I didn't grow up on the Amiga; I cut my teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer line (2 & 3). My first brush with an Amiga (outside of a demo at a Babbages in the ma

I didn't grow up on the Amiga; I cut my teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer line (2 & 3). My first brush with an Amiga (outside of a demo at a Babbages in the mall) was thru a guy I knew in high school who had one for video editing. He showed me (and others in our group - I had helped form a "Color Computer Users Group" and we met at this guy's house) a graphics demo - which completely blew me away. This was probably sometime in 1989 or so. After high school, and a year in a tech voc school (where I also got to use Amigas, because at the time industrial electronics used the 68k for controllers, so we had to learn how to code and interface to them - so we used an Amiga as the platform for that), I started my first software engineering gig, and at some point I convinced my employer (a small mom-n-pop shop) to lend me the money to buy an Amiga. I ended up getting an Amiga 2000 with a monitor and hard drive. I stayed on at that place long enough for them to give me two more loans (which got completely paid back); first for an Amiga 1200, then last for an Acer 486 PC (fell in love with Myst at Best Buy). I still have both Amigas, the monitor (1040s), software, tons of Fred Fish floppies...lol. I don't know if any of it still works; I haven't fired any of it up in decades. I got out of the Amiga around 1992 or so, and moved on to Windows. I honestly wished I had discovered Linux at the time, but it wasn't on my radar (I had some experience with Unix, specifically AIX and RS6000 hardware - at that first employer). I didn't discover Linux until 1995. Which I found to be a close experience to what I recall on the Amiga (it's more a feeling thing for me - definitely nothing like the graphics, sound, software, etc - but the discovery and freedom, that wasn't as there with Windows). Today, about the only thing I do with Amiga is occasionally purchase the latest version of Amiga Forever - at some point I want to build a dedicated emulation box running it.