Oh man! Do I remember the Amiga Days! My first "real" computer was an Amiga 500 with 2 MB of Ram. No Hard drive though. I think if I had spent another $500 I could've had a 12 MB HD. I did some wild stuff with that thing. Years ahead of anything at the time. As far as that goes, it can still keep up with most low end professional systems today.
Mine worked great right until my 2 year old sone decided to feed the floppy drive a couple of quarters. I think that change bounced off of every chip on the way through.
If I remember correctly, wasn't the old Sci-Fi flick, "Max Headroom" done primarily on the Amiga based system?
Today's NLE's are quite a bit more sofisticated than the old Amiga stuff I played with though. Capturing Analog video is especially tough. That's why I looked at the Pinnacle Equipment. They also have the DV500 and you can still find the DC10 series of equipment. It will mean opening up your computer and placing the capture card, but it does work and usually works out quite well.
I've been pricing components for a dedicated Video Editing machine for my own system. I figure I can do it for about $1500 using the best CPU I can get. If I were to go Dual Processor, I can probably do it for about $2500. Get this.... with the new SATA HDD specs, I can add in up to a Terrabyte of storage internally! Folks, that's a lot of video. I've got a 200 GB now that's taken with OS and programs, I can still get about 6 hours of total raw capture on it.
Sorry about teh thread jack!!!!! 8)