Surprisingly similar story to my own, despite being the other side of the Atlantic and different hardware. School I went to was also piloting IT in schools, so

Surprisingly similar story to my own, despite being the other side of the Atlantic and different hardware. School I went to was also piloting IT in schools, so we had a selection of 8 bit kit and an after hours club that was hugely popular. My memory of Apple II is the expansion slots helped it stay relevant longer and it attracted a huge range of weird and wonderful add ons as a result. C64 was far more price sensitive which showed in some of the choices. Were it much more expensive it would have lost to one of the dozens of other 8 bits. > This probably tends to bias my experience with the platform away from what people might consider its major strengths My Amiga bias is less the amazing hardware, as that's always going to become outdated at some point, even though it was astonishing for its day. I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows and would be in a much better shape had we started with some of the Amiga and Mac OS choices and innovations accepted as the usual way of doing things. Case in point in the OP: Mac's Applescript, or the earlier Amiga ARexx, rather than batch files and a big fat nothing in Windows. I spent years finding every innovation on Windows had someone doing it far better a decade previously. Usually with an order of magnitude less code. Windows seemed comically lacking and gratuitously obnoxious to write code for. So of course that platform won for general computing. Hindsight is easy of course. > selling overpriced crap to customers deluded by the Reality Distortion Field Macs were objectively better at so many things but lacked colour. In truth I always felt the reality distortion was on the Windows side. Much later Apple became a little too much focused on style but that's another story. :) > and the environmental issues at the MOS plant in PA Didn't know of that. That's the third reference to current environmental issues from decades closed plants I've come across in about as many weeks! I just read The Radium Girls about Undark and the worker's horrific injuries and struggle to get compensation or even acknowledgement. The two companies denied, lied, and cheated their way through. Both sites, and even where factory trash and rubble from demolished buildings was sent(!), were found highly hazardous decades later and required huge cleanups at EPA expense. IIRC one cleanup is still ongoing. I wish humanity could be encouraged to be more considerate of our planet.