>One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time
Amiga was only better 1985-1988.
I still have my original Amiga and A2000. I was an Amiga user for a decade. They were very good. I was platform agnostic, caring only to get work done as quickly and easily as possible so I was also an early Macintosh user as well as Sun and PA-RISC. And yes, I still have all of those dinosaurs too.
By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back.
But by 1988 the PS/2 with a 386 and VGA was out and the A2000 was shipping with a 7MHz 68000 and ECS.
By 1990 the 486s were on the market and Macs were shipping with faster 030s and could be equipped with NuBUS graphics cards that made Amiga graphics modes look like decelerated CGA.
After the A2000 the writing was on the wall.
Note: my perspective is of someone who has always used computers to do work, with ALMOST no care for video games so all of the blitter magic of Amiga was irrelevant to me. That being said when DOOM came out I bought a PC and rarely used my Amigas again.
What I can confidently assert is that I upgraded my A2000 many times and ran into the absolute configuration nightmare that is the Amiga architecture and the problems with grafting upgrades onto a complex system with multiple tiers of RAM and close OS integration with custom chips.
One more bit of heresy is that I always considered Sun's platform to be superior to SGI's.
I think you are mostly right, I just think your timing is off. Those early 386 machines and Mac II systems were very expensive, at least 2 to 3x the cost of an Amiga. The average home user wasn't going to drop $8K on a PS/2 model 80 with a 386/16.
By the early 90's the Amiga just wasn't competitive. The chip set barely evolved since 1985. ECS barely added anything over the original chip set. By around 1992 or 1993, 386 systems with SVGA and Soundblaster cards were cheap. Amiga AGA was too little, too late. Also consider the low end AGA system (Amiga 1200) was totally crippled with only 2 megs of slow "chip" RAM.
I was an Amiga fan until 1993. Started with an A500, then A3000. Eventually I moved on to a 486 clone w/Linux. Later on I had a Sun SparcStation 10 at home, so I agree with you on Sun and SGI.
> Amiga was only better 1985-1988. By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back.
Oh indubitably! I don't think even the most committed Amiga fan, even the ones that speculate about alternate histories, would deny that at all.
The thing is, though, that only happened because Commodore essentially decided that since it had so much of a head start, it could just rest on its laurels and not really innovate or improve anything substantially, instead of constantly pushing forward like all of its competitors would do, and so eventually the linear or even exponential curve of other hardware manufacturers' improvements outpaced its essentially flat improvement curve. So it doesn't seem like IBM PCs and eventually even Macs outpacing the power of Amiga Hardware was inevitable or inherent from the start.
If they had instead continued to push their lead — actually stuck with the advanced Amiga chips that they were working on before it was canceled and replaced with ECS for instance — I certainly see the possibility of them keeping up with other hardware, and eventually transitioning to 3D acceleration chips instead of 2D acceleration chips when that happened in the console world, eventually perhaps even leading to the Amiga line being the first workstation line to have the gpus, and further cementing their lead, while maintaining everything that made Amiga great.
Speculating even further, as we are seeing currently with the Apple M-series having a computer architecture that is composed of a ton of custom made special purpose chips is actually an extremely effective way of doing things; what if Amiga still existed in this day and age and had a head start in that direction, a platform with a history of being extremely open and well documented and extensible being the first to do this kind of architecture, instead of it being Apple?
Of course there may have been fundamental technical flaws with the Amiga approach that made it unable to keep up with other hardware even if Commodore had had the will; I have seen some decent arguments to that effect, namely that since it was using custom vendor-specific hardware instead of commodity hardware that was used by everyone, they couldn't take advantage of the cross-vendor compatibility like IBM PCs, could and also couldn't take advantage of economies of scale like Intel could, but who knows!
The thing with Commodore was that as a company it was just totally dysfunctional. The basically did little useful development between C64 and the Amiga (the Amiga being mostly not their development). The Amiga didn't sell very well, specially in the US.
The company was going to shit after the Amiga launched, it took a competent manager to save the company and turn the Amiga around into a moderate success.
Commodore didn't really have money to keep up chip development. They had their fab they would have need to upgrade that as well, or drop it somehow.
Another example of that is the Acorn Archimedes. Absolutely fucking incredibly hardware for the price. Like crushing everything in price vs performance. But ... literally launched with a de-novo operating system with 0 applications. And its was a small company in Britain.
The dream scenario is for Sun to realize that they should build a low cost all costume chip device. They had the margin on the higher end business to support such a development for 2-3 generations and to get most software ported to it. They also had the software skill to make the hardware/software in a way that would allow future upgrades.
Imagining Sun buying Amiga and making it a lower end consumer workstation to pair with its higher end ones, with all the much-needed resources and interesting software that would have brought to the Amiga is a really cool thought experiment!
Sun did actually approach Commodore to license its technology for low end work station. However the Commodore CEO at the time declined for unknown reasons.
I don't know what Sun had planned for this tech.
A even more interesting approach for Sun would have been to cooperate or acquire Acorn. The Acorn Archimedes was an almost perfect low end work station product. Its incredible weakness was its lack of OS and it total lack of applications.
Acorn spend an absolutely absurd amount of money to try to get the OS and application on the platform. They spend 3 years developing an new OS, and then realized that this was going nowhere. So they rushed out another new OS. And then they realized that nobody want to buy a machine with a compromise OS and no application. So they had to put up huge effort to try to fix that. The company simply couldn't sustain that kind of effort on the Software side while at the same time building new processors and new machines. Its surprising what they achieved but it wasn't a good strategy.
Had they just adopted SunOS (BSD) it would have been infinitely better for them. And for Sun to release new high and and low end RISC workstations at the same time would have been an absolute bomb in the market.
Even if you added all the bells and whistles to the system (Ethernet, SCSI, extra RAM), you could be very low priced and absolutely blow pretty much every other system out of the water.
Re Acorn though — As much better from a market perspective as buying Acorn and releasing RISC- and BSD-based low-end workstations might have been for Sun, I still prefer to imagine a world where the Amiga's unique hardware and software got to live on — perhaps with compatibility layers to run Sun software, but nevertheless preserving a UNIX-like but still non-UNIX OS lineage and non-generic-PC hardware lineage.
That's definitely how it seems to me, which is why I focused on Commodores poor management decisions first and only mentioned the possible technical issues second
It took a bit more than 1990, for PC 16 bit sound card, Super VGA screens, with Windows 3.1 to be widely adopted for the PC to out perform the Amiga, specially in European price points.
My first PC was acquired in 1992, and still only had a lousy beeper, on a 386SX.
I was similar, not really interested in graphics, just a nice programming environment. PCs had that stupid segmented address space (which was not ignorable at the programming language level), expensive tools, and crappy OSes. My Amiga 2000 had a flat address space, a nice C development environment, and multitasking actually worked. It really was ahead of its time, in combining a workstation-like environment and an affordable price.
Chip ram, fast ram, cpu ram, expansion board ram, or slow ram? Did too much ram force your zorro card into the slooooooooooow ram address space (mine did)? Tough cookies bucko!
It's the same in most computers. Wiping RAM is effort.
The feature here is that AmigaOS will try and reuse the ExecBase structure if found.
Such structure has a checksum, which is checked. If the check fails, a new one is made. This happens e.g. on power on, or after running games that are not system friendly (i.e. most games).
But if the check passes, this structure has important information, such as a list of memory regions, the "cold/cool/warm" vectors, which are function addresses that get called if non-zero at different points of the boot process (non-surprisingly a virus favorite), as well as and a list of reset-resident modules, which become allocated memory, thus protecting them.
A popular such device implements a reset-resident memory-backed block device, which the Amiga is able to boot from.
As someone trying to get into Amiga retro competing as a hobby in today's day and age, I find it keeping all the different types of ram straight very confusing lol
We kept our A2000 viable longer by adding the CPU board with the 030 chip. We went from 7MHz to somewhere around 40MHz or whatever. It meant that my Lightwave render went from 24 hours per frame to a few hours per frame.
Amiga was only better 1985-1988.
I still have my original Amiga and A2000. I was an Amiga user for a decade. They were very good. I was platform agnostic, caring only to get work done as quickly and easily as possible so I was also an early Macintosh user as well as Sun and PA-RISC. And yes, I still have all of those dinosaurs too.
By 1987 PC and Mac caught up and never looked back.
But by 1988 the PS/2 with a 386 and VGA was out and the A2000 was shipping with a 7MHz 68000 and ECS.
By 1990 the 486s were on the market and Macs were shipping with faster 030s and could be equipped with NuBUS graphics cards that made Amiga graphics modes look like decelerated CGA.
After the A2000 the writing was on the wall.
Note: my perspective is of someone who has always used computers to do work, with ALMOST no care for video games so all of the blitter magic of Amiga was irrelevant to me. That being said when DOOM came out I bought a PC and rarely used my Amigas again.
What I can confidently assert is that I upgraded my A2000 many times and ran into the absolute configuration nightmare that is the Amiga architecture and the problems with grafting upgrades onto a complex system with multiple tiers of RAM and close OS integration with custom chips.
One more bit of heresy is that I always considered Sun's platform to be superior to SGI's.