Back in the 1990s I was very pro Amiga, my first internet connection in late 1995 was powered by a (t)rusty workhorse of an A1200 with a 50MHz 68030, 8Mb of expansion RAM and a couple of hard disks (one was SCSI and, along with a dual speed CDROM, was connected to the PCMCIA slot via a Squirrel interface) and I did pretty much everything with it from desktop publishing to building the first Cosine website.

That old Amiga came down from the loft a few weeks back along with some other bits and pieces and, since I’ve been meaning to drag the data off its hard disks, I’ve spent the last couple of days working on it. The poor beast really wasn’t in good health… the keyboard had stopped working down it’s left side and the internal Connor hard drive had shuffled off this mortal coil entirely. Cleaning the keyboard contacts helped a little but didn’t restore the left Amiga key, so instead I transplanted the Blizzard 68030 board into the already CF-ified A1200.

So now I’ve got one reasonably good if somewhat yellowed A1200 ’030 (it even has screws in the case, that’s rare for me) and the workhorse, now with just a 4Mb RAM board and a shiny new CF card installed that, after a little messing about getting the Squirrel working, has a copy of the old external SCSI drive – that machine currently looks like this…

…since I’ve got it shipping the backed up data over to a FAT16 CF for transfer to a laptop. Once that’s done I’ll make a couple of further backups for good measure because I’m paranoid, and can “file” the original drives. Of course there’s still loads of work files to sift through.