this was a fun read https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/personal-computing-on-an-amiga-in-2021

Look at that demo! Two floppy disks. 1 MEGAbyte of RAM. And look at Amiga OS, working under equally limited conditions and it doesn’t look that different from the OSes we use today. This makes me hopeful that somewhere in between the space of retro-computing, where excellent minds use the quirks and specialties of old but well-understood platforms to make incredible things possible and contemporary computing, where so much more computational power is available to so many more people in so many more formats, there is a sweet spot where we can remove the complexity of accumulated cruft in modern hard- and software and we can remove the complexity of workarounds that were necessary on old systems to make things work that seemed architecturally impossible, to build something that is fully understandable by a single mind, works well, and does most of the stuff today’s computers do.

The Amiga was ahead of its time, to be sure. I work on the Red language, a descendent of REBOL, which was designed by Carl Sassenrath who architected the Amiga OS. Datatypes are central to the language, so he must have put a lot of stock in that idea.