gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/gemlog/Amiga/00-First

For whatever reasons, I didn't get around to attending college to obtain a certification until I was 25. At that point I had been repairing all manner of anything that anyone referred to as a 'Business Machine' since I was 17. Mechanical, electro-mechanical, electronic typewriters(!), calculators, cash registers, POS laser scanning lanes, photocopiers... I did field work and board repairs both. I had to fly and drive a Lot. Often 20-30 flights a month and still put 50-60 thousand km on company and rent-a-cars every year. 20 year olds do not mind living in hotels as it turns out. I began that life as soon as I could figure out a way 'in', complete with the world-shaking educational qualifications of (technically) only 7th grade. Really 8 - just missing French (I got kicked out for talking to a girl on the first day... so did she). Therefore I was always paranoid of being the only tech with no college at Data Terminal Systems. I took a couple of years of Telcom after challenging the entrance. It is 1st semester 1986 and I'm strictly a hardware guy.

As we know from listening to The Server Room on anonradio.org (*1), the Amiga 1000 had just come out in 1985. I had only read about it. By that time, I had followed a path of discovery similar to many of our masto, tilde and sdf friends: a long laundry list of things /like/, but not limited to, ZX81, BBC micro, Vic20, C64/128, TI99, on and on... Of course exactly None of those were even remotely comparable to the Amiga. Its dedicated chipsets for graphics and sound coupled with a pre-emptively multi-tasking O/S just made me positively drool!

And one of my instructors had a brand as new A1000 in his office! Could we touch it? No! :-( None of us juniors anyhow. A couple of the seniors doing the telcom specialty I was there for had some slight access. I would have to wait!

But then, part way through my telcom specialty, I caught an amazing break for a starving student and fell into a bit of money. When I flew back north from Vancouver after getting my first hip replacement (different story), I came back with nearly $5,000 worth of Amiga 2000 all tricked out plus 'stuff'. That was kinda more in 1987 dollars than it is today. For some reason best known to her, my wife was nowhere near as thrilled with my surprise purchases as I was. Strange that.

One of the chips that set the Amiga apart was the Paula: 4× 8-bit PCM channels (2 stereo channels); 28 kHz maximum DMA sampling rate. The allure of being able to create more than one tone simultaneously was just too much for me. Papa needed a $5,000 phone dialer! The very first, absolute first thing I did was glance through the manual to see what I could use to generate some tones. Didn't look too bad. Amiga Basic could do the job just fine! Here is the frequency chart for a touch-tone phone:

In less than two hours I was able to hold a POTS handset up to the A2000's speakers and run my little abasic script. It broke dialtone! All the numbers were accepted! I heard ring-back! My friend answered! Wow!! :-)

Those were the first of many, many thousands of hours that I would spend with the Amiga line of computers over the coming years. A2k, A3k, A4k...CDTV, Video toaster board, sidecar (nearly a waste of money), genlock... Endless fun! :-)

00-First_Contact (in Amiga)

2020-08-19