[blakespot]

Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.

Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.

[TheAmazingRace]

I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[sillywalk]

> I heard NASA used their Amiga systems

Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1]

[0] https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-...

[1] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s

[drewp]

https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control...

The document is sadly 404 now, but this was an awesome nerdy writeup of the conversion of the Universal Studios Waterworld from Amigas in 2007.