I don't think we negotiate the same phenomenon. You seem to describe the harmless, almost romantic indulgences of nostalgics. I talk about the bizarre, often enough toxic distorsions of a certain breed of user, who still fights, after all these years, their Platform War. The sort of fan who blames "the PC" for the "ills of the industry".

Anyway, off to some specifics:

> "The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards [...]".

A standardized general-purpose computing platform "for the future". Exactly what spoke to me, as disseminated in the publications I read as a kid in 1991.

> "Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac."

"Power balance"? I didn't think in such abstracts when I made my choice, and conducted the long and merciless attrition-lobbying campaign for financial support, to buy a PC. The Amigas and the Ataris were simply not a factor for a variety of different, but very tangible and practical reasons:

Atari ST? I was not (on my way to become) a musician with the need for a precise and affordable backpack-portable computer instrument.

Amigas? The big birds were seen, outside of some specialist-niches, as uneconomical compared to their IBM-compatible brethren.

The vanilla home computers were seen as affordable, but extremely limited, racking-up (hidden) secondary costs to make them more usable. Often enough they carried a certain cultural stigma as well, being perceived by our financiers as gaming toys and therefore time wasters. And most importantly? No one I personally knew had an Amiga. Who to swap software with, where to find a mentor? Yeah...

The Atari guys I befriended used their machines almost exclusively for dabbling in electronic music, later as part of the emerging East German EBM and hard techno scene.

Games? The titles I was interested in either didn't exist on M68k platforms (flight simulations à la Aces of the Pacific, wargames such as the Harpoon series, or adventures like The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes), were practically unplayable (e. g. Red Baron), considered inferior (e. g. Wing Commander)... or just came out too late.

By listening to stories of some Britons of my age, it only recently came to my attention how privileged I have actually been. Some of these people told me stories of buying their first A600s or A1200s only in 1993! At that time it was hard to separate me from my trusty, second-hand PC... a machine with a CPU-type nearing its eighth (!) birthday (386DX-25).