The Apple II family straddled the divide between work and play pretty well, though it was probably more of a play machine in later years. In 1988, when I was almost 8 years old, my parents bought an Apple IIGS as our first computer. My mother, who is an accountant, ran accounting software on that machine, but the rest of us also had a lot of fun with it, in both the 8-bit Apple II emulation mode and the 16-bit native mode. A couple of years later, she bought a PC. Whether it was so she could have better accounting software, or just the same accounting software as her colleagues, or because the rest of us liked the GS so much, I don't know. I don't think she ever told me directly. In any case, the net result was that I could spend more time on the GS, both playing around and learning to program. Of course, my siblings spent quite a bit of time playing games on the GS as well.

I didn't know anyone with an Amiga, and there weren't any at school. The only Commodore machine I ever got my hands on was my paternal grandfather's Commodore 64, which seemed quite limited compared to the Apple IIGS we had at home. From what I've read, it seems that the Amiga had better graphics than the GS. And of course, the Amiga's processor was faster, unless one added an accelerator card to the GS, which we never did. The GS's sound chip (an Ensoniq) was more advanced in some ways; it had 32 oscillators. But samples had to be stored in that chip's own RAM, and there was only 64K of that. Still, there were a few good trackers for the GS; the best one was NoiseTracker from the FTA.