My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.