You won’t believe what someone threw away in Antwerp: a working Amiga 1200

Sometimes you find interesting things in unexpected places, and that is exactly what happened during a normal walk home through Antwerp. I wasn’t really paying attention to much and was mostly just heading back like usual when something beige caught my eye next to one of the large street trash containers where people often leave things they no longer want. Usually it’s the typical stuff you see there, broken printers, old routers, random cables, or outdated electronics that nobody feels like keeping anymore, so at first I assumed it was just another old keyboard someone had thrown away. But the shape looked familiar. When I walked closer and turned it slightly, the label immediately stood out: Amiga 1200. That’s not exactly the kind of thing you expect to find sitting next to garbage bags on a random street in Antwerp. For a moment I just stood there looking at it and wondering how it ended up there, because even if most people today would consider a thirty-year-old computer useless, it still felt like a strange thing to simply throw out like that. It’s an Amiga for god sake!

The machine itself looked surprisingly intact. The plastic had the typical and extreme yellowing you see on old computers and there was some heavy dust on it like it had probably spent years in storage somewhere. Even the floppy drive button still moved normally when I pressed it, which already made it look less like trash and more like something someone had simply decided they didn’t need anymore. I looked around for a moment to see if someone nearby was moving things out of a house or clearing out a garage, but the street was quiet and nobody seemed to care about the old computer sitting next to the container. After a few seconds I decided to pick it up and carry it home, thinking that someone had probably cleaned out an attic or basement and dumped everything they thought was obsolete. Back in my apartment I put the Amiga on the table and took a closer look. Despite its age it still felt solid, the kind of hardware that was built to last much longer than most modern electronics. Curious to see if it still worked, I connected it to a monitor and switched it on, not really expecting much from a machine that had likely been sitting unused for years. For a moment nothing happened.

Then the screen came to life and the Amiga boot screen appeared, like the computer had simply been waiting for someone to turn it on again. That alone was already surprising, but it got even better. After booting, it turned out this Amiga 1200 actually had a 20MB internal hard drive installed, which meant the system loaded straight into Workbench instead of asking for a floppy disk. And somehow it still worked. The familiar Workbench icons appeared on the screen and the hard drive quietly spun inside the case without making any strange noises or showing any obvious problems. There weren’t many files left on it, mostly a few utilities and some random folders that probably hadn’t been opened in decades, but the fact that the drive still functioned at all after so many years was impressive. After letting it run for a while just to see if anything would crash or fail, I eventually shut it down and moved it onto a shelf in my living room. It now sits there among much newer devices that are technically far more powerful but will probably not still be working thirty years from now. It’s still a strange thought that a fully working Amiga 1200 with a 20MB hard drive ended up on the street in Antwerp, just waiting for whoever happened to walk past it first…

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