I got my A500 with Kickstart 1.2 in 1987, at most two months after it came out in the Netherlands. I had been happily playing about with my Schneider CPC464 until that time, but found it hard to do something worthwhile with. Also, the cassette deck was becoming an annoying pain. I was looking at other, bigger computers (mostly PCs) when I was offered an Amiga leaflet. I liked the specs, and bought it along with a monitor.
Then I didn't do a damn thing with it, since there was a chronic lack of software for the machine, and what there was, was hideously expensive. If it wasn't for my mother spotting a German magazine at a store in 1988, and some timely translations of Data Becker books ('The Big AmigaBASIC Book', 'Tips & Tricks for the Amiga', etc.) I might have sold it off a year later. I hammered away in BASIC, typed in many programs and hex code listings. I managed to upgrade to Kickstart 1.3, and eventually started swapping games a little. Illegal as hell, of course, even though the cracks were done by mystical groups in Germany and Denmark. Those were the days.
Then slowly real life caught up with me, as I needed to run software for my study in chemical engineering which my Amiga could not cope with. (Neither in CPU-power nor in compatibility.) I had two machines in my room for many months, and at some time even upgraded the A500 to a A500+, then added an aging A590 with SCSI-1 harddisk. Eventually, the A500 was replaced by a A4000/030. I did my best coding on that machine, as I finally was able to get hold of a decent C-compiler at an affordable price. I wasted more money in equipping it first with a 68882, then with a 68040-card, a SCSI-controller and a CyberVision64. What money was left I spent on the PC, which was running at 10 times the speed of the Amiga 8 years ago. When I moved out, I sold off the A4000 and haven't regretted that for a second. Well, sometimes I miss the simplicity of DeluxePaint or PhotoPaint, and there are times when I code (for Linux) when I wished I could look something up in an Amiga manual.
Recently, I have given AROS a try, but threw away the CD after about an hour or so. It felt weird to be staring at (and using) a Workbench-clone. It was light-years behind the GUIs I've come to use and expect from a computer system. I applaud the efforts being undertaken in order to make sure that the core Amiga system lives on---although not in the form many diehards and fanboys would like---they truly are impressive projects. But I also found the efforts naively, nearly tragically pointless and futile. I also realised that people should abandon the idea of porting Mozilla or Firefox to the system (even AmigaOS4): the Amiga is too simplistic to be burdened by such complex beasts. I felt it as being sacriligeous in some way.
For me, the Amiga was mortally injured Commodore turned turtle, and it was irrevocably dead by the time I sold off the 4000. A few times I wondered about getting a system for a few bucks and tinker with it, but I think I'd rather like a CPC in that case. The Amiga, I mastered. The CPC I never did, so that offers a challenge at least, even if it is just a minor one.
