Okay it was the operating system. workbench ran on top of it as did whatever game you ran on it.
It was a console in the sense of it having locked hardware that was basically impossible to configure. 1 drive bay, 1 expansion port & whatever you could plug into the rear ports, kind of like an all in one motherboard that could only run the one OS. It was a computer in every other sense of the word though and a fuck of a good one

That it was. I loved my Amiga dearly. Used it for lots of different things. Wrote school papers (I had a 9-pin colour matrix printer :-D), made music in various trackers, fiddled with DeluxePaint, and of course, played lots of games.

Heh. I think I figured that out, it just DOESN'T make sense, unless you lived in a world with no past of computing (which is when the Amiga was released). You load DOS and then load disks to run programs? I wonder how they managed to do so much with the Amiga back in the days, I can give you that.
From my archeological research, I hear the Amiga at one point managed to have a Windows-like operating system (sorta), photo editing, word processors... but I suppose you had to be swapping a disk every two minutes for that kind of work. Imagine, the thing was fully multimedia prepared, high-colored etc, and was held ransom to the number of diskette bays you owned! When I learned that, I almost cried.

Thats basically right. There was a fair chunk of disc swapping but only for big games, your normal arcade / platform / shooter and games of that type usually only had 1 disc anf bigger games like monkey island 2 had 11 discs. Not that you had to swap discs ALL the time, most apps were really cleverly made so it was only when using certain resources or one finishing a level in a game. Also there was an available hard drive so you could store a whopping 20 megabyes!
Commodore had Workbench which was basically the same in concept as windows 3.1 but I'd not call it "Windows Like". It'd be more accurate to say that both Commodore & Microsoft (as well as apple & whoever owns unix, [sun microsystems isn't it?]) had a Xerox Star like operating system. The Star was basically the start of everything we know as computing, everything afterwards was a shameless knockoff. From what I've read, xerox had it on display but had not copyrighted the concept and both jobs & gates ripped it off. Have a look at the video and remember this was designed in the late 70s & early 80s when all computing was in the form of a dumb terminal with a text only interface to a mainframe.
Check the size of that tower though, I've used servers smaller than that that probably weighed half the amount. Also the keyboard, which is JUST a keyboard is the size of a C64, shows how much miniaturisation took place in the year that followed...

The video is apparently from '84. I realize I know shit about old OSs, but this was impressive in many ways. I might be overimpressed, but to me it's cool anyway: he has a proper and sizeable screen (not a TV set), a keyboard with OS commands, a working mouse, sends and receives "mail" (whoa), installs a printer in seconds, has "local internet" network, over 8 character file names (in a way)... Probably revolutionary for its time...
It's nice to know this stuff, I should read more about it soon.

Yes you did..
When playing Monkey Island 2 which, as you said has 11 disks (+ 1 for save games) my brother was playing, and I was changing disks.. It was a two-man job.. (Multiplayer, 80's style?) :-) You didn't use all the disks all the time, each "area" had 3-4 disks, which you alternated between...
And it never decided on what disk it needed.. Insert disk 4. Check. No wait, # 8. Check. *Working* Insert disk 2 etc...
But when one look on graphics and a lot of the programs (especially music/painting) the Amiga 500 were better than a lot of things on PC to far into the 90's/late 90's..
Ahhh.. Good times..

Yes, but Monkey Island 2 was truly an exception. I don't remember any other game with that many disks. The second worst swapping game I can remember was Dune 2 and it only had 5 disks, and didn't have all that much swapping.

I consider myself very open to old technology, I got not one but TWO old DOS PCs here with old sound cards and all that rot for old DOS games. But even I wouldn't take that swapping for long. I was thumbing through a catalog of old Amiga games, MANY of them had 3 or more disks, for an average of 1 diskette bay.
Imagine the children of today. They'd certainly laugh their asses off at anyone in the situation of swapping diskettes while playing (oh well, the children of today don't even know how to use these -- look image attached -- according to a respected newspaper they'd try to "press" the numbers as they were buttons).

I understand that.. However, what is important to understand is that this was more or less the most advanced thing we had ever seen.. This was the god-damn future. This was how it was meant to be! And as a base of comparison, the previous generation, the C64 had the big really flopp disks, took looong time to load (we're talking like five minutes) and the "loading screen" was often a epelepsy-inducing, nausiating thing, basically the screen was divided by 10-20 lines, which changed colour faster than the eye could see.. Probably the reason there are warnings on all games even today..
And you had to know a lot of text commands to get most games to work.. To run a game/program you would have to type:
L shift+O (Load) "game name" ,8,1
Or
List "disk name",8
to list the files on the disc, and locate the executable..
There was a lot more, but I was like 5 years at the time, and I remember poorly.. If someone could do a crash course in C64 usage that would have been excellent!
There was a lot of ingenouity and fresh-thinking going on, trying to get the newly acclaimed copied discs to work.. Had to be programmer light to work those things.. Ahh.. Also good times!
Compared to that discswapping was a small endevour..
And as Wishbone said, yeah, MI2 was the exception with 11 discs.. But it was totally worth it.. I remember my brother having the stack (!) of disks ready long before christmas, it being a bad-kept secret that my parents were getting him the expantion thingy the Amiga 500 required to run the game (which was what? A 1 kb RAM-expansion or something? Less?)

The default expansion was 512K so the machine had a full meg and you could do all sorts of fancy things like have sound in some memory intensive games, FA18 Interceptor I think needed the expansion to have sound, otherwise you had to make whoosh & bang noises yourself. I was never satisfied with 1 paltry MB, the expansion unit I had allowed up to 8MB! Never got any more than 1MB but damnit I had the OPTION! I did own a second disc drive so disc swapping was a lot less annoying, THAT'S probably why I was thinking MI2 wasn't that bad, I had the primary discs in at all times. I often contemplated getting a second external drive (you could daisy chain them) to reduce the disc swapping more but I never got around to it.

Amiga used to rule.
It wasn't until the future Crew made the Second Reality demo (the first PC demo not to suck), infogrames released alone in the dark and idsoftware made doom2 that I got my first PC.