10 PRINT "We will miss you Jack"
20 GOTO 10
Check out my signature. It's been there for literally maybe 8 years of my nearly 10 year membership on these forums. Amigas and Commodores are what got me into computing, and Jack made that all happen!
I started with a VIC 20 and programmed with all 4K of RAM that puppy came with. Played a lot of GORF and text adventures on it.
Then we moved to a Commodore 128 ... which we normally used in 64 mode. Who didn't? That single computer was probably the reason I got into computing.
I then moved on to an Amiga 500, then an Amiga 2000 ... and finally an Amiga 1200 they had the AGA chipset and, despite the numbering convention, was far more powerful than the 2000. I can't say enough about the Amiga line. It quite literally took until the mid 90's before any other computer could match an Amiga's graphics and sound capabilities.
My first Mac was a PowerComputing clone with a 603e processor that I bought in 1997 for my junior year of graphic design school. It lasted me maybe 4 years and multiple upgrades! I had a *massive* 64MB of ram in it.
Everyone makes waves in the universe somehow. Jack made computing affordable to a lot of people that, despite my love for Apple and Jobs, Apple didn't do as well. The Apple II was inferior in nearly every way.
When I was in high school, there was a group of us who all had C64s, and we would swap code, games, etc. Then one guy got an Atari ST, and lots of us got very jealous. That thing was amazing. Then we all got REALLY jealous was when another guy got an Amiga. It was far ahead of anything any of us had ever seen, including the Mac and the Apple II. As you said, it was many years before anyone had something that could touch it.
When I was in college in the mid 90s (around 94-95), I had a friend who worked in the campus TV station. I thought all the cameras and other tech they had was kind of neat, but what really caught my eye was the Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster they were using to do graphics work. It amazed me that it was still working, and according to the staff, doing a better job than anything else they had tried.