Honestly, this list of features is really impressive, I’m really starting to see what made AmigaOS so special for so many people, and I’m a hard-line *nix gal. AmigaOS seems really unique, in that it’s an especially lightweight, responsive, yet structurally clever and well thought through system. It must’ve felt light years ahead of everything well into the 90s. This is definitely making me want to upgrade my A500 to Kickstart 2.04 or 3.1 to get these features.
I was a teenager at the time so I got to play with it when it was new. I had the privilege of learning how to code on my Amiga 500. Sadly it was in AmigaBASIC and later AMOS Pro (I even bought the compiler for that) and I never got to using real programming languages until the Amiga was already defunct. I find myself going back now, though, and admiring the OS interfaces in context with much more knowledge. The UI APIs were very lacking compared to today’s toolkits, but for the time they were really next level.
That’s the same as me. I had Amos and the compiler too. Must have been around the time the company went under, perhaps just before. I didn’t know they went under until years after. My parents would not have bought me an expensive PC anyway so I was stuck with what I had, and it was great.