Got my start with a Tandy 1000SX, and as I'd said before, it was hard to understand why people accused the PC clones of sucking. Did have hell with a few games and Radio Shack expense/cluelessness at the time... but PCjr graphics + ISA expansion (not that Tandy would /tell/ you those were ISA slots) made it as reasonable as any other home computer of the day, and compatible with most of the IBM stuff floating around.
Got on the local C64 board, and people were going on in defense of Commodore. Hnh, that cheap, and at least as good as the big expensive Tandy box that somehow got replaced with a PS/2? Had a lot of fun running 64Term or whatever it was and playing with the graphics characters the PC didn't have... 40-column BBS screens centered in the 80-column view, of course.
When I finally met a C64, it was a disappointment. Yes, good enough, and you could do some pretty magic things with it... but the BASIC 2.0 that so many of y'all learned on lacked basic convenience, and the whole 1541 speed issue... Oof. I have great respect for all the people who could think ahead enough to put up with that daily! If only the 64 ROM had come with the 'DOS wedge' built in... (In retrospect, of course, the 128, having something like that functionality, would've been quite an admirable machine if anyone'd noticed.)
Then I met a friend's A500, and the Amiga, which had seemed outright mythical, if a bit debatable (along the lines of Xerox Stars, Atari STs, and all the other names-without-faces to a 'normal PC user' of the day... and the 8-bit crowd were still feeling that bit of passive-aggression, since the likes of GEOS 'could do that already'), proved to be everything the 8-bitters had sold the C64 as... plus
actual multitasking... never once in a 'normal workflow' (for a BBS kid - running a terminal emulator, unpacking files, playing with some sort of enhanced 'say' he had a copy of, running an intro of some sort or other) did anything have to stop, shut down, or drop to a text mode... all running off those crazy new small floppies alone (heck, the 20-40MB drives in the home PC weren't helping allow anything like this!), in a machine the size of a keyboard, and if he did reboot to run a game, it autobooted and came right up... something PC games were still hit-and-miss on, given DOS licensing and all. (Of course, now we know those games were banging the hardware and making life hell for the NG efforts later, but at the time...) All quite elegant, and I'm amused the sort of ideas we'd bat around ("Hey, what if you could doodle notes to yourself on the Workbench?") are the same thing people are fiddling with on the systems of today. (Yep, everything
has become "an Amiga," and with the same annoyances... Wrong Kickstart version, mismatched Linux kernel, broken DirectX?... same difference!)
Of course, then I detoured to OS/2, got the "Amiga-like" experience on PC faster than all the Windows kids (well, in exchange for 3 years of hardware-swapping, as it was the first PC I 'built' from scratch... that came down to secret idiocies in the VL-Bus space,* but I sure did learn a lot about sitting on hold), tried to direct some love to Linux but got bit by the state of
its hardware support ~1999/2000, and found myself slid onto the same BSD platform that Amiga-using friend jumped ship to around '95. (The friend in question hadn't lived with Windows 3.
0, so he had less incentive
not to dual-boot with what continued to become the 'standard'... and as such, he's long since gone on to become a productive member of society, while I'm back here beating the Amiga horse because I have my own form of sub-
jwz-grade luck. I think
Fred is my only hope at this point, if I still want to pretend I'll ever find a tolerable
career with this stuff...)
[Yeah, James,** if you stumble across this, I've been wallowing into everything you once found 'cool' years (too?) late... It's just by accident, I swear!]
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*QLogic vs. Opti, IIRC (some sort of issue that kept an otherwise nice QLogic FastSCSI from working with the then-modern VL bridge found on my Nx586; known-issue to QLogic once I figured out it was them and not the boardmaker), then Diamond or S3's idea of PnP being to hog an interrupt line or some address space that the Adaptec that replaced the QLogic couldn't be configured around. I still can't bring myself to blame x86 PnP around that era, as it were individual manufacturers making a mess of it, but whew...
**No, not jwz James.
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So er, was Amiga ever "the enemy?" Not in generalized PC-land, because people would have had to have heard of it to have an opinion. But I did watch it begrudge the 8-bitters some, probably mostly because data-migration was not a (cheaply-)solved issue in those times. The BBS wars revolved around the Mac and Amiga users baiting each other.
