[henrikschroder]

I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice.

(More of my school friends back then had Ataris than Amigas, so it was a no-brainer decision for me.)

I'm curious what spurred the insane die-hard mentality though. Most of us left the Amigas and Ataris for the PC in the early 90s, except for a few who swore by their Amigas and loved them to bits even though their relative performance grew more and more pathetic.

So what caused it? First love? Or was there something genuinely good about the system? I'm genuinely curious.

[DLWormwood]

Same here, and I really did want an Amiga at one time. One of my favorite internet comic writers still apparently uses them to this day.

http://www.sabrina-online.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q

That said, I ended up on Macs, and for the longest time, I though we were going to end up in the same boat. (And in a way, we did. To me, OS X isn’t quite the joy to use due to it’s complexity and design compromises for interoperability versus the classic Mac OS.)

EDIT: Every time this topic comes up, I’m reminded of an old USENET thread I posted to back in the day.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.advocacy/brows...

I’m the first “Mac user” in that thread.

[elblanco]

I think it's for a few reasons:

1) because it was a really powerful system that was just under the complexity curve such that a dedicated person could learn literally everything about the system from top to bottom and do cool stuff with it.

2) It's stock form was insanely powerful out of the box, while PCs were from different vendors, with different configurations and no particular standard "thing" was a PC.

3) It wasn't really meant to be tinkered with, but almost everybody who had an Amiga had done some crazy things to upgrade it. The hacker community on it was vibrant and technically awesome (see #1 above). Whereas if I wanted to upgrade my PC I simply inserted a new card or something, these guys were soldering new OS ROMS and SCSI interfaces into a system that really wasn't supposed to have these things. I remember reading about Power PC expansion boards for the A500 and wondering "where's the expansion slots?"

4) Because of #3, systems took on very individualistic flavors, like muscle cars tricked out by their owners. You knew that a guy with an A500 that had the latest OS ROMs, two hard drives, a VGA monitor, a couple of floppy drives and was on his 3rd keyboard had put a lot of personal time into the physical aspects of his box. The same couldn't really be said (at least not to anywhere near the level) with PC owners.

5) Amiga user group meetings were a blast with people bringing and showing off their machines, trading pirated software (anybody remember "Fish disks"?) and generally have a great time trading trick out secrets with each other. It felt like a car club community event rather than a computer community event.

[kenjackson]

"I had an Atari 512 STE. Clearly the superior choice."

You do realize that thems is still fightin' words? The Vi/Emacs war is a pillow fight compared with the Amiga/Atari ST wars.

[henrikschroder]

I can almost remember how the arguments went.. Guru meditation sucked more than the bombs, but the 800kB weird-standard diskette format was better than the 720kB one? And MIDI-ports were better than that weird 4096-colour format that noone really used?