Hi,
What the Amiga means to me even today!
Back when the Amiga first came out, my old Otrana (a Z80 CPM machine with MSDOS emulator) gave out, so I was looking for a new computer, I walked into my favorite computer store and they where displaying the Amiga 1000 for $999.95 (funny why don't they just say a $1000.00), the store manager told me, smerf since your my friend, the sale ends in 2 more days, but if you want, since you have bought so much computer stuff off of me, I'll keep the sale price for you until the end of the month, so I looked at MACS (yuck) IBM's (to much business and no sound and poor graphics but it did what I wanted DBase III, and Lotus 123, yes I programmed these for business) CoCo color computer from your favorite Radio Shack, (interesting) but not to many programs at the time, the Tandy Sensation (to expensive and required RS manipulated software) well in 2 weeks I went back to relook at the Amiga, my sales friend said, still looking, well guess what, the Amiga has MSDOS software in the Emulation mode, I have a demo copy that works all the way and I'll throw it in free if you buy one, well I looked and thought about if for another week, then I went back and bought this monstrosity from Commodore. The first two weeks I hated this darn machine, df0: df1: why not just use a: b: the darn command lines where to long, why not just say copy a: b:, this machine is ridiculous, but something kept saying in the back of my mind, this machine is doing some stuff that I never saw a computer do before, well the Amiga grew on me, as I learned more and bought more software and met more people that owned the machine I began to realize that the Amiga was more than a computer it was a community of people all struggling through the same things as me, we formed clubs, had meetings, discussed the new things we learned, had arguments (smerf likes those) showed new demos we found, traded fish programs and had fun. We had one person who wrote music, one who did graphics, and one who made demo disks and collected shareware and freeware disks (yours truly), so the Amiga means to me people having a good time forming a community and discussing the Amiga, we had people of different race, religion, nationality etc. We had arguments over computer platforms, software programming, religion, racisim, cars etc. my best friend was aethist, and my next best friend was (hang on to your hats) Muslim, and we all noticed that Only Amiga had these fanatical groups, IBM who heard of clubs or meetings like we had, Atari,forget it, as a matter of fact the only ones who even came close to the Amiga users where the CoCo users. So the Amiga means friends, community and people who had a genuine interest in the use of this Amazing machine.
Yes even I the greatest arguementive person in the world, the one who loves to troll to get people excited likes the Amiga Community, and still likes to hear what are people doing with this amazing little computer, maybe if we could all get together over this computer, we could all be friends world wide, and have friendly arguments instead of wars and killing.
smerf