A couple or three decades ago, I was a lot geekier than I am now.

I favoured a non IBM PC compatible type of computer known as the Commodore Amiga. At the time it, and the community surrounding it was a huge part of my life. I used to host meets at my house where 20 or 30 folk would show up and many would bring their machines.

Most evenings were spent chatting with similarly geeky folk in the #disa IRC channel.

I was always wanting the latest, greatest bit of hardware and most of my disposable income was spent on it.

Before moving down to Bristol I spent almost a year staying in B&B in Bristol during the week and going home at weekends. Then I partially moved down into a rented place, and eventually I fully moved.

This meant I lost touch with a lot of my obsessions, with a lot of friends, I just wasn’t around and all my geek energy went into work. So the Amiga pile never got looked after. Never got set up properly. It just sat there, moved from room to room, unused.

Now… well, I pulled the various boxes together, crossed fingers and fired up a random machine. It kinda booted but complained about the lack of CD drive. Quick to solve – once I’d remembered that devs:dosdrivers was a thing. A3000 with Cyberstorm 2 060, CV3D, A2065 and a random Z2 RAM card. It’s alive, it’s on the network, it boots into OS3.9, looks like it was my tester machine.

I’m going to see what still works.

I’m going to get a backup of as much as I can retreive.

Then I’m going to sell it all – get it into the hands of people who will get the joy out of it that I lost. There is still a vibrant community around the Amiga, and judging by the prices on Amibay it’s full of folk just like me having a good bit of nostalgia buying the things they wanted but could never afford way back when.

But right now… There is so much stuff and I really don’t know where to start!