True believers: The biggest cults in tech

InfoWorld: Interesting stuff! Nice to see some inspired thought behind the selections, and not the expected, paint-by-numbers "Cult of Apple, High Priest Steve Jobs, LOL" twaddle one sees from lazier sources. I wouldn't at all object to a mention of the Cult of Microsoft. Members tossing away billions of dollars for products that don't work, and then doing it again, and again, and again, because "that's just how it's done"... What's more cultish than that?

You obviously weren't an Amiga owner during the late 80s (or a Mac/ST owner relentlessly and mercilessly assaulted daily by them). Even back then, we all knew the Amiga wasn't just a computer... it was a religion and way of life. I still look fondly back on the happy days when I could get up every morning and know beyond any shadow of doubt that my computer was superior to everyone else's... well, besides the guy down the hall who bought his ${newer.faster.amiga} last week. When the Amiga's long, slow march into the sunset began, and I finally bought a PC... I was lost. Compared to what ex-Amiga owners went through, ex-Scientologists have it easy... at least THEIR friends still talk to them (if only to try and bring them back into the fold). When I sold my Amiga and bought my first PC, I instantly became an untouchable heretic... partly, because everyone else knew the same fate was ultimately waiting for them, and that someday THEY'D have to suffer the indignity of crawling into the "Pee Cee" camp, too. Maybe even write (ick) realmode assembly (shudders). Few people realize that the birth of the PC game industry (and hardware arms race that continues today, with the highest-end hardware targeted to gamers instead of servers & CAD users) occured about a year after the Amiga's de-facto death. It's not a coincidence. Pre-'94, the PC universe was full of companies that couldn't bear the thought of selling games that couldn't run on a 4.77MHz (ok, maybe 8 or 10MHz) 8088 with 256k and a CGA card. Or, if it was a REALLY high-end game, a 286. Now, add to the mix a few hundred former Amiga programmers used to the idea that if a game sold 50,000 copies, it was direct proof that God existed, owned a copy of their game, and enjoyed it immensely. They realized that even if you wrote off every PC in existence with less than a 486-DX2/66, a local bus videocard with at least a meg of VRAM, 4 megs of system ram, and a Gravis Ultrasound (or maybe a SBpro), you'd STILL have 10 times as many potential customers as the Amiga had on its best day in history. And from the darkness came Comanche: Maximum Overkill, bringing voxelspace out of Amiga demos and into a real videogame. Followed shortly thereafter by Doom, of course. Even today, I can still sniff out the former Amiga owners. Almost none have Macs (deep down we know it's really a Unix box now, but old prejudices die hard... you say "Mac", we think "Etch-a-sketch" for clueless people who merely USED computers, as opposed to LIVED with them). Interestingly, few are Linux users, either. At least, not as a culture and steady diet. Former Amiga owners generally love the idea of Linux and grow fonder of it by the day, but Windows95 (and real support for our high end hardware, for the first time in our lives) really WAS a major life turning point. See, if you owned an Amiga 2500, 3000, or basically anything besides an A500 with 512k and a floppy, only one thing was certain: it would never, ever work properly with most of the programs you tried to use... especially not European games. ..//
\X/ Only Amiga made it possible ;-)