[obarthel]

I agree that there is nostalgia involved, but it is only part of the picture.

From a software developer's point of view the Amiga is worth resurrecting because the operating system design represents a promise that you can get great power and flexibility out of modest means, by keeping complexity at bay.

It wasn't always so rosy, but you could pack quite a punch by developing products for the Amiga. The system gave you a lot of leverage, which architect Carl Sassenrath rightly referred to as "empowering the user". The development environment (a 'C' compiler, a debugger and a decent text editor would see you through) and the operating system documentation were solid enough. You could comfortably hold the entire design of the system and its APIs in your head. That kind of knowledge is rare these days, given how complex our platforms of choice have become.

I have been an Amiga software developer for more than three decades now, through the good times and the less good times (it used to be a hobby, became a business, now it's a hobby again). It does give you perspective, and not everything that came around in these last three decades measured up so well: how much of the power of the hardware platform ends up in the hands of the user?

The (for lack of a better word) "thin" Amiga operating system layer allowed you to squeeze a maximum of performance out of the hardware. I recall that during the late 1990'ies Amiga networking software, tested against a HP-UX based logic analyzer's networking performance in the lab, came out on top.