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I belive my Amiga booted in 8 seconds before I added all the patches, tools and accessories you wanted .. If you aborted the shell before loading Workbench you would probably shave off two-three seconds more ...

Had some miniemacs with the OS, and it seems it can use fat32:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/fat32.html

You can get USB aswell:
http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hardware.htm

I realise it's not a viable alternative today, but it's kind of sad how bad things develop considering how much faster todays machines is.

Reminds me of a youtube video with a Mac Classic running Claris Works (or something similar) and a more modern PC running Office Word or whatever, boot systems booting up, running the word processor and then writing something (and eventually saving and turning the machine of as well.)
Of course the new software is much more advanced, but the old mac did it faster .. And sometimes people don't need much more than that application offered.

There certainly was a 68060 based Amiga - the A4000T, which was available in 68040 and 68060 versions ( http://www.amigau.com/aig/a4000t.html ).

OK, lets try to set this straight.

Commodore never released a 68060 based machine. The highest was the 68040 based A4000, which I believe hit 25MHz stock. They may have had things in R&D, but they never saw the light of day.

If you wanted a faster machine, 3rd parties created boards with 33, 40 and 50MHz 68040 CPUs.

In one of the later iterations of Amiga's technology ownership (Escom, Gateway, etc) there was possibly a 68060 based machine (the A4000T refererenced). However, not many - if any - of these machine ever made it to normal consumers.

There were a few companies that created 68060 accelerators for A2000, A3000 and A4000 machines. These typically ran at 50 or 66MHz. Everything worked, however, there was at least one library patch for the OS necessary and the 060 processor caused a few problems with older software. Some of these accelerators also supported a PowerPC chip as well (601/603 variety, probably), as Amiga folks were following Apple's lead here.

I never saw a 68060 based Amiga, but they existed. Unfortunately they also commanded a high price (I believe several hundred dollars) because, I would assume, the rarity of the chip. I am fairly confident that the 68060 was never produced in any significant quantity. There was never a 68050 (at least for the public).

DCE "might" have some out with a 68060 based Amiga in the form of a a6000 but I have never met one.

There certainly was a 68060 based Amiga - the A4000T, which was available in 68040 and 68060 versions ( http://www.amigau.com/aig/a4000t.html ).

Unless there simply were never any 68060 acceleracers for the Mac

Well, were there? I never heard of any, but I may be wrong. It seems quite plausible that there weren't any, as Apple had switched to PowerPC by then.

the inevitable Amiga post :) - NASA/JPL used Amigas for several telemetry needs for a while, anyway....

http://www.polyphoto.com/upchug/HalInterview-eng.h tml

amigaboy
http://www.amigau.com/

Coding: Hisoft Devpac Assembler, Aztec C, SAS/C, Storm C, Hisoft C, Hisoft pascal, AMOS and Microsoft Amiga Basic(!).

Creating art/gfx: Digital Creation's Brilliance, Deluxe paint, Real 3D, Imagine 3D and Lightwave.

Creating Music: Soundtracker, Noisetracker, Startrekker, Protracker, MED, OctaMED, Bars and Pipes, Super Jam, etc.

Desktop Publishing: Pagestream, Professional page.

Text editing / Word processing: Cygnus ED, Wordsworth, Final writer and Pro Write.

At that time most of the applications mentioned (with the the OS/HW combo) were much superior to anything you could find on "professional" PCs and Macs at the time, in some ways some of them still are. But sadly, most of the applications mentioned are now dead or only available for Windows/Linux/Mac.

Funny thing is, as far I can remeber it was not superior or cheap PC hardware that killed Amiga. It was not even the mistreatment it was subjected to by Commodore. It was iD software's "Doom" that put the final nail in the coffin. As no acceptable Doom clone appered for the Amiga in reasonable time, every kid around begged their parents to buy PCs instead of Amigas, which in turn led to the decline of the mass market for Amiga hardware and following that, the loss of most software houses.

Amiga University - Arexx

ST!

Amiga!

ST!

etc.

Seriously though, the Amiga was _much_ better for music than the ST - musicians often fell for the false economy of the ST with it's built in (crappy) midi port, but a midi card for the amiga always provided better much midi anyway, and Amiga Tracker packages, particularly OctaMED SoundStudio (now available for Windows*), really completely outclassed ST tracker packages. And Amiga Bars'n'Pipes is still unmatched.

What happened to Bars'n'Pipes? Microsoft bought it, and promptly stopped all development! However, they weren't totally evil: You can still get a (binary-only, no source) copy today from the previous link.

Bars'n'Pipes had a fascinating and extremely powerful UI, where one composed by plumbing components together. Some newer audio packages attempt a similar metaphor, but bar'n'pipes did it better (and in 198x too!). Please, if you're a GUI sound application author, take the time to get Bars'n'pipes up and running on an Amiga Emulator.

* And I know they have an unstable Linux build of OctaMED they're not releasing yet... (mainly because the OSS-lite sound system that's the default in Linux 2.4.x totally sucks, and they don't think the market's big enough if they require ALSA)

Yes, and there was the Amiga CDTV too. But they were practically stripped down versions of the full computer. The CDTV was an Amiga500 with a CD-rom, without the keyboard and mouse (optional). The CD32 was an Amiga1200 with CDROM + special video chip, without a keybord.

I bet you could make a console out of an IBM compatible PC too (Sounds like the xBox, doesn't it?), but that wouldn't make your standard PC less PC, right?

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone