TI-99, Amigas and PowerMacs, oh my!

Cross-platform? Heh. You can have my Macintosh when you pry it from my cold dead hands.On the other hand, I’m flexible. These days, there is no other choice.

My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. 3.3 MHz, 48K RAM, 16 colors max. I used a cassette recorder to save my little TI-BASIC programs. I learned to translate bits to hex because that was the only way to do pixel level graphics. Wow.

Next stop: Amiga 1000. 7.2 MHz. 512k RAM. 4096 color palette. 10 years ahead of its time. 32-bit multitasking and multithreading, a microkernel, multimedia, long file names. Windows 95? This was in 1985. Wow again.

I loved that machine. My first real graphics were made on that thing. Above you can still get at some of those images. At the time I felt like I was cutting edge, now I just chuckle at lessons learned.

I had a hell of a time figuring out if I’d ever be able to touch those digital files ever again. I eventually found a nice person in Canada, via usenet who sent me a utility in the mail to go from Amiga to DOS. Then I was able to use DOS disks on my Mac. Once on the Macintosh, PhotoShop 3 was able to open the Amiga IFF files. And I bet you wondered if anyone ever used that! Well, I’m the one guy.

The future is cross-platform.

Coda:

This was originally written (in Summer of 1997) in hopes of convincing prospective employers that all my Mac experience wouldn’t hamper my ability work on any old computer they happened to have. And luckily, it seemed to work. — Joe Crawford