So a few people ask why I use the domain, email and username of onlineamiga on the internet. Especially with living in Spain where Amiga means friend in the female tense, and yet I’m a guy. People have even corrected me “You do know that Amiga is a girl way?” So its obvious that people assume onlineamiga means online friend.
It doesn’t!
It all started with the Amiga computer. (Go google it if you’ve never heard of it). The Amiga was a home computer around in the 80’s and 90’s. It pretty much died a death to the PC in the mid 90’s sadly with Commodore going out of business. However a lot of us were still very attatched to our systems. Microsoft Windows operating system was just starting to get off the ground. Whereas AmigaOS was actually way ahead of its time.
To put simply. In 1994. PCs were on Windows 3.1 and Amiga was on Workbench 3.0. If you remember the major differences between 3.1 and 95, then basically amiga was closer to Windows 95 back in Amiga OS 1.3 days than Windows 3.1. I won’t bore you with all the technical details. But as one example, I never had an 8 character file name limitation at any point using an Amiga.
So, by 1997 I had my Amiga hooked up to the internet. Something people didn’t think was possible. “Oh you need a PC to do that” “What? An Amiga on the internet?? No way!” Oh yes way, and at the time, it handled the internet very well. In fact in a lot of ways, a hell of a lot better than PCs could. The PC was actually very vulnerable. There was a time where even pinging a Windows 95 machine with a little bit of code, would disconnect a dial up modem. Also early versions of explorer would blue screen if a website tried to load an image from CON: device. So the Amiga felt bullet proof online (and it was). I had no antivirus, no firewall and never was hacked or had a virus.
So thats where the name came from. My Amiga was online, and as such onlineamiga just seemed to be the one. It stuck ever since. I don’t see the need to change it.