Do you know that feeling of instant camaraderie you get when another person shares a deep passion of yours? You may not even know their real name or age or where they live but to you, the shared characteristic speaks volumes about their soul. I feel an immediate kinship with someone if I find out they are a libertarian, or if they're a Celtics fan, or if they have ever owned a Commodore Amiga.

The first two are obvious signs of good taste, strong values, and a sense of history. But who on Earth is Amiga, how did she ever rise to the rank of Commodore, and how can someone own her?

The Amiga was my secret weapon. It was a personal computer decades ahead of its time. In the early 1980s, I used the Amiga to edit videos and make cartoons as extra credit for classes in school. It had thousands of colors when its main competition had, at best, sixteen. It multi-tasked and it did so without crashing, something both Macs and PCs still struggle with. It had multiple virtual screens, each with different resolution, as if there were several computers sharing the same monitor.

And the games! The graphics, the sound, the intensity. One of the first games my dad and I played on it was a detective game where you type in what to do using regular English sentences and then watch as the characters on screen act it out, if you get it right. We got about five screens in with commands like "open the door" and "walk left" and then were stymied for months at a place where the right answer turned out to be "hide behind the couch."

I programmed on the Amiga. My first computer had been a Timex Sinclair with one kilobyte of memory that often broke or got accidentally unplugged. I had to reprogram my virtual Monopoly game from scratch every time—the code quickly became optimized as I learned about subroutines and procedures to minimize the amount of retyping. On the Amiga, most of my time was spent moving "sprites" and "bobs," Amiga-speak for two types of graphics, either fast or slow, that would float across the screen.

The Amiga had the world's first word processor with the now-ubiquitous ruler and button strips up top. Before that program, it was hard to imagine how a computer could improve on a typewriter. Most word processing programs at the time simply showed text and you had to use weird button combinations to do things. The Amiga essentially introduced WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get.

Much like the Libertarian Party and the Boston Celtics, the Commodore Amiga has been a source of great disappointment to me for the past 20 years. The Libertarian Party, as opposed to the libertarian philosophy, never elected a single federal official. The Celtics never hoisted another championship banner. And the Commodore Amiga didn't take over the world.

In all three cases, the killer was a combination of a lack of leadership and of being too far ahead of their time. The Libertarian Party didn't really focus on electing candidates as much as it did on growing membership, awareness, and education. The Celtics suffered through poor owners, and managers with itchy trigger fingers who traded away players such as Joe Johnson and Chauncey Billups while they were still young. And the Amiga was a great computer that was unfortunately owned by Commodore, which didn't see the jewel in their midst and, despite modest success in Europe, let this amazing technology wilt away.

There is cause for hope. The Libertarian Party, realizing that by now most people have at least a passing acquaintance with libertarianism (one character on Desperate Housewives even described himself as a libertarian, saying he believes in minimizing the power of the state and maximizing individual freedom), last year changed its focus to actually electing winnable candidates. Yours truly ran as a Libertarian candidate in our district last year to all sorts of successful measures, except at the polls.

The Boston Celtics completely reversed course this summer, moving from a youth-centered squad to a veteran team with three All-Stars. They acquired one of the best basketball players of all time in Kevin Garnett and one of the best pure shooters of all time in Ray Allen, the former Husky standout. They went from having the second-worst record in the league last year to being a championship contender.

And to complete the trifecta, Commodore has risen from the ashes and will be moving in to 263 Tresser Boulevard in Stamford. They no longer own the Amiga brand or its technology but they are run by coders and gamers who grew up on the Amiga and remember its unique niche in computer lore. And they're not just selling kitschy computers from the 80s, though that "vintage" product is on their website. They're selling souped-up Windows PCs optimized for gaming.

What can I say. I feel a kinship toward them. Deep in my heart, I also suspect they are libertarians and Celtic fans.

phil@maymin.com