Comment by agar

I think there's truth to what you say.

The Amiga pushed the boundary in so many directions at once that the horizon extended far beyond what I was used to with the DOS/EGA/TSR/ISA/x86/PC Speaker environment. Or, the monochrome VT100/PDP-11/multitasking/multiuser systems I used in college.

At the same time, it was clear the horizon was limited...but could be pushed back through a combination of cleverness, and discovery, and code. You felt like there were true discoveries to be made, whether it was through looking at source code found on UUCP, by finally understanding the purpose of some struct found in the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual, or just experimenting with blitter or copper code.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the depth of knowledge available, computing today feels stale; anything "new" is only new to you. A million people would look at your "innovation" with disdain as its such a well-trodden path.

In a way I welcome AI-based coding, because if there's no joy (for me) in the (coding/discovery) journey, perhaps I can at least feel there's magic in getting to a new destination more quickly than ever.