Same age, same experience. I also remember when years later I first started really using Windows and an IBM PC at university - they were already 486DX2 at a whopping 66MHz, but the UI still felt more sluggish than my 7MHz at home.

Computations, on the other hand, were incomparably faster.

A bit younger (I was in my last year of primary school when I graduated from the C64 to the Amiga 2000). I fondly remember reading through the back of the Amiga 2000 reference manual (the ring-bound one) on Christmas day. It had schematics and everything! (back at that age, schematics just LOOKED cool - I couldn't really read them as such).

I remember those $5 shareware disks you used to be able to get at the markets.

By the end though, several years later.... Oh man.... Games weren't as smooth as on the Amiga, but OH THOSE SIERRA VGA GAMES ON THE PC!!!! Especially compared to their horrible Amiga ports (which were also Sierra abandoning the platform.... the port of King's Quest VI that was done by Revolution Software shows how much better they could have been).

Awesome memories!

They had shareware disks bundled with magazines. I knew someone who worked at the magazine shop and we would slide some out to copy them. It's amazing how now I can get any software so easily.

I'm a little older (46) and my first computer was a Vic20. That was followed by a C64 which I owned when the Amiga 500 was released and the difference was staggering. The introduction of the workbench desktop was jaw dropping compared to the relatively clunky Commodore Basic interface of the older machines. I couldn't afford one at the time so I only got to play with the 500 at a friends or in stores which probably made them even more fabulous - it was years before I actually owned an Amiga and that was the 1200. The next time I had such an experience was when I started using Sun Sparc stations connected to a network and the SunView interface. Great days.

First computer was a PC1211. Then I got an ORIC ATMOS and an Atari ST. Never really had a chance to play with an Amiga and couldn't buy it (a bit pricey - although maybe an other way to play that hand would have been to save the money spent in other computers to only buy the Amiga. But at that rate, I'd probably still be waiting for something better to come around.

"The Future Was Here" really got me to understand what was so great about the Amiga (because, the ST also had the Boing demo - but the sound wasn't as nice.)

Still have my Commodore 64. It still works. And I still have probably a hundreds of games and progams I downloaded from the old BBS systems on a 300 baud modem that at the time I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I busted my butt one summer mowing lawns to afford to pay for my own telephone line so that I could spend endless hours on that thing. And then the movie WarGames came out and I beefed up my efforts to take over the world on my old C64 :)

Love it! I started out on C64 too. Buying computer magazines and programming books. Didn't really understand much back then but it was everything I wanted to spend my time on.

Same boat. Funny a few years ago I was cleaning some stuff in my parent's basement and came across a collection of old computer magazines from back then. Ended up climbing up in the attic, grabbing the old C64, and hooking it up just to make sure it still worked. Started right up and worked just like the first day I got it. Wish I could go back to those days without a care in the world.

>The innocence and magic feeling of all this at the time, unexplored possibilities an amazing time I hope every generation gets to experience in their own way.

I'm your age and can't speak on what young people today are feeling, but the last time I felt "magic" in the computer world was when I stepped up to a Kinect. Suddenly the game was tracking me and my avatar was making my movements. It just felt surreal and psychologically somehow put me in the game. Like the Amiga, it was a little half-baked and then ultimately unprofitable, but for a short time I remember thinking, "Wow, this kind of tracking could be the future. Think about unlocking your front door by analyzing your gait, having a whole body motion cap avatar that does everything you do including facial expressions, games that you play with your whole body, etc" Sadly, the game industry has gone back to its hobbyhorse of AAA shooters and next-gen consoles without much to offer. I guess we'll see how VR does as well, but that just seems like more of same - a screen on your face instead of in your living room.

I hope to experience magic again. Magic Leap and Hololens sound like they might be the proper middle-ground between "face on screen" and Kinect.

One of the best memories I have of my father is when he opened the car trunk, beaming, presenting me a brand new Amiga 500, and the joy and the excitement my very nerdy teenage self felt.

A fantastic machine, at the time the best of both worlds for gaming and productivity.

Two years younger.

Same experience here, specially because some of my friends were active in the Demoscene.

However my parents though I was better off with a 386SX (looking to the present they were right), so I had to go to their places to play with their systems.

No system has kind of captured the same spirit.

Well said, its just hard to see that combination of accessibility and magic happening again, everything was new to everyone (almost) back then.

so well put.