What year do you think the last working A500 will fail?

[Starglider 2]

I was wondering whether the original Amiga will always be around. Whether there will even always be replacement parts available or to be fabricated.

Apart from some global apocalypse, do you think there will come a year when the last working A500 dies and cannot be revived by any means? When perhaps silicon chips just aren't even manufactured any more, nor can they be. If so, name the year below.

My guess...

The year 2478.

Wednesday.

[Predseda]

I am more pesimistic, so my guess is Tuesday

[dreamkatcha]

I imagine they'll outlive the last person who still remembers them and gives a damn. I'm not sure if that makes the inevitable decline more or less depressing.

[s2325]

I'm waiting for SF movie where someone in distant future have working Amiga.

[Mrs Beanbag]

they'll dig one up in a thousand years, and it will still work, and they'll have a copy of Rocket Ranger, but no code wheel

[eXeler0]

When they are getting reeeeally rare, someone will package his mint condition A500 into a vacuum tube and keep it in a nuclear shelter for the next 1000 years.
Or.. it won't be too long in the future where anything used in an A500 can be 3D printed, (mixing materials will be easy in 10 years time even) but then again, at what point is it still an original A500. A lot of the ones around have new caps or other stuff replace with newer parts.

[dlfrsilver]

hopefully they have new caps ! You don't want them to die thanks to these old shits ?

[LuMan]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

When they are getting reeeeally rare, someone will package his mint condition A500 into a vacuum tube and keep it in a nuclear shelter for the next 1000 years.

I suppose the good thing here will be that when they finally put it on Ebay with 'RARE, R@RE, ULTRA-RARE, L@@K AT HOW RARE THIS IS.." they will actually be telling the truth (for once).

My ZX80s are all still working well. When they die we should take it as a 15-year warning of the impending doom of the last A500!!

[paul1981]

Replicating the case is easy, and the emulation is getting better every year. If the last A500 does pop its clogs then it's at least comforting to know that a fake emulation replica can be built that looks exactly the same.

As for last real A500...hmm... I'll guess thousands of years. There's stuff in the ground they keep digging up which are thousands of years old, so something that is not going to be weathered should last indefinitely.

Okay, capacitors would be dry - they would need replacing with a future equivalent, but they would be easy to fabricate. So I don't think you need worry about them dying. :-)

[Arnie]

It will probably be the same year that I buy one

[s2325]

Maybe it will be something like this https://www.google.pl/search?q=antik...EPD7EQ_AUIBigB

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by s2325

Maybe it will be something like this https://www.google.pl/search?q=antik...EPD7EQ_AUIBigB

That's fascinating! According to http://TheChrononaut.com it or something similar might have been built by time tourists from earth's future, for when they were stranded in time, to calculate how to return home. Why they didn't just build an A500 beggars belief. Surely those old parts were first available from around 200BC.

[Knoeki]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

According to http://TheChrononaut.com it or something similar might have been built by time tourists from earth's future, for when they were stranded in time, to calculate how to return home.

[Codetsu]

in future we get disaster and all intel CPUs died
what is left is Motorola systems and they start make Amiga again...

[r.cade]

Not that long. Everything now is on borrowed time...

My guess would be 2025 at the latest.

Almost all Amiga's I've seen dead were not chip, but board death due to batteries and caps.

However, for C64- it's always chip death. PLA, VIC, ROM, RAM... It all just dies one day. The VIC-II in my C64 just died again (go through about one per year, but it gets daily use and it's on a good monitored power supply).

[dreamkatcha]

I wonder if by that time we'll have 1:1 replicas that look and operate exactly the same as the original without emulation, and if that happens, will it suffice?

[Starglider 2]

On BBC Click this weekend were biodegradable consumer electronics. So actually, Amigas and others from this era might be the only ones that do survive. We're lucky in a way...

[Gordon]

I hope my amigas outlive me because I can't imagine life without it

[dreamkatcha]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

On BBC Click this weekend were biodegradable consumer electronics. So actually, Amigas and others from this era might be the only ones that do survive. We're lucky in a way...

That's a depressing thought when people have such doting affection for the electronics they grew up with. It makes sense for plastic bags and other meaningless consumables, but this is pure sacrilege to any historian.

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

That's a depressing thought when people have such doting affection for the electronics they grew up with. It makes sense for plastic bags and other meaningless consumables, but this is pure sacrilege to any historian.

Agreed, it's sad, but also makes me happy because we're a rare breed. Even with modern PCs or Macs, I don't think people harbor that same nostalgia that we get to enjoy time and again. This is just the latest evolution of how modern tech is less special than those first few years of home computing were. We're lucky to have experienced it first hand.