19. Battle of the nerds

You are listening to the Ericade Radio Network. Good evening and welcome to another hour of Amiga Retro Music. Amiga Flashback is here and it's better than all other podcasts. Because I say so. Yeah, you probably remember all the grandstanding about superior computers, demo groups, music and all that jazz. Rivalry by any other name. This is also the theme of today's show.when we talk about them and us. Let me, DJ Demon, take you to the battlefield of nerds. Once again, into the fray.

Swedish enlightened media doctor Anders Hansson once got a radio show here in Sweden. He spoke about mental and physical health and mentioned a scientific experiment. A number of people were shown a see-through glass jar filled with marbles and asked to guess how many they were in there. The answer was not something that the scientists really cared about. The participants were only told if they guessed too low or too high.Almost directly, the people formed two groups. The two high group and the two low group. Those had a friendly, but present feeling of being superior to the other groups. This is a human condition, we always do this. You know, Team Atari vs Team Amiga, Team Fairlight vs Team Triad, Team BBS with menus vs Team Command Driven BBS. We remember those, don't we?

The demo scene here in Sweden and elsewhere has always been full of competition. As I previously have spoken about on this podcast, it was sometimes a very hostile environment for everyone. And few classic demo groups from Sweden are more well known than Triad and Fairlight. Fairlight was founded in 1987 by Strider and Black Shadow.The former had right-wing conservative views and that became synonymous with the group itself and was seen in earlier demos. A common slogan was kill a commie for mummy and when might is right. Far from all members were right-wing, so this may have become more of a style than actually trying to sell a political view. Fairlight made demos but are probably more famous as a cracker group.that removed copyright protections and distributed software and games freely. You see, this was not illegal in Sweden for the first years, but it was later criminalized. Fairlight is still active today and Strider has moved to the United States. Triad was the chief competition and was founded in 1986. They started a war of some sort with Fairlight by releasing demos with a lot of communist symbols and messengers.In a way, they became the Nemesis. They were serious about being rivals, but did probably not mean anything with the symbols other than, yeah you know, taking off Fairlight. And yes, they're also still active. But from what I can see, they are most likely on more friendly terms with Fairlight today. As they say, mods turns into rockers in the end.

Atari vs Amiga We've spoken about this a number of times I know But it's the original computer war for me That's strictly said not true As computer wars are as old as the commercialization of computing itself Both those computers were very successful home computers in their own right And they were based on the same Motorola CPUThe Atari had a number of consoles and computers, but the Atari ST-series went toe to toe with the Amiga 500. The Atari has inferior graphics, but a slightly faster CPU due to overclocking by 1 MHz. And it also had a very interesting thing, a set of MIDI connectors. The Amiga had better graphics, a very powerful architecture with co-processors for many tasks.It had multitasking and of course a great sounding 8-bit sampler. The Amiga was snapped up by graphics artists and animators while the musicians chose the Atari. The nerds fought each other over which was the better computer until the home computer era was over and they both had to move to the next great thing. Whatever that might have been.For me it was the PC that I have stuck with since then.

Windows vs almost anything else. Microsoft early on caught the anger and hatred of the nerds. The company was successful and aggressive. Many stories, true or otherwise, circulated about their exploits. They were rumored to have strong-armed other companies into doing their bidding or outright destroying them. Windows was a success as well.but initially quite a primitive hack of an operating system, even by the standards of the day. The first versions could not freely move Windows around the desktop due to a patent that Apple owned. MS-DOS that Windows ran on was a real mode OS without memory protection or built-in capabilities to address more memory than the real mode allowed it to.About later versions of Windows, there was a saying that Windows is a 32-bit extension and a graphical shell to a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor which was written by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. But in 1995, Windows 95 pretty much killed off a lot of the competitioneven though it had a shaky start and many problems and bugs. In my opinion, the Amiga workbench was superior to the Windows 3.1 by leaps and bounds, but Windows 95 was a more problematic challenger and by then the Amiga was fading into obscurity and the home computers were all but dead. This fight evolved, if I may say so.into the Windows vs Linux, the Windows vs Mac and the Windows vs whatever. When Windows 95 was launched, Microsoft licensed Rolling Stones song Start Me Up. It played in commercials, cleverly omitting the part of the song that went, it makes a grown man cry.

Let me guess that is not a popularity contest winner for this guy. Windows with a number of exclamation marks. And Windows was kinda, you know, not the geek's choice and I'm fighting with my Windows 10 workstation here so I know this feeling all too well.

Galway is God. that's Martin Galway actually. The song done by Jogair Liljedal, I can tell you. The idea is that this song obviously was done by Mr. Galway on a C64. So this is an Amiga remix, so to speak. At least that's what it says in the comments.

first console. I know mine. It was actually a Commodore 64, this classic thing. Or maybe it was the Amiga that I later got, that was a real console so to speak. Or maybe it was the Texas Instrument, my father's Texas Instrument. Anyway, Cream of the Earth coming up.So what drives nerd rage? I don't know actually. That is quite a little riddle. I consider myself both a geek and a nerd and I'm proud of it so to speak. But I do think we have kinda maybe a little bit of self-esteem issues or something. I don't know about everyone but you know, can I show those?owners of Atari's that hey, we are better users because we have better computers and in the end we did all this, both Atari users and Amiga users against the PC users because you know, they were winning.

This is the Arikade Radio Network, an Amiga flashback. Beak gives us substitutionology. Yeah, I could say it. Fantastic. We're going on with beat, with mind of a dreamer. And geeks and nerds, aren't we kinda dreamers? And aren't we kinda rivals? Because we feel our dreams are the ones that should become true.

So, Amiga Flashback is done for this week. This is DJ Demon bidding you adieu. It's the best French I can do. And hope that you will be tuning in next Saturday. Or, yeah, listen at the podcast. The station is available at radio.arcade.net.

Scotch man in a skirt by Cube. Two things. First of all, it's called a kilt and second of all, it's called a scott.