Please post a comment answering the following:
1. Your first exposure / introduction to THE COMMODORE AMIGA.
My first exposure to it was, I think, at a homecoming week activity in 1991 at my school. A friend of mine brought his Amiga 500 and arranged to borrow a large-screen projection TV and had his Amiga set up with that Pinball Dreams demo that was going around at the time. Now...my friend had been talking for a long time about getting an Amiga, and in fact he sold me a buttload of his Commodore 64 stuff for $10 when he got the Amiga. (Most of it was boxes of floppies that had...well....games with a "cracked by" message

)
2. What attracted you to the AMIGA platform.
Started when the aforementioned friend was going on about how amazing Amiga is, what with multitasking, more reliable than Windows, etc. That friend (whose C64 stash included a modem) turned me on to the BBS scene, and there were a lot of Amiga users on the boards. I went to a couple of BBS parties and saw Amigas in action and was just blown away. I NEEDED to get an Amiga!
3. How did you use your AMIGA computer?
For everything, really. My first Amiga was an Amiga 600 -- just the basic $299 package...1 meg RAM, no hard drive, and packaged with Robocopy 3, Shadow of the Beast III, Myth, Graphics Workshop (a paint program that I never did use, and you really needed a hard drive or at least a second floppy drive to run), and Microtext (a word processor). My main dealer at the time was Tenex, based in Mishawaka, Indiana. I got my A600 from them, and later on I ordered a 40-megabyte hard drive for a nice price. They called me back and said they were out, so I got an 85-meg hard drive. For $250. (wow.)
But yeah, I used that Amiga for everything: games, word processing, BBSing, homework, you name it. It was my computer, so I HAD to use it for everything computing related.
Used it to do music a lot. In fact...when I was a senior in college, I had to take a TV production class for my major. (I was shy four credits and had a choice of either that or photography -- and you had to buy your own camera for that class, and as such was the *only* class in the whole course catalog that required you to buy your own equipment, so I chose TV.) There were three main projects in that course: a 5-minute project, a 15-minute project, and a 30-minute project. The 5-minute project was for groups of 2 and 3, while the other two were for the entire class as a single group, so for both the 15- and 30-minute projects we came up with a really cheesy soap opera. My contribution: music! I loaded up OctaMED and sequenced a theme song and some background music. Everybody thought it was a hoot! In fact...at the annual radio and TV awards banquet that night, I won a plaque for music composition -- the first time they ever had to award it.

Anyhoo....I really souped up that Amiga 600. I added another meg of RAM via the PCMCIA slot. Hard drive got upgraded multiple times. Eventually added an Apollo 030 accelerator and 8 megs of fast RAM. Upgraded from OS 2.05 to 2.1 and then to 3.1.
After I graduated college, I had a friend who was still a student where I went (I went to a local college), so I'd hang out with him over there sometimes. One of the instructors form the journalism department saw me and told me she was getting rid of the Amigas (a 3000 and several 500s) and getting Macs, and if I could help her out with something (I think catalogging software, if I remember correctly) I could take whatever I wanted. I brought another friend I knew from the Amiga community to help out. He claimed the 3000, and I grabbed a 500 and decided that the 500 would be my "upgrade project." After I realized that my 600 was already technically an upgrade project, I just kind of put the A500 to the side. Same friend who got the A3000 said he wanted to buy the 500 from me for his nephew, so I said sure...
In 1998 I upgraded to an Amiga 4000. Used that thing for even more stuff that I won't get into now, just too much to talk about!
2003 -- AmigaOne G3 boards were out, with a new operating system (AmigaOS 4). Bought a complete MicroAmiga1-C, which was literally the size of a shoebox. I loved that thing. I had been considering buying a PC just so I could keep up with the rest of the world in terms of learning programming and stuff, but after I got that PC, my wife and I were at a financial hardship that was aggravated by my wife getting screwed out of a paycheck, so to guarantee that we could make rent I sold off the MicroAmiga1. Broke my heart to do that, but I actually got $300 more than what I paid for it originally because OS4-compatible boards were harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa at the time, so they were in huge demand. (There is a company that's making Amiga OS4-compatible boards again, btw.) So my official Amiga life came to an end in 2006, after thirteen steadfast years of dedication. When my wife and I got back on our feet the following year I couldn't find another Amiga OS4 board, so I decided to try the Mac world, and within minutes of using my brand new MacBook (which still works like a charm to this day, just a few days shy of nine years later!), I was like..."Wait, what's Amiga again??" heh.

(Truth be told, I really am missing Directory Opus...)
Edited by dauber, 19 December 2016 - 06:58 PM.