This weekend I received the single most generous donation of personal, physical Amiga related "stuff" I could ever imagine. Computers, expansion cards, box after box of productivity software, games, video production software, music composition software, drives, memory, chips, original OS disks... Literally anything and almost everything one could imagine.
And everything was boxed and in original packaging with manuals, meticulously organized and labelled. At least half of his enormous collection appears to have been opened once, then carefully re-packed and stored. I could be wrong, but it seems like it because so much of it looks brand new. And most of the expansion cards are still in the original boxes.
The man who bestowed this gift, who goes by the name of Skip, was what I'd call an Amiga power-user hobbyist. He did not use Amiga computers professionally, but he was one of the most passionate Amiga users I've ever met. He had games, sure - some big name classics. And he told me stories about how he and his son played the Monkey Island games together and used to recite the jokes at the breakfast table. But he went so much farther than games. He absolutely wanted to be a creator. And the Amiga was the only platform that held that promise.
Part of Skip's collection includes virtually the entire printing of Amiga World magazine - my personal favorite American magazine that covered the Amiga. He read each one, then carefully stored it. He also subscribed to the more professional Amiga mags, the ones aimed at video broadcast professionals. Some of the pages show places where he underlined tips and tricks as he self-taught himself how to do all the things the powerful Amiga could do.
Many people ask why. Why did he give this treasure trove all away? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure except that it was "easy". Easy in the sense that it was all gone in a day, not weeks or months or years on Ebay or Craigslist. But his own reasons were that he was now 73, suffering from tendonitis and had lost sight in an eye. He needed to down-size and reduce due to the realities of advancing age. And, he ultimately wanted it to go to someone, or somewhere, it would be appreciated.
I have to say - just opening the 17 boxes after I got it all home, I couldn't believe what I was looking at. The breadth and depth of this Amiga lover's passion was deeper than anything I've ever seen in person in one place. It spans over a decade of passion, commitment and financial investment. And, from what I can tell, he actively used the machines for at least fifteen years, if not more. Due to some moves across country, everything was packed up in 2004 and had remained in dry storage.
After everything was put into my van, Skip wanted to show me two of the animations he created on the Amiga. He used Deluxe Paint and a few other tools (including computerized voice dialog that was synced to the animations). He had managed to convert them to MP4s so we could watch them on his Windows machine. After watching the first clip, which was rather amusing, we started to watch the second as my son approached the monitor. The three of us watched the second short animation together. Each clip was about a minute long with a character, short story and joke, and featured synthesized voice. I could see the pride Skip had in these short movies. Movies this man created from his home when literally no other consumer-level computer at the time could do so. He knew the dialog by heart still, and I could see his lips moving slightly as he mouthed the words as we heard the character recite his lines.
I submit below a series of photographs of his collection, which I am beyond lucky to now call my own.
Note: I didn't put this post in the Conquests section as this doesn't seem to qualify as an Amiga find. It feels more like a gift that fell from the heavens.