I started off with games, my dad bought an A500 early in 1990.
Was a fantastic machine. I later bought an A1200 for myself which served faithfully until around 2004.
Why did I stay? It's a good question that I genuinely wish I had a good answer to. I learned a huge amount about the inner workings of the OS. I loved how many patches and hacks were available for it that could improve this or that. I guess I was stuck in the cult like mindset that pervaded Amiga to a degree.
I reveled in being able to push both the software and hardware as hard as I did, allowing it to perform far beyond what it should be able to. I took pride in knowing each and every patch, how they reacted with each other, how to fix just about every single issue that came up.
When I finally made the jump to x86 I realised what I'd been missing the first time I installed BeOS Max Edition v2.
It installed the OS, apps and any patches right off the disk.
What would typically take me a solid day to do on the Amiga took 20 minutes, of which I was present for all of around 3 of them.
It just worked. And with that realisation, my journey with the Amiga ended. I don't think I ever again even turned them on after I'd copied all my docs and pictures across.
In some ways I miss the old girls. They were part of my youth, they offered me a creative outlet when life was offering me sweet FA. But I don't miss the amount of effort required to maintain a heavily patched, kludged system like my 1200 ended up as.
I still run UAE from time to time, to play old games and watch the occasional demo. But as a platform it simply doesn't offer me what I need on a day to day basis.
What keeps me with the community is the people. I made some truly great friends as a result of coming to this site.
