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

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.