I was about 12 years old. I had been engrossed with both the family Apple IIe computer and the fleet of Apple computers installed at my school, learning how to

I was about 12 years old. I had been engrossed with both the family Apple IIe computer and the fleet of Apple computers installed at my school, learning how to write BASIC programs. Wandering through the local shopping mall with my dad, we saw in the window of a software shop an Amiga 1200 running Lemmings. I was awestruck. I started getting copies of Amiga-related magazines, and saw these amazing three-dimensional pictures of things like balls and rubber ducks. It was like gazing into the future. Thankfully, my dad was likewise impressed, and within a few months we received delivery of a shiny new Amiga 3000. In anticipation of continuing my pursuit of programming, we got a compiler for an Amiga variant of BASIC, but I ended up focusing on two-dimensional graphics with Brillance, three-dimensional graphics with Imagine, and video editing with a variety of tools. A friend at school picked up an Amiga 2000 and joined the multimedia production fun. It might be a good thing that we didn't have YouTube back then, as we likely would have published all sorts of embarrassingly poorly-done animations and videos. We persuaded our school to buy its own Amiga computer for us to edit the student newsletter on, but we both left the school the following year, and it was reported that the Amiga got shoved into a storage space, never to be used again. I tried hard to persuade anyone who would listen to get an Amiga. The IBM-clones and Macs of the day just seemed so flat-out inferior, I couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't want an Amiga if they just realized what it could do. I suppose I would have been happy to still be using the Amiga to this day, except that, after the demise of Commodore, it became increasingly (but not surprisingly) clear that support for the Amiga platform was dwindling. Some users have heroically clung to the Amiga even to this day, but even by 1996 or so it was looking prudent to move elsewhere. Like remembering a corned beef sandwich from a deli you visited twenty years ago, I might be remembering the Amiga greater than it actually was. But even after thirteen years of using modern Apple computers (and iPads and iPhones and what-not), I still feel there was something magical about the Amiga that has not been captured in anything else. Or maybe the Amiga captured something magical in me.