Last night I had dinner with some Amiga friends. In case you don't know, the Amiga was an alternative computer platform beside IBM PC and Mac. In its glory days, there were shows and expos about the Amiga, several magazines with disks and CDs, user groups in most major cities, etc. I helped run an Amiga users group in NYC through various offices. Eventually, the platform disappeared from the general public and I myself gave up on the group. What was the use of meeting when there was nothing to talk about? When many of us already abandoned the platform?
Pretty much the only activity left of the group is the annual dinner. Around the holiday season, we would get together over dinner to wax nostalgia and discuss our current computing needs, sprinkled with other news of the week. I've been attending the dinner for the two years and this year we had the biggest turnout, a whopping nine people. Most attendees were old hands but we had a new friend to the group. He grew up computing on the Amiga and has been buying Amiga stuff off eBay. By chance, he came across the group on the Web and asked for help with getting a certain piece of system software. Someone in the group graciously provided him just what he needed. After the dinner, at home, our new friend did what he needed to do. A happy story for the holiday indeed, even though we really had the dinner in 2009 and not in the holiday season of 2008.
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