I too was an Amiga fan, moving from an 8-bit Radio Shack Color Computer to the Amiga 1000 in late 85. The price of the Amiga was significantly beyond my early 20s budget so I was only able to finagle one by finding someone who needed some software written on the Amiga and getting them to buy me one in exchange for writing what they needed. But such was the siren song appeal of Amiga's promise in mid-85. I spent months poring over every page, image and word in the "Launch" issue of AmigaWorld Magazine, which was in reality a cleverly disguised extended sales brochure that came out months before the computer itself was available for retail purchase.
No teenager ever inhaled every inch of a Penthouse magazine in the detail I memorized that issue of AmigaWorld. It was truly computer porn in every sense, an airbrushed fantasy which significantly surpassed the reality of the computer that actually shipped for at least its first year on the market. There wasn't much you could do with a $2000 Amiga 1000 system in the first months other than run Boing, RoboCity and other demos ($2000 including the "optional" chip RAM upgrade (which was in reality required), RGB monitor and external 2nd floppy drive).
The early launch applications like Graphicraft and Musicraft weren't quite complete enough to be useful for much real production work, largely because when the Amiga 1000 first shipped the paint was still quite wet on the operating system itself. Worse, Addison Wesley the publisher of the official developer docs for the Amiga took their sweet time actually printing and shipping the damn books, despite the fact it was only a re-layout of the docs Amiga supplied in Xeroxed form to early developers. Unable to wait any longer as my Amiga-purchasing benefactor needed their software, I drove three hours away late at night to the house of a developer who had the original Amiga docs and took them to an all-night Kinko's and spent the hours between midnight and dawn copying every page by hand (at night because the developer needed the docs by day because he was late on his own application for his employer). But... strangely, we loved the early Amiga 1000 anyway. We thought we were buying a Penthouse Pet but what showed up was an infant that did little other than cry all night and need its diapers changed :-). Thankfully, a year or so later the OS had matured enough and sort-of real tooling, apps, docs and source code examples (in the form of Fish Disks) started appearing enough that the Amiga's fantasy potential slowly started to become real.
Dave's right that most Amiga-centric people from back in the day may still simply be incapable of assessing the Atari ST in a completely fair and balanced way. That's probably because we didn't assess the early Amiga in a fair and balanced way either (but in the other direction). So, he did a great job setting aside his own ingrained worldview to put the ST in it's rightfully deserved historical place.
The ST really was a hell of a deal, and in all honesty, I could never have afforded an Amiga 1000 if I'd actually had to pay cash for it instead of labor. While the early ST certainly didn't deliver on its own promise either (due to its own serious teething pains), it did hold the promise of being the super cute, fun girl next door who could become your best friend and, if you were lucky, actually marry. It paled only when compared to the Penthouse Pet-fantasy promise of the Amiga, which the early Amiga certainly didn't live up to (and by a much larger margin than the ST), but which, somehow... eventually, the Amiga mostly managed to do - although largely in the form of the later A500 and A2000.
To the teenage me, the Amiga 1000 looked gorgeous, but was an impossible dream due to its entry price. The Atari ST520 was affordable and still looked very nice.
No teenager ever inhaled every inch of a Penthouse magazine in the detail I memorized that issue of AmigaWorld. It was truly computer porn in every sense, an airbrushed fantasy which significantly surpassed the reality of the computer that actually shipped for at least its first year on the market. There wasn't much you could do with a $2000 Amiga 1000 system in the first months other than run Boing, RoboCity and other demos ($2000 including the "optional" chip RAM upgrade (which was in reality required), RGB monitor and external 2nd floppy drive).
The early launch applications like Graphicraft and Musicraft weren't quite complete enough to be useful for much real production work, largely because when the Amiga 1000 first shipped the paint was still quite wet on the operating system itself. Worse, Addison Wesley the publisher of the official developer docs for the Amiga took their sweet time actually printing and shipping the damn books, despite the fact it was only a re-layout of the docs Amiga supplied in Xeroxed form to early developers. Unable to wait any longer as my Amiga-purchasing benefactor needed their software, I drove three hours away late at night to the house of a developer who had the original Amiga docs and took them to an all-night Kinko's and spent the hours between midnight and dawn copying every page by hand (at night because the developer needed the docs by day because he was late on his own application for his employer). But... strangely, we loved the early Amiga 1000 anyway. We thought we were buying a Penthouse Pet but what showed up was an infant that did little other than cry all night and need its diapers changed :-). Thankfully, a year or so later the OS had matured enough and sort-of real tooling, apps, docs and source code examples (in the form of Fish Disks) started appearing enough that the Amiga's fantasy potential slowly started to become real.
Dave's right that most Amiga-centric people from back in the day may still simply be incapable of assessing the Atari ST in a completely fair and balanced way. That's probably because we didn't assess the early Amiga in a fair and balanced way either (but in the other direction). So, he did a great job setting aside his own ingrained worldview to put the ST in it's rightfully deserved historical place.
The ST really was a hell of a deal, and in all honesty, I could never have afforded an Amiga 1000 if I'd actually had to pay cash for it instead of labor. While the early ST certainly didn't deliver on its own promise either (due to its own serious teething pains), it did hold the promise of being the super cute, fun girl next door who could become your best friend and, if you were lucky, actually marry. It paled only when compared to the Penthouse Pet-fantasy promise of the Amiga, which the early Amiga certainly didn't live up to (and by a much larger margin than the ST), but which, somehow... eventually, the Amiga mostly managed to do - although largely in the form of the later A500 and A2000.