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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC.

The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.

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Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first ever sold - period.

https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...

I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.

1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.

I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.

Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20 Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.

Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.

Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list

I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)

Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.

> I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.

Platform studies as an interdisplinary discipline should, and usually does, pay attention to the subtleties of different markets; many an enthusiast's dabblings in history do not, thereby often enough mimicking the sort of Ereignisgeschichte ("event history") from other fields hobbyists gravitate to, e. g. military history.

I, for my part, value Datagubbe's account as an interesting meditation on personal computing realities, and therefore choices, in the Sweden of the late 80s to early 90s.

My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.

Minor correction: The Amiga 500 came out in ~May-October 1987, depending on your country.

You're right, it was probably summer 1987.

Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92, which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could barely run the original civilization.

Wing Commander was released for the Amiga! It just ran absurdly slowly.

Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.

It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games.

Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable.

And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin.

Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.

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