sdyates that's very similar to my "Amiga Experience" (or perhaps "Commodore Experience" is a bit more accurate).
Got a Vic20 back in...oh, 83? or so. With a Datasette. I programmed in BASIC like crazy. I remember this old late 70's fisheye b&w TV I had the thing hooked up to...heck, come to think on it a B&W set was what I used with my C64 which came a couple years later.
The VIC-20 though...as I said, I programmed in BASIC. 'Course I had a lot of games, too. Let's see...I think Lunar Lander from Commodore was the first one, then some of the Scott Adams Adventure International games came next (man how I tried and tried to write my own interactive fiction in that 3.9 kilobytes of free memory on the VIC!)...what else...oh, yeah, I had Omega Race, that was a pip.
Then I got a C64 (still didn't have a disk drive for a couple of years) and just carried on - heck most of my BASIC projects came along for the ride, too. The amount of software I had on that thing came and went in a blur. Some favorites were the ZORK series (all 6 of 'em at the time), Gunship (the first version that booted without the animation, just a still splash screen - the guy at the s/w store said I had the first copy out of the shipping crate...man I loved military flight sims!), F19 Stealth Fighter, innumerable pirated games ;-)...
Oh and GEOS too. Wrote a bunch of papers in high school with GEOS and my Okidata thermal printer. Over on my cork board next to my office door I still have one of the "demo" pictures that you could print out with an Okidata printer on the '64. The Samurai picking his teeth. Anyone remember that one?
Between the VIC-20 and the C64 I remember Commodore's slew of bad computers, like the C16. I recall the Compute!'s Gazette showcasing all of 'em and putting a positive spin on them. I remember thinking if I busted my butt all summer long, I could probably save the scratch up for a C16 and that looked like a pretty good upgrade path (a mere $99 when a C64 was the princely sum of $189), and then migrate to a C264 :-P Boy am I ever glad I didn't go down that route.
Jumping back ahead, I remember the '85 issue of Compute's! Gazette that covered the Amiga in all its glory. The A1000 debuted for..oh what was it, $1999.95? Anyway it was pretty much out of the reach of a fifteen year old anyway. But oh did I drool over it. I remember when some demo team or the other released this little demo on the C64 that was the Deluxe Paint "King Tut's Mask" complete with a blue Intuition bar at the top of the screen and a "mouse pointer" (really just a sprite). You ran the demo and you could pull the image up and down like you were moving a custom screen.
It was too painful. After spending an evening playing with it periodically I deleted it off of the floppy it came on - I couldn't stand it; it was like giving a rubber bone to a starving dog.
Anyway, in 1988 or so, I wound up getting a C128 as a b'day present; my C64's power supply died and my folks knew I wanted a new computer, so they got me the 128 (not being able to afford the Amiga).
The 128 wasn't much to write home about. The 80 column mode required a better monitor than a mere color TV (yep, had a color set by then), and IIRC there was *never* any "C128 only" software. 'course I could be wrong.
That lasted about six months. In early '89 I went to college for the first time and made the Dean's list. To show their appreciation my folks bought me the last computer they'd ever buy me...an Amiga! An Amiga 500, to be exact.
Let me divert to a funny/heartbreaking story about that one. At the time, my pop had enough money to get me an A2000 and practically insisted I let him. The A2000's they were selling at the time were going for about...$2099.99 IIRC. The reseller had A2000HDs configured with A2088 boards and bundled them with a monitor and was billing it as "two computers for the price of one".
BUT.
I felt so guilty at the notion of my dad spending so much money, when I was 19! I demurred, and insisted on an A500.
The 500 was a lot of fun but I got to tell y'all... it was the death of programming for me, forever. I thought for sure with the Amiga's BASIC (ABasic, or AmigaBASIC, I don't recall which it was) would make my dreams of writing an F18 sim (!) come true. Oh, speaking of F18 Sims...I got EA's "F18" the night I got the 500 and it was unplayably slow. Over the years as I had the 500, I ran in to that problem a few times. F18, OMEGA from Origin and Starflight also from EA ran too slowly to be played. They were literally slide shows. Did anyone else ever experience this?
Well, to return to the topic at hand, I loved my A500 but soon found myself doing little more with it than playing games. I didn't really understand AmigaDOS - heck I had a frustrating night trying to copy one file from DF0: to DF1: ! My Workbench disk got corrupted a few days after I got the machine and I was the only person I knew who had one. In my frustration I stuck the Preferences disk in and set my screen color to black, my cursor and mouse pointer colors to white and left it that way (did I mention I was still using a TV? Well, I was...and would for years to come).
Fortunately a guy who ran a shareware library that had all of the Fish Disks made me a copy of WB1.3.2 and made me back it up right there (ha! :-) ) in front of him. I went home, got back in to WB and away I went. I did a few more slightly productive things with the '500...I got a 1200 baud modem for it (yep! 1200 baud!), a few shareware tools like a nice "word processor" (really just a text editor with a few whistles and bells), and a few shareware 3d programs. A friend sent me a copy of Vista 1.0 and I had a HECK of a lot of fun with that - including rendering little one and two second terrain flyovers that actually impressed my mom who was NOT a "computer person". Ah, late childhood!
My A500 underwent a lot of changes. I recall spending most of a tax return on it: An AdSpeed (14mhz baby!), another 1mb of RAM in a Supra sidecar attachment, a 2mb Agnus chip, another 512k for the trapdoor, a new Lisa chip...and a couple CIAs to replace the ones I blew up. ;-)
I had the 500 from '89 to '92 and sold it for enough scratch to buy a bare A1200. I was back to square one: an unexpanded Amiga that was in many ways inferior to my A500 (although it did feature a hard drive interface that got used "eventually"). I had picked up a used 1084S somewhere along the way and finally got rid of that damned TV. I struggled along with a 2m CHIP/no FAST Amiga for a while. Then, one day, mana from heaven. A fellow who used a local C-Net BBS with a large following in the open chat room was getting out of the Amiga scene. Commodore was dying, the company who had just three years prior had stock trading at 23 was now barely listable. So he was getting out. He gave me a DKB1204 (GAVE)! I got a 4mb SIMM (for the princely sum of $179) and installed it and had a powerhouse of an Amiga...
...about two years too late. The ship had sailed, and the writing was on the wall for C=. Well we all know what happened in 1994. Already, in the US, Amiga software was for the most part mail-order only. I held on, and kept my ear to the ground and watched things unfold (or fold up, rather) for the Amiga. But in the end, I knew it was all on the PC platform. As much as I liked the Amiga, the games and applications were (for me) just not there. And that was that.
I gave my little 1200, with it's 60mb hard drive, 28mhz 030 card and 4mb RAM, a new owner for enough scratch to buy the parts to build a PC (but that's another story).
Amiga ownership for me is part of an Odyssey of Commodore computers. I still have one issue of AmigaWorld (a US based magazine that ran for most of the Amiga's life and about a little bit thereafter), and an official publication from Commodore (through Hayden) titled "Stimulating Simulations for the VIC". One magazine from each end of my C= ownership.
Appropriate bookends, no pun intended.
I have since then been through innumerable PCs. I'd like to say that little bits and pieces have migrated along with me, but nothing really has. My first PC had a 170mb hard drive in the days of 300-500mb drives. The abuse I put that poor little thing through was unspeakable. It struggled along and put up with me cramming Win95 onto it (after having doublespaced it)...well, no, wait. I'm doing one bit of hardware a disservice: my first PC case. It's a nondescript AT PC case but I've had it for thirteen years now. It has over the years held a '486 dx4/100 (AMD clone), a '486 dx2/80 (another AMD after I blew up the 100 by improperly grounding myself :-( ), a 5x86-120 (that was improperly jumpered on the motherboard, and so failed, thanks to the vendor), a Cyrix PR166 (which ran about the same speed as a P100 and I hated it, but that was probably because of the sucky 170mb HD as well), a Pentium 200mmx and since I went to a different case (actually many cases) it gathered dust for a few years but was finally resurrected in 2002 as a "domain server" running WinNT4 Server on a 1 gig SCSI HD (with a trio of other SCSI drivers), with a P120 CPU and 32(!!!) MB RAM. It was slowly upgraded to a P166 with 64 and then 128 MB (whereupon it became a Win2000 server), then to a P200, and in what will be it's final incarnation: An AT slot-1 motherboard with a PII/350, 384mb RAM and a 10gig HD. All in that same sixteen year old decal and sticker covered AT case.
Sorry for going all PC related in that last bit, guys.
