When did you realize that the wintel machines had caught up to the amiga?
It was in mid 1994 or so. A friend of mine showed me some sort of voxel environment with texturized mountains scrolling in a fake 3D view, at speeds my Amiga 1200 woudln't ever reach, at 640x480 pixel full screen, on his 486dx2/66 machine. Then he opened in a fraction of second some JPEG images. I realized that PC were the place processor grunt was, and that their nature of modular and customizable machines would be overkill for the average Amiga user.
I bought my first PC then, a 486sx/25 notebook with DOS and Windows 3.1. It wasn't smart as AmigaOS 3.1, but with the help of Sparta (a very cool file manager for Windows), I could immediately recreate the one folder == one directory paradigm, which Windows <95 tried to hide with program groups. That was: I could act on Win31+Sparta as like as I did on AmigaOS when opening drawers. Dozens of little share/free-ware tools I found on the Cica CD-ROMs helped me customizing the GUI with toolbars and other improvements, and with my surprise they didn't affect overall speed. In a nutshell: I needed only a few days to get a better desktop environment than my beloved AmigaOS+MagicWB, and without hassles.
That was a huge hit for my amigism.
Then Commodore went bankruptcy, and Intel launched its Pentium processors. Sorry, it was Game Over for the Amiga, and I bought a Pentium 90 system (yes, the bugged one =)): it was amazingly fast and it could run smoothly all the PC applications I learned to love in the meantime. When I installed Windows 95 I felt immediately at home.
However, I still missed something. Windows (and then Linux) became more bloated, huge and heavy at every release. That's why I enjoyed the AROS project as soon as I saw it: it was aiming to do exactly what I was dreaming about at the time, a cute Operating System on the most powerful and cheapest hardware available... "Mine!". And here I am...
