My first computer experience was a PC back in 1984 or 1985,
(I visited my oldest brother at work).
It was text only, black background with green text, that's about all I remember,
since I was only 6 years old at the time, but I do remember ONE thing...
I wasn't impressed :-)
So, my first Amiga experience was back in 1987 or 1988, when seeing adverts in
a store, that you could make animated cartoons on it and that really impressed me!
About the same time one of my brothers bought a ZX 128k Spectrum, although he
wanted an A500, but it was too expensive at the time.
I wasn't too impressed by the Spectrum either :-)
So in 1990 or 1991, two of my brothers (one of them owned the Spectrum) put
togther some cash and bought a used A500, now I was impressed :-)
About the same time I sat with a Mac for the first time,
(my oldest brother had lend it from work, to play some golf game on it :-)
it was a Macintosh Classic and it could only display greyscale, not impressed :-)
And in 1992 my brothers bought a second used A500, so they could have one each!
At this time I started to have some computer learning in school and yes
you guessed right, on PC's...
It was Victor 386's with Win 3.1 and since then I get sick whenever I see Win 3.1
again :-) It must be the worst piece of crap I have EVER seen, I can't believe
how it could be so freaking popular, yuck!!
In 1993 (I think it was) I played Chaos Engine and Flashback for the first time
and since then, they are my absolute favourite games!!
About the same time, one of my brothers (not the Spectrum one) bought a Rochard
harddrive for his A500. At this time he bought a computer magazine called
"Dator Magazin" or "DMZ", the biggest computer magazine in Sweden at the time
and it only covered Amiga :-) I ofcourse also read them and started to learn more
and more about the Amiga.
In 1994 he sold his A500 with the Rochard and bought an A1200 and I really liked
it, since it had better graphics and was faster and I was amazed about the
startup time!
And in 1995 I bought the A1200 from my brother and since then I have been a serious
Amiga/computer user. Before, I only used my brothers Amigas once in a while to play
some games.
On x-mas 1995 my oldest brother bought us younger brothers a PC, a P75 to be exact
with Win 95 and thanks to that I got to learn Win 95 (and up), quite a bit, which
is a neccesity these days since there are PC's everywhere (just hoping AmigaOne
and OS4 will change that, at least a bit).
In 1996 I bought a Blizzard 1230-IV with 16Mb ram for my A1200. Shortly after the
orginial 120Mb HD died and lost a lot of stuff, that I didn't want to loose and
that was a bit tough!
In 1997 one of my brothers bought a PC (the one I bought the A1200 from).
In 1998 I bought a BlizzardPPC, with the 040 overclocked since 2002 and it
works perfectly!
But the cooling and power troubles made it impossible to run the BPPC in the
original case, so in 1999 I bought a PowerTower with a new A1200 motherboard and
sold the other A1200.
About the same time the other Amiga brother went to PC, I still got his A500, now
with a GVP Impact Series II HD and an extra floppy drive, jeehaw :-)
In 2001 I bought a PC (sorry, didn't know better :-) and in 2002 I bought a
BVisionPPC for the Amiga. And in 2003 I gave the PC to one of my brothers
(the Spectrum one) since I was fed up with all the troubles Windows gave me, so I
bought a PowerMac G4 instead and I'm quite happy with that so far!
Now that we have come to 2004 (the year of the Amiga, hopefully :-)
I'm planning to buy AmigaOS 4 for my BPPC and maybe an AmigaOne also,
if money allows it!
I hope that the Amiga can get in the fastlane again (just enough), so that I can
convert my brothers back to the Amiga!
I also try to support the Amiga community in any way I can, have registered 21
shareware progs so far, done some catalog translations, done a little betatesting
and maintains the Famous Amiga Uses list.
Although I use other computers like Mac's and PC's, the Amiga is still my favourite
computer, mostly because it got that something special, that makes it so fun to use!
Up until 1998, I thought that Amiga was the best computer and I didn't want to
have a job where I had to work with PC's, but with time and alot of computer usage
and experience, I have learned that no computer is the best, they all have
their pros and cons and as luck turned out, I got a job where there are Amigas that
I use on a daily basis! I use it to put in adverts, like buy and sell stuff for our
local TV channel, and we use Scala InfoChannel 500 for the job. But since I'm a
system technician I also get to work with Mac's and PC's.
Wow, that was NOT the short version :-) any way I still use my A1200 quite alot
and intend to do so for the forseeable future!
Happy Amiga computing everybody!!
And thanks to the Hyperion guys and all the rest for the great job with AmigaOS 4!!
