30th anniversary of the Amiga

I know there are some former Amiga users around these parts because it was mentioned in another thread. I had a couple myself (still have a B2000 in a cupboard in fact). Apparently it is 30 years since the A1000 was released in 1985.

Yes, I too have got one in a cupboard, an A500. And several boxes of games (mustn't throw anything away! EVER!) including all those point and click adventures that came on numerous floppy disks (sometimes as many as fifteen!) that you constantly had to swap between when your character moved to a different room.
And as I've often said before Deluxe Paint 4 was awesome! The first half decent picture I ever did was a portrait of Sean Connery as Indy's dad (along with a terrible looking Harrison Ford) that looked just like a pencil sketch thanks to the lovely colour range tool.
I also remember some awful attempts at recreating Pixar's (but back then it was just John Lasseter) Luxo Jr using Sculpt 4D and I even used to try and code my own games with Amos Pro.
I had so much more patience and ambition in those days. :nostalgic-sigh:

Yes, I miss Deluxe Paint too, although I was more a fan of 3 than 4 as I never particularly liked HAM mode for painting and the only other major addition was onion skinning for animation (admittedly I did like and use that a lot).

HAM mode! I'd forgotten about that! All that colour fringing was eye-wincing stuff to look at. And I now instantly remember Extra Halfbright as well.
I liked it for the animation too, I spent many an hour/day/month/year drawing my own roadrunner cartoons that sadly only came to 200 frames before running out of memory. All saved in the lovely Anim5 format.
Also the live translational tile symmetry was superb for doing seamless backgrounds. Much better than Photoshop's fiddly Offset filter.

Ham & onions? Sounds like dinner...

Well, it was pretty tasty at the time

HAM is an acronym standing for Hold And Modify. It was a graphics mode that enabled the use of 4096 colours.

I remember the first time I used a computer it came with a cassette player and that's what you stored data on. Can't remember the model but my friend had one,

I had several commodor 64's though, my grandma used to rent them for me and just leave me to figure them out. Back then there was only DOS so I really didn't do much, but I shortly went into a computer class in grade 10, they didn't have any for grade 9, and we made really long artwork with keyboard characters, using dox matrix printers to print them out, ahh I miss those times.

I didn't get my first computer until 1998 so I missed out on all that dino stuff. Except for computer class in school - we used DOS and I didn't understand anything and every time you pressed the wrong key you had to start all over because the teacher never thought to explain if there was an undo or backspace type button... Plus I thought the whole thing would explode if I did something wrong... (And dad's computer, which he got several years before I got mine, always stopped working when I was using it. He claimed I was typing too fast for it to keep up...)

Charlotte wrote: I didn't get my first computer until 1998 so I missed out on all that dino stuff.

My first computer was a ZX81 (with a 16k RAM pack, the most powerful thing known to mankind... almost). As far as that is concerned you missed out on having to spend time working out the perfect volume setting on the tape recorder so that you could load programs from the tape, and them making sure you marked the volume dial so you didn't lose it. You also missed spending 5 minutes waiting for a game to load only to discover that the volume was set wrong and having to start over again after another couple of minutes while you rewound the tape.

Possibly the best thing you missed out on was spending most of a day copying out pages and pages of code from the back of a magazine for a game only to find out one of two things, either A: you had made a typo somewhere during the process (or the code was actually wrong itself) and the game wouldn't run, or B: you ran the game, thought "this is actually a bit rubbish" and switched it off after 5 seconds of playing.

Sounds lovely... What a shame I missed it...