I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition.
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
By the early 90s the design and graphics-focused software for color Macintosh systems was light years better than Amiga. And the high-end video modes on Macs simply worked out of the box. If you needed a Gen-locked system for your local TV station, sure - get an Amiga. Ironically the custom chips that made the Amiga so special and a natural fit for broadcast design is also what killed its ability to use interlaced video modes that didn't make your eyes bleed or require special hardware. Most folks by then didn't want to learn how to make the Amiga "do all the same things". They wanted to go to the store, buy a computer that worked like the ones at school or work and use it. Period.
I have a Quadra 700 (same era as the Amiga 3000, which I also have) that can run circles around the 3000 with far less power or needed upgrades. For example by adding a decent video card the Q700 can output to dual monitors, each running their own resolutions and color depths - while multi-tasking. I can install triple-A CD-based software titles (like Photoshop or Illustrator or Pagemaker or MS Word) and on and on. The tools on Amiga pale in comparison even while the hardware was cool. In the 80s the Amiga was magical. By 1992 the way it seemingly just stood still was tragic.
As previously stated, high-quality print had become a "killer app" and Amiga simply didn't get the same support. And a lot of this had to do with their native video modes.
I can throw video cards and processor cards at the Amiga and make it a much more technically impressive machine. But if I want to run A+ professional software on it I basically need to run a Mac emulator.
As the video points out, the gaming market by '92 was moving on in the US. For 2D the SNES and Genesis took over. For 3D the PC arms race had begun, and there was no looking back.
Re-watching steve talk in Stanford and wondered about this calligraphy and font. But these discusssion about DTP reconfirmed how important this understanding make Apple unique. At that time and even afterwards due to the importance of fonts.
From the same era was this oddball solution[0], which at the time I had thought was something that never got out of R&D but apparently did exist as a commercial product in laughably limited numbers.
The a2024 monitor did not require any changes to the Amiga that drove it, except that software needed to be aware that it existed which naturally almost none did.
It basically just used the bitplane model as a tiling frame buffer and rather than displaying four or five bits of color depth, dropped the color depth by half and interpreted different colors as shades of gray using some monitor translation profile type of thing.
Again software would have to know how to play ball with this to work, but the effect was that you got a rock solid 60 hertz screen that displayed, initially, 8 or 16 shade greyscale at 1024 x 800 resolution.
There was a limitation in that the individual quadrants of the screen could only be redrawn at 10 or 15hz even though the scan rate of the tube was non-interlaced 60hz. Subjectively, having seen this thing in person I didn't get the sense that it made much noticeable difference for the kinds of applications that would use it, which would be principally dtp or coding. The computed vector refresh rate of the entire display field was in general nowhere near quick enough for the raster quadrant paging to be noticeable, except in vertical scrolling.
Sadly this was obviously was a desperate if rather clever hack solution to the eye-strain drawbacks of the Amigas interlaced display at high resolutions, so no software support however appeared that would have driven further work in this direction. However had that happen, and the technique applied to this monitor was updated to match the capabilities of the AGA chipset, the resolution would have been potentially as high as 2360 by 1024 at 75hz, (edit: should be 60hz. 75hz possible "only" at 1600x1200) which comfortably exceeds HD (though only in greyscale) but for 1992 would have been safely well out in front of almost anything else at any price range, let alone a few thousand dollars.
Given the awkward aspect ratio, a more sensible use of that resolution would have been splitting it vertically into a dual monitor setup, although one would need two identical monitors to make that work. and the Amiga's version of multiple virtual desktops, pull-down screens, would have been impossible to make work effectively, and one wd have to do multitasking entirely on the workbench display in full-screen application windows like the Mac.
But at least it would have been preemptive multitasking, which clearly was entirely worth all of the extra associated hazards of multitasking without an mmu-aware kernel. /s
> It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga.
By the early '90s, new DOS PCs had VGA and Sound Blaster cards as standard equipment, and were usually also including Windows 3.x. That put the typical PC clone on par with Amiga for most home/office use cases, especially including gaming.
> It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home.
Apple didn't have much of a foothold in the home at this point -- their bread-and-butter market was schools, and they were just beginning to get a foothold in the design and DTP market -- and Apple itself was in deep trouble for similar reasons to Commodore.
The fact that IBM PCs and compatibles had become the de facto standard for business computing is one of the exact reasons why Apple, Atari, and Commodore started losing market share in the early '90s.
If you could buy a single machine that's good for both business and gaming --- one that runs Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Wolfenstein 3D, and King's Quest V -- perfectly, why would you pay even more for a proprietary platform that only excelled at one set of use cases at the expense of the other?
This was the era of convergence between home and office computing, and the fact that IBM-compatibles dominated the office market, the capabilities of PCs had reached near-parity with the Amiga, and the PC was an open architecture with a large ecosystem of OEMs all competing with each other and driving prices down, spelled doom for any non-x86 computing platform by the mid-'90s.
Yeah, though people have explained to me that there were things in the Amiga that kind of "stayed primitive". While I think it's insanely cool how early they got preemptive multitasking, something that I think hurt them was the fact that by-design it didn't really support any kind of protected memory.
The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.
The filfre.net series of articles on the history of Commodore and Amiga is truly great work, and should give you a much clearer picture than pretty much anything else.
Every weakness of the Amiga could have been solved if money was poured into it instead of poured out of it.
The entire chipset state could have been bankswitched in a multi-tasking fashion and each process could have gotten its own "virtual Amiga" to play in. So much can be done when you have full vertical integration, but Commodore never leaned into it.
Every perceived weakness of the Amiga is from the perspective of the design of the winning system, i.e. generic modular PC design where the hardware and the OS are at best uneasy friends.
Did really anything support protected memory back then?
I also am still much more bought into the power of marketing and generally focusing on getting things into student's hands as the power move that Microsoft pulled off. Probably helped a ton by a lot of failed vendors along the way. It isn't that DOS and Windows were pure successes. Rather, they managed to outsource a ton of their failures onto other companies.
> focusing on getting things into student's hands as the power move that Microsoft pulled off
That's a huge part of Microsoft's success. They looked the other way regarding "piracy" to gain market share. At least in my country nobody paid for Windows at home. If students and home users had been forced to pay, the adoption of new Windows versions would fall drastically.
OS/2 1.x supported memory protection for apps targeted for OS/2. Since 1.x was written for the 286, it put all MS-DOS apps in the same address space, so one errant app could bring down the whole MS-DOS subsystem. It would take OS/2 2.0 to exploit the 386's Virtual 8086 mode, which allowed each MS-DOS app to run isolated.
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.