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ScuzzBlog: Diaries December 2023

Entry 04th December 2023: Post 1: Amiga Disk Revolution - The Jungle Issue 5.


Amiga Disk Revolution - The Jungle Issue 5.


I found myself having to explain to someone new to the Amiga the
other day how the Amiga created a massive community that pretty
much revolutionised the way kids communicated with each other.
Paper was dead and the users were all sharing their disks with
each other.

Disk magazines were pretty common in the day and by way of example
today I grabbed a copy of The Jungle Issue 5 for December 1993,
some thirty years ago. Amongst the many articles are actual charts
of the main players in the production of Amiga content, whether
it be music , coders or demo creators. From the editorial I am
sure you get a sense of the activity propagating from the disk
circulation. Truly amazing really.

Anyhoo here is what I wrote.


The main thrust of publications produced on the Amiga was via disk
based media. Simply go do a search on Aminet for magazine and you
will see the endless pages of magazines created by the Amiga. The
distribution of fan based publications was via the PD houses and
Parties. The Amiga was doing its best to make paper redundant. Why
use paper when we had digital tools at our disposal. I certainly
junked the paper format in favour of disks the moment I started
using my Amiga.

My disk boxes are filled with with ADEM [ demo ] ASLI [ slide shows ]
AMAG [ magazines ] and AGAM [ games ]. The format was pretty
unilaterally adopted and disks were swapped out at parties and
between fellow Amiga users. You can grab a CD of 17-Bit and browse
thro the various magazines and publications.

And yes scanning and mostly image grabbing was possible. More
importantly images were animated and modified as part of publications.
That was the joy of the Amiga. A bouncing ball not a static one.
The  disk in truth became the means by which fans of the Amiga
communicated with each other. With the Amiga came PD and there were
literally thousands upon thousands of Amiga disks in circulation.

Interestingly by the mid nineties the magazines themselves had
started to move over to internet based groups and any number of
the Amiga User Groups were building sites around their specific
group activities. At the demise of the Amiga Format it became AFB
on Yahoo along with CUAmiga etc. The community simply morphed into
yet something else and magazines and fan based productions emerged
as web based formats. But in truth the driving force for Amiga
creative work has for the most part been its digital media whether
disk or internet based. I can't think many were going to the extreme
of producing paper versions when distribution was way more fluid
using the disks. And all their mates had Amigas.


Amiga Disk Revolution - The Jungle Issue 5.

This is the title page of RAW Issue 6. [ Same format ]

RAW 6 - [ mostly Enigma MCMXC AD ]


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Last updated 4th December 2023

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scuzzscink 2023