Reminiscing and the computing renaissance

Sifting through boxes of 3.5 inch floppy diskettes - some of questionable provenance in a dusty basement. Gingerly packing up what I consider to be the holy trinity of Commodore Amiga computers - A1000, A2000, A3000 - all in some state of working condition. Of course, back in the day, only Amiga made it all possible - awesome graphic demos, games, word processing, and ray tracing to Amiga Unix - AMIX, which was one of the first ports of SVR4 to the MC68000 series processor (yes I do have AMIX installed also).

The frustration watching the Death Bed Vigil movie in which Dave Haynie of Commodore Amiga fame gives us a tour through the Commodore engineering at headquarters and of course the fire (bankruptcy) sale which happened at Commodore Canada on Pharmacy Avenue in Toronto.

Once upon a time, we all carried the respective flags of our favorite platforms - which were varied. It was this rivalry which I think led to these respective user communities squeezing tremendous performance out of these systems in the race to show which platform was best.

Then it all seemed to change. Suddenly we were all forced to march to the same clock rhythm - and boredom set in. With this course seemingly set in stone, how are we to escape this computing Sturm and Drang?

GAME ON!

Well, for me this hope appeared in 2013 with the announcement of the OpenPOWER Consortium - an open technical community built around the IBM POWER architecture to grow solutions to serve the evolving computing needs of today and the future. Next week the second annual OpenPOWER Summit takes place in San Jose, United States and if the first event was any indication, this should be a very exciting event. So Power Up and strap on your accelerators as we’re in for a very interesting ride!