What grew my interest for Linux

My adventures into the world of Linux started in 1994. It was taken to a greater height with the release of RedHat Linux 0.9 on the 31st of October. This release was better known as 'Halloween'. It was not a very serious endeavor since Linux was still in the early days. I was still an avid user of my Amiga computers. Most of the time I also played games with my friend Jordey; 'Syndicate' and others. And even some on the PC. I still considered most games on the PC pathetic, with a few exceptions like Dune 2 (which I also played on the Amiga)... I downloaded a lot of games and other stuff from Aminet, read the CU Amiga and participated in the Amiga scene. For me, it was still all about Amiga... since we bought one in 1986. I still have the information leaflets. This all changed a little in 1995 when I saw C&C. It seemed the PC did have potential. My reaction? I bought my brothers Amiga 1200! Till 1997 I wrote all my essays for school in a professional DTP application which I got with a CU Coverdisk. My teachers were always amazed by the quality.

It was 1996... while still being involved in the Amiga scene, I read an article in the Dutch Amiga Magazine. It was about some software written by Bernd Schmidt called UAE. I quickly looked on the internet and found this news posting. I was kinda stunned... since the Amiga's architecture was complicated to emulated due to the use of those custom chips; the Denise, Alice, Paula, etc. Somehow, he managed! It grew my interested and I had to use it!!! Not long before Courbois Software, a Dutch distributor of public domain, sold me the famous Amiga Hoax for use on a PC. This development made me feel twofold. First, a familiar feeling of the connection with Amiga... and second, hopefully the Linux community would feel like the old community.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Eventually Commodore went bankrupt. It was bought by Escom... it suffered a bad time. In 1998 RedHat launched a CD set called 'Roughcuts' which included the build for m68k! I was pissed it did not run on my Amiga. The assets of Amiga were sold to Gateway, sold again to Viscorp and now owned by Amiga, Inc. During that time Linux has gone a long way and kinda revived the interest for unices. And it got me completely hooked. For several years it was even my primary OS. Since I started with RedHat I kept going back to it... 'it had a familiar red color'???.

I also have to admit I had a Microsoft period in my life... :-( I thought the integration of applications was a good thing. I guess the games were the reason I used the PC :-P, 'Elite II' (also on Amiga), 'System shock', 'Wing Commander III', 'Quake', 'Blade Runner', 'Half-Life'. Anyone can make a mistake in his life.

Deep inside, still the old Amiga holds many memories for me. Playing games all night long, like 'Beneath a Steel Sky', 'Lotus Trilogy', 'Wing Commander', etc etc. So when I used Windows, I always was happy I could install WinUAE. It was a version of UAE for the Windows platform. At a certain moment it was even more complete than UAE itself. WinUAE could emulate some AGA, while UAE was just an Amiga 500 with OCS. There was even a product on sale called Amiga Forever which was based on the Windows version.

With me, a lot of people still can't let go of the Amiga. So when I saw this I felt the urge to download the schematics and built it myself. So perhaps soon I have another machine I can add to my collection. Currently I have an Amiga 1000, several Amiga 500's, Amiga 3000, Amiga 1200, Commodore CDTV and an Amiga CD32. At some moment I also had an Amiga 2000 and Amiga 4000... I still don't know why I sold those :-/. All of them are operational, since I always fixed them myself. All in all... it was the computer on which I started programming in assembler (and hex editing), evil AmigaBasic, Amiga E and eventually C/C++.

Nowadays I still use Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu, openSuSE, etc). Still look for everything Amiga... Even have a MacBook from work, which I suggested to have. I have noticed it also has a community... but a quite 'different thinking' one :-P. Development I now do in Java, C#, some scripting languages and a little C/C++.

Some of the history of Amiga is published in this article. The original UAE website does still exist after 11 years. Although these new resources contain more mature versions of the software: UAE, E-UAE, WinUAE, WinUAE. There are a lot of Amiga resources available... Amiga.org, Amiga.com, Back2Roots, Amiga Board, Amiga Games, AmigaWorld... and just search on Google for Amiga. I made UAE run on Amiga itself, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PlayStation Portable, Palm, and more... For the real Amigans also try UADE.

PS: I am still looking for some hardware (anything welcome... even Atari)!