 13:35 I'm undecided on the "Commodore died in '94, therefore it's loved today". Mainly because people are Amiga, not Commodore fans. The Amiga development went on way into the 2000's with the spawning of Next Generation hardware. It wasn't really ever "dead". Unlike the Atari ST line ;-) ... and if you continue down the road, Mac OS "died" in 2002 and yet it hasn't brought forth a big retro wave. I do share the perceived usefulness of the Amiga. It has great games but little more. Let's not forget the Video Toaster was amazing for multimedia work at the time but I wouldn't use it today other than the fun of fiddling with this pioneering technology. Other than that, I can't think of any productivity software that really stands out. That's what is so different from Mac OS. We have such a great variety of high-quality applications at our hand. You can perfectly use this system for everyday tasks. Not to forget all niche / speciality software out there. Just the other day found out about a great woodworking helper for System 7. Yet, it seems only a small fraction actually uses these systems while the majority shelves Mac OS machines in collectors style. These folks mostly hang out Facebook / Discord and talk about using Mac OS vs. actually using it. Test my theories by joining and asking a question about iMac colors. I guarantee, you get an answer within minutes. Now, do the same thing and ask a question about a function in MacDraw. Good luck getting any useful answer! The thing I don't understand is the why. Does that have to do with geography, e.g. the Macintosh and Mac OS being very strong in North America while the Amiga has its stronghold in Europe? Do Americans rather have an indifferent-to-negative attitude towards using "old things" while Europeans rather cherish "classic stuff"? Just thinking aloud, maybe our Americans here can give us more insight.
Last Edit: February 03, 2022, 13:39 by Bolkonskij
Knezzen Administrator 512 MB Posts: 608 Village idiot	Reply #7 on: February 03, 2022, 15:04 It’s the same thing with the Atari. C-Lab built Falcons on license up until 1998 or so and the German company Medusa Systems built the Medusa and Hades Atari compatible computers with PCI and ISA slots, regular PC RAM etc. The 00’s saw new hardware like the CT60 (68060 accelerator) and the Atari Coldfire project (Atari compatible computer based on the 68k derivative Coldfire. What I mean is that the Amiga and Atari died commercially with their mother company. No more Amigas or Ataris where sold at general computer stores for the mass market. All the major software started coming from small independent developers instead of big software houses, typical for a dying or “niche” system that used to be big. Even though the the DOS and Windows 3.x community might be alive (just like the System 7 community), there’s no retro vibe since the mother companies are still around and people have slowly transitioned to Windows 10 and ARM based Macs running macOS. There was no hard cut. There was no death, so there never was a big community driven effort to “bring the platform back”. There only was older versions of the same OS that’s still being made. That’s the reason why the Mac and Windows community is much more “back in the days” centric and not “let’s bring back the Atari and Amiga” type of community. We simply don’t have the tragic history

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #8 on: February 03, 2022, 16:26 As far as the Amiga goes, all of those post 94 "follow ups" came in with lofty promises, took the money, gutted the brand and left the Amiga community with next to nothing in return. And that didn't change until some brave privateers designed their own custom chip Amiga revival machine. So the senss of betrayal is very real in those circles. And for DOS look at Vogons and other like Websites. They even developed a true Java Stack for MS-DOS - that's more than MacOS 68k ever got :-O Now I call that "vibrant". And as far as the States are concerned: I used to live in Texas were the TI 99/4a is cherised to this day and lots of folks collect and even still develop for that machine. I myself have a storage room in the Southwest with suitcases full of ancient expansion cards for the Peri-Box. ;-)
Last Edit: February 04, 2022, 19:30 by 68040
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #9 on: February 04, 2022, 10:02 Well, at least when Amiga Technologies came out of the Commodore ashes there was some feeling of hope and progress on the Amiga side. You may remember the days when you'd head into an Escom store here in Germany and had clueless salespeople point you to the "Amiga Corner" with new Amiga 1200 Magic packages on display :-) But yeah, good example about the DOS world too. Maybe, it's because Mac OS isn't so much fundamentally different in design from modern operating systems by comparison (like DOS)? The Mac OS principles (a desktop, a mouse, icons) have become a standard and the basic principles did not change much apart from visual eye candy. Hence, it's not so clearly a "different computing" that might spark interest? (well, it is in reality, but you need to use Mac OS to understand in the first place)
Last Edit: February 05, 2022, 07:16 by Bolkonskij
mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #10 on: February 04, 2022, 18:28 This is a great topic! Until I discovered Dan Wood on YouTube, and his excellent Retro Hour Podcast, I had no understanding of the Amiga, or its cadre of dedicated fans who carry its torch to this day. I think I'm with Knezzen here. There is definitely a sense of "what could have been?" and "If only..." among the Amiga's fans. The view seems to be that the Amiga's potential and promise were cut tragically short by the decline and fall of Commodore, a company that once had a major facility not far from me here in Pennsylvania. There's a real sense of loss and bitterness there. The repeated disappointments and missed opportunities that run through subsequent efforts to either revive the platform as a going concern, or take it in new directions, make things that much worse. What's more, I think the still ongoing saga of who owns the rights to what bits and pieces of the Amiga's legacy just adds fuel to the fire. I think all of this plays a role in the creativity and ingenuity of those who throughout the past 30 years or so, have created and continue to create both hardware and software to keep the Amiga's torch lit. As was said above, we Mac aficionados have none of this back story. Our own 1990s drama turned out differently, and the Mac went in a new wildly successful new direction that set it up for the next generation and beyond. While our beloved OS was eventually one of the casualties in this new world, we at least got to see it play a starring role in the late 1990s renaissance, and then live out it's golden years in the Classic environment - a sort of electronic "mother-in-law suite". In short, we've had closure followed by new life - perhaps not with results that were always satisfying, but that's life, really. Bolkonskij's question about how Americans and Europeans may differ in their attitudes toward "old things" vs "new things" is very much of interest to me. One of the more unfortunate assumptions of the modern era is that the new must be better than the old - simply because it is new. While no expert in such matters, I find it hard to believe that this assumption is not at least an ingredient in the special sauce that supercharges American consumption of everything from automobiles to shoes... and also computers. As the new comes in, the old has to go somewhere, but in truth there are a variety of places for it to go. I grew up less than a mile from a notorious landfill in northern New Jersey - one that routinely caught fire while it was still open in the 1980s. (I still remember looking out the window of my 5th grade classroom and seeing smoke that turned colors as the dump burned on one occasion - from jet black to brown to dark red). So, I'm familiar with the staggering amount of trash we Americans create, and then foist upon each other and the world. On the other hand, one look at the number of former light industrial and light commercial buildings around me that have been turned into self-storage centers suggests that we don't throw away everything, we just don't know what to do with what we keep other than store it. Same goes for the buildings themselves - while not particularly productive or interesting, self-storage centers have revitalized some old buildings that had lain dormant for years if not decades. I'm thinking particularly of what used to be the bottling house of a brewery not far from me (stout brick building with its name etched in stonework across the front) that sat sadly disused along my route to work for years, before suddenly returning to life. This post is getting too long, but as it concerns computers, I think we Americans are just as susceptible to the lure of the newest gadgets as we always have been (otherwise why would most of us pay ridiculous monthly sums to our mobile phone carriers to finance the purchase of new phones every year or two... without really understanding that dynamic), but we are also susceptible to "internet creep". So long as our computers/phones/tablets provide an enjoyable enough experience online, they are fine. As soon as they don't, it is time for something new. Planned obsolescence definitely plays a large role here too, as well as the gradual migration of tasks to "the cloud" that are otherwise perfectly suited for less-than-current machines (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, etc). Ok, I've gone on long enough and I think my stream of consciousness has formed an ox-bow here - if you are still reading, I salute you!

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #11 on: February 04, 2022, 19:37 @mac-cellar, if you're after a true midnite oil burner, then research the personal history involved in the Amiga vs. Atari story, which was a Denver style drama of ego between Jack Tramiel and the top-brass of the company he helped to make great (which was actually Commodore ;-) Back then we kids spend night after night harrassing each other in BSS flamewars or - seriously - via computer print-magazine adds. And nobody took prisoners in the wars between the Amiga and the Atari crowd. ;-)

mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #12 on: February 04, 2022, 21:35 @68040, thanks, I just might do that! I remember getting a touch of that story in the documentary about Commodore that was produced a few years ago. Just enough to make me curious Along the lines of this thread, your post got me thinking about what it was that made such ardent fans out of those who used one computer or another, and if such a thing is still possible? Vintage PC, Mac, Atari, Amiga all have their devotees and rabid fans, but I wonder if this is one of the phenomena that the advent of the internet has diluted significantly, to the point rabid fanbases just aren't a thing anymore. As the everyday experience of using a computer both broadened to more and more people, and centralized around a web browser and, maybe, an email client. The experience of using Firefox or Chrome is (at least today) largely homogenous whether it is on Mac, PC, Linux, etc. And if you use Gmail, the same is pretty much the case. Forgive my ramblings all - it's late Friday afternoon and I have a headless, fanless, noiseless Powerbook 5300ce waiting as my weekend tinkering project.

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #13 on: February 04, 2022, 22:30 @mac-cellar, no apology necessary as I think its a story that ought to be told and not forgotten. If you truly want to know the spirit that got us moving in those days, then read the books of Isaac Asimov. We saw ourselves as the vanguard of a new age, where our computers and our codes would solve the problems that the old hairy dudes had left us with. Hunger, poverty and disease: The power of the Personal Computer would help to get rid of them all. With the naive arrogance of youth we believed in the promise of a new tomorrow. With flying cars, self-repairing houses and holidays on Mars. So those flame wars were about whose names would be remembered in the history books of the future. Shall it be an Amiga, Atari or Macintosh world that we'll create? IBM-PCs were for suckers in white shirts, so we knew they'd get buried with the dinosaurs. Now the future is here. We all wear face masks, are afraid to even shake hands, religios fruitcakes rule most of the globe and computers have proved to be a great help in making life ever more complicated. The great Information Superhighway is transporting smutt into every living and many kid's rooms on the planet and sucks what little real life we got left right out in return. And a new generation of teenagers runs through the strets, fueled by the promise that they'll get to solve all the problems in one strike. If only they could find a way to get rid of those hairy old dudes that stand in their way. But now I am one of those old geezers with too much hair in all the wrong places. :O
Last Edit: February 04, 2022, 22:39 by 68040
mac-cellar 128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7	Reply #14 on: February 06, 2022, 22:13 @68040 - Very well said. Funny... I really enjoyed watching "Foundation" on AppleTV+ recently - though I had to watch the whole series twice to make sure I caught what I thought I did the first time through. When I was done, I knew I had a new science fiction series to dive into. I'm almost done with the first Foundation novel now. I read a short story of Asimov's years ago, and while it has always stuck with me, I never took the next step to dive into his novels. Glad I'm doing so now.

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