As you may have read in My Commodore history – part one: Commodore 64, my computer story started with a Commodore 64. Through a friend, who had an Amiga 1000 I was introduced to the Amiga world. As I remember, he later got both an Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000. He actually had an Atari ST as well.
This post originally appeared on my old Amiga site (Amiga Retro Computing).
If you have yet to read part one, you can read it here: My Commodore history – part one: Commodore 64
After having saved up the necessary funds, I bought an Amiga 500. I had bought a Philips CM8833-II monitor for the Commodore 64 that I could use for the Amiga 500. Joysticks for the C64 works fine with the Amigas so I could use them without problems. I do not remember which year, I actually bought my Amiga 500 but as you may know it was released in 1987. Mine had a Kickstart 1.3 which was released in 1988 so that will be the earliest date, I could have bought it.
Later I changed from the Amiga 500 to an ECS Amiga 2000 with Kickstart 2.04 that I upgraded little by little with a Hardcard – a SCSI Harddisk controller with a harddrive attached, and a PC-AT 286 card, that meant that I could run Windows AT compatible software. At some point I bought an Amiga CD32
I mainly used both my Commodore 64 and my Amigas for playing games, but I also did programming on both platforms. On the Amigas I programmed mainly in C and a little Assembly Code.
My favourite kind of games were Simulations of different kinds for instance the line of simulators from Microprose: Silent Service, Hunt for Red October, F117A, F19 Stealth Fighter, Gunship, etc. But also Urban simulators like SimCity, A-Train and Battle Stations! Another main game genre for me was racing games: Outrun, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, etc. And then I played Golf and Football Manager games a lot all the way back from Football Manager and Leaderboard Golf on the C64.
At some point I went on to studying Computer Science and the platform here was IBM PCs compatibles. At school we had Intel 80186 based Siemens PCs and were programming in Turbo Pascal, C and Cobol. When Commodore went bust in 1994 and after Escom also went bust in 1996, I finally switched to PCs and some time after this I got rid of my Amigas then an A2000 and a CD32. A decision I have regretted and thus try to rectify…
Stay tuned for My Commodore history – part three: Back to the Amiga
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