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Recently, solderpunk challenged his readers —perhaps in jest— to come out and post about "Orphans of Commodore". What a load of perkele! Those early Commodore users and their affection towards their grey brick. Ah, but the Amstrad, the lovely Amstrad CPC 464, that is a beautifulmachine. And it became perfectly usable as soon as you upgraded it to use those rock solid diskettes; when I transitioned into a IBM Compatible PC and their, very, floppy drives, I did miss those Amstrads well thought, dependable diskettes that might have been designed in Lahti.Oh, and there were a few things I missed too.
The Fantastic Manual. The Amstrad CPC 464, not only came with a nice keyboard and monitor; but also a great, honest to Ilmarinen, user manual, and, a Basic handbook, all lovely translated to Spanish. The fancy PC?, well you had to acquire it somewhere, which is not exactly easy when you are living on an island. Luckily, I had then access to the university library, which had a few books, most of them written in English, which I could manage at age 18, but would have been a huge chore back when I got my lovely Amstrad.
The ability to tell the computer that I wanted this position of memory changed to this value, and an explanation of what it could do. Yes, that came in the manuals. And it could be done in Basic, proper Locomotive Basic, not that second rate dialect that came as a curse to the Commodore or whatever.
The legibility. Right now my terminal is displaying yellow letters on dark blue background, just as the good Amstrad did by default. Letters could be chunky in Mode 0, but that was a compromise so the Z80 could display all its colors, and for text you had Mode 1 and 2, though I tended to favor Mode 1 over 2… OK, I might writing for true Amstrad fans here, moving on.
The no crap included. Not so much with my first, "real" computer but as MS Dos turned into Windows the computers I bought were increasingly loaded with garbage somebody in MS or whatever computer make wanted me to have. I eventually transitioned to a Mac, but that was even worse in the "nanny --state-- tech company" restricting me on what I could or couldn't do with my computer and even how long I could use it… sorry, we think your machine is obsolete.
Lastly, I camed to my senses and transitioned to Linux.
Now, do I want to go back to an Amstrad?
Well, if it had a hard drive, ethernet and would not then be a real Amstrad CPC, then I just might. But, I don't really want to go back. Play a game of Highway Encounter?, or even President? yeah, sure, once or twice.
However, I'd like to keep the good parts, as much as possible. That's a bit of what the Raspberry Pi foundation has been doing, in a sense. It's true that their manuals aren't as good as the Amstrad's but hey, that was in the old times when everything was better. I know it because I felt much younger back then! I cannot see Python as a replacement for Basic, I had rather picked Lua, any day, at least as an educational machine, but that's my own bias. Tab, space, tab, perkele!
Now you can set up a modern machine to your liking. It only requires a proper OS, and some knowledge, but acquiring knowledge requires time and commitment, while using a computer "as is" mostly requires only a click here and there.
The bad thing about Gemini is the bits it doesn't do, the good thing about Gemini is the bits it doesn't do too. Because, yes, it requires some knowledge to get into Gemini, but it's a low fence; once inside, it's easy to command the whole thing. It's not a mysterious web designed by a thousand soviets, I meant committees, that nobody can really understand, it's all there written and available to anyone to make its own client, server, site and what not.
No, I'm not an Amstrad waif. Daddy might me gone long ago, but he taught me what was good in life and I can follow in his footsteps, now.
Nostalgia, ostalgie, let's us not dwell in a world that never was.
~ Miguel de Luis Espinosa
> yretek@proton.me