Why did you buy your first Amiga?

[astuermer]

My dad bought a A500 package in 1987... only for writing texts in ProWrite
I got it in 1992 I think... played a bit with it, and so on.

In 1996 I bought my first AGA Amiga - an A1200, no HD, standard.
I bought a 340MB HD with some games on it, later I moved to an InfinityII Towercase, bought a Viper1230 Turbocard, later a MediatorPCI together with a LAN card and a Voodoo3.

When I moved 1 year ago, I sold it for about 250 Euros.
...1 week later I bought a desktop A1200 - again
But I sold it 2 months later... and took my A2000 which was dusty in my cellar - put a graphicscard, a GVP 040 into it and worked a bit.

Now - moving again - I am selling it (the A2000) and will receive my A3000D in about 2 days

[Ziaxx]

I was a member of a local Commodore club, we had club meetings once in a while where the members brought their computers to a rented school cafeteria or something (basically like a miniature copyparty), and at first everyone were using C64's, but then as the members started switching to the Amiga I didn't wanna feel left out so I was bugging my parents and got one for Christmas in 1989.

[Dr. Dude]

Pc sucked at the time... oh wait... it still does

Amiga, a computer whit power, and cheap to
And... to fit in local, joined the club... not much left it these days though

[narud17]

I was instaling a phoneline into a chaps shed at the bottom of his garden and he had a couple of 1200's and an 500 for his bizness i was hooked fromthen on.

[source]

I originally started with the pet computer my dad brought home from work once and while. From there I got a C64 for christmas. The amiga was the next logical progression. A buddy of mine had a 500 at the time, but I wanted a computer that would also do IBM apps as well. So I got an A2000 with a bridge board. from there I graduated to the A4000 T in 97. in 2001 I aquired 2 more 4000's as toaster flyer machines.

[Nexjen]

Our family had one for a few years till my dad sold it and then made me use an ST. :'(!!!! I eventully got round to buying my first Amiga 500 two years ago , which was faulty. Now I have two Amiga 600's in storage and quite a few good games.

[Photon]

My older home computer (MSX) seemed to go nowhere, so it was time to change. At the time I was writing features on programming it in Assembler, for a Swedish home computer magazine. But it was becoming obvious that it couldn't go much further - Konami sold cartridges with blitter chips and sound chips on them, and they were great, but there was no way a normal person could compete with software houses like on the good old C64. A friend of mine took over the column and he was more enthusiastic and did a great job, reporting MSX-2 developments and whatnot.

So at first I bought an Atari 520ST (shock! horror!) and it looked good on the utilities side, but the games were terribly bad. A few weeks later, close to Christmas of 1987/1988 I went to a friend's house and his mother had bought him an Amiga 500 from his home country England. He showed me some demos... The next day I went back to the store and the owner was kind enough to take the ST back.

Everything just looked so much better, the music was so totally beyond ST, and he was kind of a swapper, so he had a disk with a very early version of Seka on it. I biked over to his house every day for the rest of the holidays, just to be able to use his Amiga! In a couple of days I had made my first demo - it showed copper stripes until you clicked the mouse...

In the following weeks we formed a demo group with some friends and I made lame demos with graphics.library graphics, and then he got Soundtracker, and then he got Deluxe Paint... the rest is history

A while later I got my own A500 and I was in heaven. I devoted all the time I could to programming it, and my grades plummeted. And then I was back, writing programming column for the Amiga in the same computing magazine :P

I had a C64 when I befriended Robert in 7th grade school, he had an Amiga. He showed it too me and I was sold instantly. So I got a semester job and saved money to buy one my self. After a few months I had enough cash to buy my first Amiga, it was an A1000. It set me back around 1000$, which in 1986 was quite a lot of money.

I couldn't afford to buy the Monitor from the guy selling me the Amiga though, so when he delivered it, all I got was the main unit, a keyboard, a mouse and some games. None of them was of course playable without a monitor, except for Racter! Yes, I managed to start Racter by randomly clicking on the Workbench screen, which I of course couldn't see. Eventually I "found" the icon, and Racter started up. From thereon, I could play my first Amiga game on my first Amiga.

Ahh, the old times

[Avanze]

Mainly for the games I would say. I knew someone at that time who had a lot of games to copy for me. Around the time my father bought the Amiga 500+, the Atari ST was slowly dying out. So it seemed to be the natural progression, still kept the old Atari at the same time though.

[Pyromania]

I bought my first Amiga because I wanted to do video and capture photos, Newtek's DigiView impressed me. Yes I bought the A500. I really enjoyed my C-64 but always wanted an Amiga and got ride of it after I got the 500. I did buy a SX-64 about 3 years later though.

[Stein]

I bought my first Amiga for a very simple reason. I saw the game Shadow of the Beast the GFX just blew my mind, the smooth scroll was unbelivable, not to mention the excellent sound track.... I was beside myself, had to get one

[Pyromania]

Yup, SOFB impressed me too after I got my machine, I still love that game. I bet it sold a lot of Amiga's.

[Doc Mindie]

Having read through most of the first page of this thread.....MicroSoft and Windows owes us Amiga-fans ALOT!!!!

So....who's up for making Billy The Gay pay to get Commodore up'n'running again, so we can get some talented people back at the Commodore HQ in Silicon Valley?

I mean....there was hardly a good game (no, Doom was NOT that good, sloppy pixelated gfx) or gfx-package that could be used "allround" untill Win95......Plug and Play wasn't really usable untill Win98.....and DirectX is the answer to Amiga's "Code once, play on all models"

MicroSoft didn't dear implement such things untill Commodore was down and dead, it seems.

[BippyM]

Originally Posted by Doc Mindie

Having read through most of the first page of this thread.....MicroSoft and Windows owes us Amiga-fans ALOT!!!!

So....who's up for making Billy The Gay pay to get Commodore up'n'running again, so we can get some talented people back at the Commodore HQ in Silicon Valley?

I mean....there was hardly a good game (no, Doom was NOT that good, sloppy pixelated gfx) or gfx-package that could be used "allround" untill Win95......Plug and Play wasn't really usable untill Win98.....and DirectX is the answer to Amiga's "Code once, play on all models"

MicroSoft didn't dear implement such things untill Commodore was down and dead, it seems.

*cough*

[NightShade]

I purchased mine after a friend brought his dads A1000 into our Physics class, most ppl had the c64 or spectrum. I had a BBC Micro B... after seeing the gfx this machine produced along with kick ass sound.. I had to get an A500 which was pretty damn new, I catually sold the beeb to a school who paid enough almost to cover a new a500 as the beeb was great for hooking up to robots, basic programming etc...

[dondilly]

My first computer was a BBC B, loved it, excellent for tinkering amd knocking up hardware to drive from the userport (I had or was getting two HNCs under my belt one in Electronics and telecoms the other in realtime systems). The BBC was getting long in the tooth while I was doing the realtime HNC and I was fast becoming fed up with inserting printer escape sequences directly into wordwise WP documents.
I hated PCs, at work at the time, they were considered the things secretaries used while all the engineers used a mix of Intel MDSs and DEC VMS systems depending on the project. I was also using a unix based PDP11 at college to delelope for 68k target boards.
So when i started looking round to replace the beeb, PCs were a non starter and it meant choosing between the 3 main 68k machines n the market. The Mac was way too expensive and while I used a MAC a lot for schematics etc at work, I wanted something with a bit more colour to it. Then looking at the ST and from experience on my Bro's machine while the graphics way exceeded the beeb, it didnt quite cut it. TOS/GEM also seemed awkward and flakey and to be honest at this time, while many of the guys at college had STs, mainly for the 68k target, it was around this time most were selling them fast and buying amigas.
On the games front, while I like most , enjoy gaming, It wasnt that great a factor in choice other than the availability and choice of titles rather than the machine's gaming capabilities.
One thing I loved about the amiga even in wb1.3 was that the underlying system mimicked a baby unix with very similar shell scripting and CLI commands so found myself at home straight away.
I took the plunge must have been around the time the A3000 came out which was out of my price league. I didnt want to get a A500 as I wanted something more easily expandable so I ended up getting an A1500 (I believe the A1500 name was used in a couple of countries for different systems) this being in effect a A/B2000 (1mb chip) minus the bridgeboard and HD card but with a 2nd built in floppy.
I soon added a GVP HD8 to add fastram and a HD later supplemented by an internal CD drive. Later upgrades included a few extra HDs that I just kept adding to an external 4 bay scsi housing. The final upgrade was a picassoII gfx card. While not long after I got the machine, A2000 accelerator cards were getting about as common as rocking horse droppings and some might not see the point in adding a GFX card without an accelerator, I got it primarily for productivity use for WP use in low bit gfx modes and this was before the release of the A1200.
I wasnt in any rush to get a A1200 and around the time i would have made the leap, C= had gone bust. The A1500 remained my primary machine until 1996 when after a few months fed up with the my migis inability to handle web pages at any speed, I held my nose. swallowed and bought a PC ugh. I might one day upgrade my native migi hardware but am happy enough at the moment enjoying a speedy winuae.

My first was an A500. A mate of mine had had his for a while and after seeing games like lemmings, and monkey island I had to get one. Though once i discoverd dpaint 4 i spent most of my time doodling and animating.

[jrom]

Well.. it was my uncle who said I should get an Amiga. I had an MSX1 computer and wanted something better. My uncle said the Amiga had some interesting audio program which you could make music with. So he got me interested... and when I saw Turrican 2 I was convinced that it should be mine...

So I went through all the local newspapers and bought myself a second hand A500 (KS1.2) for 750 dutch guilders (~340 euro). Later bought the extra mem., 2nd drive and a colour monitor. I still have that one and it still works after all these years :-)

[Soul_scientist]

A friend at school was an only child and he got everything new as soon as it came out, so i bought his old amiga 500 off him just in time for christmas, probably one of the best things i bought back in 1992.
Non-stop playing over the whole of christmas

[snarkhunter]

In 1988, the market for my very first computer ever (a Dragon 32, purchased in 1983) had become a genuine - and most saddening - desert. Therefore, it was high time I moved on to something else ! And there just wasn't anything around like the A500 at that time. I decided I had to have one after reading a few reviews in magazines and getting a copy of the advertising brochure.

I think I purchased this machine in Sept. or Oct. 1988, along with a "1081" colour monitor. Later on came a A501 memory extension, then an external 3,5" Cumana disk drive. Then a printer.

Around May 1993, after trying to make a decision for months, I eventually purchased an A4040 (6 MB RAM, 340 MB HD) and got rid of my trusty A500. And a few weeks later, CBM went bankrupt... but I kept using my Amiga almost everyday until early 1996. Then I began to use it less and less often, until I had to switch to PCs. But of course, things were never as exciting again afterwards...