Hi Mac-Falcon. Great to see another ST fan joining to add his views. As I've said before, we might be an Amiga orientated site, but we love all retro hardware and software in its own special way.

Some interesting points raised and thoughts spared.

I love the old one about the ST's main CPU being just that little bit faster than the Amiga's. That was always used as an argument between fans of each machine. And as I already mentioned previously in the thread, the ST had to process everything using that single 8Mhz CPU. The Amiga on the other hand could farm many tasks out to its custom chipset to process, leaving it to process main program data. It didn't need to handle graphics, sound etc... the custom chips did it all instead. And the hardware architecture of the Amiga is what did make it better than the quickly cobbled together, off the shelf ST.

Then as I also live in Europe (Germany) as Harrison, I have to say that it´s not true that noone used the laser printers...
I could imagine that in Germany that was true, because Germans have in the past embraced the best specification hardware. However in the UK we hardly ever saw a laser printer in the 80's. Too expensive for most home users to afford.

I dream that one day our scenes will unite and maybe we will get a very powerful new computer system, but everything else is just a waste of time and money
I think in the last couple of years the different retro platform scenes have become much less hostile towards each other. In the past you would never have seen C64 and Amiga demo sceners sharing events with PC sceners, but now this is commonplace, and they all enjoy seeing what each can achieve on their hardware of choice.

I do however sadly think the days have gone when we will see a new powerful computer system developed and produced for us to enjoy. The PC is too well entrenched now and if we are honest, the PC is quite a modular platform, allowing us to select each component we want it to have, and have a range of OSs in addition to Windows to choose from to run on it if we wish. The Apple Mac is still hanging on, and doing OK in the niche market area they have. However I have the sense the Apple are moving forever away from the home computer market, and more dedicated to home entertainment. I think if they continues it might reach a point where they have to decide if the Mac as a platform is worth continuing, or if their online entertainment and iPod range is more important. As most know, I'm not a fan of Apple or the Mac, but it would be a sad day if the platform did end as competition is healthy. We need it for hardware, software and OS development to continue and evolve. If only a single platform and OS existed it would stagnate as there would be nothing for developers to compete against to try and keep ahead of the opposition.