Time flies
Kids can make you feel old, both in how fast they grow up and in those puzzled looks they give you after making a dated reference to your childhood or teen years, one that isn't understood by the current generation. If you want to test this, ask your teenager what his or her favorite Richard Pryor is.
Technology will do the same thing, though without making any confused glances in your direction. Need an example? Consider that the Amiga 1000 just turned 30 years old! That's right, if you remember playing games or doing graphics work on an Amiga 1000, then you're pulling up memories from a system that was released three decades ago.
The Amiga 1000 was a fairly badass machine for its day. It was the introductory "Amiga" model from Commodore and for those who could appreciate the hardware inside, the Amiga 1000 a drool worthy PC.
Granted, a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.15909 MHz (NTSC) or 7.09379MHz (PAL) doesn't sound impressive today, but this was this long before the days of GHz processors and multiple cores.
The Amiga 1000 also featured 256K of memory, which could be doubled by way of a memory expansion slot hidden in the front of the system, and robust graphics and sound capabilities (for the time period).
By all means, the Amiga 1000 was a high end machine, and it was priced as such -- according to Technologizer, it sold for $1,295, which was before adding a $500 color monitor.
Hype was high for the Amiga 1000, which was unveiled at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York's Lincoln Center with celebrities in attendance. It made the cover of InfoWorld, along with Jay Miner, the "father of the Amiga" and one of the system's designers. In fact, his signature is engraved inside Amiga 1000 systems, along with the paw print of his dog Mitchy and signatures of other engineers.
Due to a variety of factors -- bad marketing, high price, compatibility issues -- the Amiga 1000 wasn't as popular as it should have been and goes down as arguably one of the most under-appreciated systems in history.
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