It was special because it let you do very special things. Consider my experience.
I was just a kid trying to put himself through college in Albany, NY. I was working minimum wage jobs when I wasn't in class. And I was saving my pennies for a computer. I thought I wanted an Atari ST, but then the Amiga 500 was launched. I used every dollar I could scrape up to get the computer, a monitor, a genlock a bit later, some software (Deluxe Paint!).
I spent my nights not sleeping, but learning how to make animations. I got pretty good. So much so that I would watch the local used-car dealership adverts, with their cut-rate Chyron, and thought that I could do so much better. Then the penny dropped.
I knocked on the doors of some of those dealers, and told them I could save them a lot of money if they used my graphics, not the local TV station's. Some of them bit, and I would get paid $250-$500 per commercial. I'd make the cheesy graphics, save them to a floppy, and carry my Amiga and genlock to the TV station. Plug into their patch-bay, and overlay my graphics over the video in real time.
That was a LOT of money back then. One commercial could equal a month's worth of working in the mall.
Yeah, I also played games a whole lot, what with all that extra free time.
One more story that only Amiga made possible
