Best thing back then for me was largely the games. I was only a young man at the time and I was much more game oriented than I am now. Ive always been interested in graphics too, so deluxe paint was something I used a lot as a young teen. Additionally Ive been interested in making games since a very young age (made a simple rpg on tandy coco1 at the age of 6), so when AMOS was 1st released I started using that. Over time I kept using the Amiga and its big apps that appealed to me that appeared over the years. Blitz Basic2, Brilliance, Imagine and others of the era were big with me when I got my 1st a1200.
Despite all this though it wasnt until Amithlon came out that I really delved deeply into AmigaOS and the plethora of "enhancements" available. Being that some of the software Id used heavily over the years required custom chipset I was forced to look for alternative ways of doing things. This combined with the speed of amithlon really changed my perspective about the amiga and it's OS. It was no longer just a nice, albiet dated system to me lacking many modern features, but a blank canvas on which to easily build a system that behaves exactly as Id like. Perhaps a little ironic that amithlon, which can perform some of the modern functionailty that may normally be missing on an amiga (full speed movies, full speed mame and other emus, easily play mp3s, decent compiling speeds, high framerates in quake1/2, etc.), was what me made stop comparing the amiga to pcs and appreciating it as it's own entity.
I used amithlon/os3.9 exclusively for a few years (and still do sometimes), but in recent times have come to appreciate the classics again too. Sure theyre quite humble on paper compared to modern computers, but there's still a heck of a lot you can do with them, especially if you disregard modern standards. That's actually part of the appeal for me personally, seeing what results you can obtain from such an old machine. Not to mention theyre a heck of a lot of fun
