It was the summer of 1996. I was 12 years old and really into exploring older computers, especially the Commodore brand, after my grandmother gave me an old Commodore Plus/4 that she had won as a door prize somewhere many years earlier and never used. I was also able to tinker with others that belonged to my friends or that I found in thrift stores (PET, 64, 128, etc). Unfortunately everything Amiga had eluded me thus far.

I somewhat got to know the Amiga through the UAE Amiga emulator which at the time was only in a semi-working state at best. My 66mhz 486DX Packard Bell didn't exactly do the greatest job of running it at full speed or really even usable speed. But it was still enough that I became enamored with the look-and-feel (and ARexx to some degree) and knew I needed to get my hands on a real one someday. It was the holy grail of my ancient computer quest.

Then one day that fateful summer it finally happened. I was in the Montgomery Ward department store in Indiana, PA with my mom. I was poking through the electronics section and saw a very large stack of reduced-price VCR boxes on one of the shelves out on the open floor. I was looking over the stack from top to bottom when I noticed there was another box stuck underneath the lowest ledge of the shelf. I pulled it out and wiped off the unfathomably thick layer of dust from the box to reveal that it was an unopened Amiga 500, probably untouched and forgotten for many years. THE DAY WAS MINE.

I was never the type of kid to blow my allowance money on random things. I saved it all with my eyes on bigger prizes and I had just found the ultimate prize. The sticker price was $200 and I had roughly that amount saved up at the time. I asked my mom if I could use my allowance money to buy it. Naturally an argument ensued but ultimately I won and was allowed to make the purchase. When I took it up to the counter the lady remarked that she hadn't seen one of those in several years and didn't realize they still sold them. She rung it up and it was still apparently in their inventory system, so the Amiga was mine.

Emulators be damned, I finally got to explore it in real life. It was every bit as magical as I had hoped. I couldn't help but make comparisons to my aforementioned Packard Bell. 4096 colors vs a meager 256. Deluxe Paint vs MS Paint. An operating system with true preemptive multitasking and a very responsive GUI vs DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. Turrican vs. anything that wasn't Turrican. There was no going back. I had left Plato's Cave and seen the light. I didn't ever want to be away from the light again.

Unfortunately we all know how the allegory of the cave ends. No man can give light to the blind. My mom decided that I had spent way too much of my saved allowance on the Amiga, especially since I already owned an old but still working Packard Bell. Then just shy of a month later, while still within the timeframe of the return policy, she forced me to pack it all up and take it back. Just as quickly as I had found the holy grail and drank sweet Amiga-brand kool aid from it, it was gone.

I guess the main point of my post is that the Amiga, even in that short period of time, had a fairly profound effect on me when I was little. At least enough for me to write this long, rosy-eyed, nostalgic comment. It was also partially the impetus for me wanting to study computer science and become a software engineer. My thought being that if someone else can create something so cool, maybe I can too if I just learn how. (Also, secondarily, wtf mom? Where the hell else am I going to get a new-in-the-box Amiga 500 now?)