@Sean Cunningham
Wow, what a story. I could read stories like that all day. It's amazing just how many people virtually owe their current living to the start and inspiration Amiga gave them.
As for the topic I suppose I am an old timer. Our family picked up a C64 back in 1984 when I was a kid. It was used mainly for games, but without a disk drive it wasn't easy to be productive with it.
In 1989 when I was a young teenager, my two brothers and I clubbed together and bought an A500. Well, what a machine that was. It was followed by a 512k RAM expansion and external floppy. A colour dot matrix followed soon after. This machine was used heavily for games, but was also used for productivity.
As I got older the uses it was put to changed. I used it to produce Lotus 123 compatible spreadsheets for Uni, using CrossDos (which was possible under KS1.3 though you seldom read about it).
Around about 1994 an acquaintance who was into art and design decided to sell his A1200 and move to a PowerMac (I think he regretted it at the time) so my brother and I took it off his hands. Now we had an Amiga with a hard drive and that just made it a whole different beast. A 68040 accelerator and loads of RAM was added to this machine. My brother was studying computer science and was able to do some code for Uni on this and compile it so that it ran faster on the A1200 than the machines at Uni. We also set up a serial network which allowed the A500 to access the storage on the hard disk. It was very slow, but useful sometimes.
Around about this time the internet was taking off and the Amiga was already being left behind. Commodore going bust didn't help matters. Anyway, the A1200 had a trick up it's sleeve. Shapeshifter allowed us to run Netscape on the A1200, and under an 040 it was reasonably useable.
I soldiered on with the Amiga until 2001, when I finally caved in and bought a PC. My employer had got rid of their doorstep salesmen and were selling off a load of laptops. I'd always been intrigued by the concept of a laptop (well we never really had one with Amiga) so bought one. It was quite a high spec IBM Thinkpad and had loads of extras thrown in, and nice leather pilot bag to carry it all.
Since then I've bought a desktop PC and another laptop, but using these gives me no real enjoyment.
I'd like to get back into Amigas, particularly OS4, but at the moment my lifestyle doesn't really allow for it. I work all over my country and live in pretty much temporary accommodation. A big box Amiga would just be something else to worry about when moving on to the next contract. Despite the expense of it, I actually have the money and the inclination for the likes of an X1000, just not the place to store and use it.
I'm really hoping in the next couple of years I'll be able to settle down a bit, and one of the top priorities will be to get an X1000/X2000 and enjoy computing again.
