I can tell you how I hired one of my employees instead:

During the work interview he mentioned he used to write Amiga demos when he was a teenager. Can I see one? I asked. He emailed one later that I could run on an Amiga emulator.

He got the job! The demo frankly wasn't that impressive but the fact that he wrote stuff like that already as a child was, before college and stuff.

He later told me he would have never guessed as a child his demos would give him a job one day!

Howdy my binary friends and those who identify as an attack helicopter or an Amiga 500, I was away from devRant for about 2 weeks or 4 because I had to order a new touchscreen (who cares anyway).
Have I missed something on devRant?

Let me just freshen up my dictionary with Alex's rants, be right back.

My Amiga got a fancy new dress

The year was 1983. My best friend and neighbour at the time invited me over to see an amazing device that his father had brought home from work, an IBM PC. We played a game called Track & Field, and I was amazed that the machine remembered my name once I've entered it. (Uptil then the only machines with any kind of memory that I've come in touch with, were arcade games and my cousin's video game console, which was also the first electronic gaming device I've ever played, back in 1978). In the early 1980s, computers were anything but commonplace in Åland Islands, but I think that it was in 1983 that people became aware of them, and there was a budding interest to buy one, at least among us kids. It was my sister who wished for a home computer for Christmas, so the same year Santa gave us a ZX Spectrum. It came with a game called Thro' the Wall, an Arcanoid clone(, that has inspired me to make my own clone "Wall" for all the different home computers I've had, ranging from Commodore 16 and Canon V-20 to Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200). Unfortunately, we only managed to load the game (delivered on a C cassette) like once or twice after several attempts. It turned out that the hardware was faulty and dad got a refund after first having had to complain a lot at the dealer (which went out of business some ten years ago), and then bought the Commodore the next Christmas. Anyway, I wrote my first code on the ZX Spectrum. It doesn't really count for programming as all I did was typing examples and running them. I do recall altering one example though, a program drawing the Swedish flag on the screen, by adding an inner red cross thus turning it in the Åland flag. But, with the Commodore 16 (which had an excellent Basic interpreter) I got started with programming almost immediately and by the end of 1984 I had written my fist very own Basic programs. In 1996 I got my first IT job, and am still a dev. So, what became of my childhood friend and neighbour? He runs a successful computer dealership :)

Guru meditation eh...

1. Music. I am a Metal guy of many colors. So I enjoy "Dimmu Borgir" quite as much as "Amon Amarth", "Man'o'War", "Eskimo Callboy" and "Epica". I am really fond of the latter. But I also like medieval rock and metal like Harpyie or Ignis Fatuu.

2. Music. You may not believe it, but I also like western and country. (Comes from point number 4) My favorites are "High Valley" and "Jack Savoretti"

3. Music. When I owned an Amiga 4000 I made quite a lot of music. Mainly House, Trance, Progressive and Techno. I should pimp my collection of about 20k samples, but just don't find the time. As a software I was a buyer of DigiBooster Pro, nowadays I use MilkyTracker.

4. Line Dance. It is the best and greatest sport for programmers, trust me! 😁 Current favorite dances are "Sweet Hurt", "Dig Your Heels" and "Strong Bounds".

5. "Mass Effect Trilogy" and "Dragon Age Origins". I know more about those four titles than Wikia. 😉

Learn on a Commodore Amiga 500. All from books and shareware discs - no Interweb back then.

Was digging through an old HDD's OEM Windows recovery partitions and found FON-format fonts that are accurate to several old systems. Several Commodore and Amiga ones (some for 80-char mode too!) and lots of DOS ones. They have names and everything, but I can't use them after installing them... (there were a few blank ones in there too, which is odd...)

I mostly come back to programming for the kicks of when something actually works :) But the reason I started was a life changing moment of black and green Space Invaders some 30+ years ago. After that it was all about computers and/or gaming.

My mom thought she was being smart saying I could buy something for my own money. Saved like crazy and sold all my toys. That got me 8bit Sega Master System.

I continued with C64, Amiga 500, a few Pentiums and a bunch of PCs before iMacs and Macbooks took over.

There are so many better developers so just as with music I just create stuff for fun, challenge and personal expression. But at work there are also opportunities to improve the world a little bit by dev work and I'm always grateful for the chance.

Which model Amiga should I save up for?

AMOS on the Amiga and some version of Borland(Turbo?) Pascal

Recent VM/Emulation Adventures:

The goal was to get TCP/IP and SSH running on whatever weird VM/emulated machine, and connect to the chatroom at chat.tcp.direct successfully.

Longhorn, somewhere late pre-reset: Crashes right after installer begins "Starting Windows", 0x7b from sum-match ISO. Fail.

TempleOS (well, Shrine, but y'know): Dear god. No. No, I am not writing SSH in HolyC myself *fuck that,* fail.

Slackware: oh ffs i gotta use fdisk to partition this damn thing? and it's not even the good fdisk? Oh, wait... it hangs. Fail.

WinME: shockingly, was *fairly* stable... until it hung up WASAPI and the hypervisor two frames into desktop rendering. Fail.

Mac OS 7: First-boot after install, immediate unknown trap. Just works, eh? Fail.

Amiga: After about 85 resets and 7 hours of constant fighting with WinUAE, I finally got TCP/IP working. (Required 10MB of total RAM and an FPU to connect.) Success!

Win98FE: just... PuTTY and done. Easy. (This was the warmup.) Success...

Other people's achievements so far:

- Minecraft using the new QEMU interface mod thing.
- Hacked smart fridge.
- iPhone, from custom initramfs.

Started programming in BASIC when I was 11 (back in 1979) on a Tandy TRS-80, then onto Sinclair's machines (ZX81, Spectrum), then BBC Micro, Commodore Amiga, PCs, onto Macs and here we are! 😂

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

I got yet another interesting question today:
"Why do people make demos with such old machines? No one's using an Amiga or C64 anymore."

I can't really answer this one.

My first experience with a computer was inhereting my older brothers Amiga 500. The rest is history!