How did Amiga influence you?

[Amiga_Nut]

Two things...

1. Financially affected me a lot! lol I was the poorest 15 year old in town after handing over the cash for my A1000, just 12 months after my Neochrome station (520STM) purchase oops.

2. I was suddenly interested in what was under the casing making the magic happen. I never cared about how VIC-II or SID worked on my C64, never really cared what it was inside my Coleco that made games look less shit than my VCS

After reading a leaked report in late 1984 on some text based Prestel type service (Teletext page) provided by some computer show (similar to Computer Chronicles in the USA) about the specifications of the new Amiga launching in 1985 really peaked my interest and I made sure I was reading things like Byte and PCW magazine not comics like ZZAP. Watching Robo-city and listening to Fairlight synthesizer samples being played back on this little A1000 sealed my fate as a techie forever

The difference is I never jumped to Macs (why would I..if you stopped the sale of chicken pies I wouldn't start eating steak and kidney ones just for the sake of eating pies I don't like lol) and well PC is just a tool like a ratchet set or a torque wrench, I don't caress my tools after servicing my car...ditto after building a site I don't treat my PC to a new toy or clean it OCD style as if it was a Ferrari on my driveway.

I just moved my focus where the real cutting edge stuff is...games consoles and cars that produce silky smooth 110bhp/Litre without silly superchargers or rubbish turbos farting out their asses.

[Amiga_Nut]

Due to the crazy pricing in the UK of £220 for C64.....£300 for 1541....most of us here were stuck with a C64 and those wonderful loading screens and loading tunes to while away 5-15 minutes of your life lol. I never got to use my C64 creatively except for a bit of programming. There's a limit to what you can do creatively on a machine with a CLI and a tape deck

What Amiga taught me was how much creative fun you could have with a computer, I had a sampler, a nice setup for using Digiview, Dpaint/Dvideo/Dphotolab/Digipaint/Photon paint. I spent more on this stuff than games.

And that was the biggest difference, I could spend days doodling on Dpaint, I don't think I would have bothered to put such effort into a machine with borders/16 colour palette/restrictions on where each colour can go per char block.

Freedom, creative freedom, that's what Amiga gave me and I guess that influenced me because Photoshop annoys me with it's 4ghz octa-core CPU requirements to get a smooth fluid brush stroke under Win7 LOL.