What made the Amiga great is that this was not just a bit but way more advanced than anything out there. When I had to, reluctantly, switch to a 386 PC, this was very painful because it felt like going backwards in time by several years. A friend of mine had an Amiga 1000 (it came out in 1985, before the 500 whic surfaced in 1987): going to his home was witnessing the future.
Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.
My Dad bought the family computer for Christmas, 1985. It was an Amiga 1000 and I still vividly remember him teaching me to type "dpaint" at the command line to fire up DeluxePaint. (IRRC, the DeluxePaint disk didn't come with even a minimal Workbench environment on it, just an AmigaDOS window). I was 6 years old.
I used that machine for 10 years. I made drawings and animations (DP III), added titles to the silly camcorder tapes my friends and I made (DeluxeVideo), wrote book reports (ProWrite), made Christmas and birthday cards (various), composed music (Music Studio), played games, and did some light exploring of the system itself, playing with startup-sequence to improve boot times and customize things.
It wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I switched to a 486, and it felt like a step backward in many ways. Of course it was much faster, and had a hard-drive (my first ever), and the resolution was (only a bit!) better. But it was still limited to 16 colors, only 640x480, and all the software was bland business-y bullshit.
I have nothing but fond memories of that machine, and I wish Amiga had been more successful in the market. It took a decade to get back to where they would have been had the trajectory continued from their 1985 launch.
When I went with the 10 MHz 8088 with a 40 MB hard drive I also looked at the alternatives of getting either the Amiga 500 or just getting a Lt. Kernal 20 MB hard drive for my 128.
The driving factor for needing more storage of course was for my BBS at the time.
Wow, “Lt. Kernal 20 MB” is something I haven’t thought about in ages. A friend of mine bought whatever the competitor to the Lt. Kernal was at the time, used, and it was a complete lemon — he never got it working and never recouped his money. I wish I could remember the name of it — he was going to start his own BBS called and I was going to be a subop.
I was a hard-core BBS user back in that era but never actually ran one, so I went 64 > 128 > Amiga 500 > 386.
Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.