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Comment by gherkin0 | Hacker News Reader

> There was no reason for a proprietary keyboard, either. Amiga's refusal to work with commodity hardware meant that it was doomed

I do not believe the concept of "commodity hardware" was well established when the Amiga was introduced in 1985, so faulting them for not using what eventually became commodity hardware is a little disingenuous.

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The clone business began in 1983 and was well established by 1985. The DEC Rainbow was introduced in 1982, and it failed largely because it required special floppy disks that were deliberately different from MS-DOS disks in order to force people to pay a premium for the disks. The Rainbow was literally laughed at by DEC junkies that I knew.

I was using clones at the time I bought an Amiga, using commodity hardware, and nothing would interoperate with the Amiga.

I bought the Amiga intending to invest a lot of time and effort developing compilers for it. After I discovered its compatibility problems, I knew it would never succeed and was not going to invest in it. If DEC couldn't succeed with its pointlessly incompatible Rainbow, how could Amiga?

DEC did eventually fix the Rainbow, but by then its bad reputation was irretrievably lost. The DEC aficionados who had been holding out for a DEC PC had thrown in the towel and given up on DEC.

The Apple product line had many of the same attributes as the Amiga.

Apple predated the IBM PC revolution. And as I mentioned before, Microsoft did Apple a huge favor by making the Z80 Softcard.

The Amiga 1000 had the sidecar and the 2000 had the bridgeboard. Each had multiple ISA slots. The first time I saw Windows, it was Version 2.0 on an A2000.

To me, that seems like more hardware compatibility than a Mac or II.

Wikipedia suggests the sidecar didn't do well because it was bulky and expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Sidecar

It was also fairly rare. Not all that surprising since Amiga 1000's were never abundant in the wild, at least for a consumer/hobbyist targeted system. Appeal depended on a mullet like "business in the front, party in the back" intersection. Such were those days.

The IBM clone business existed by 1985, but not "commodity hardware" in the modern sense.

Like someone else said, the Macintosh was released at about the same time, was both IBM-incompatible and Apple II-incompatible, and it managed to succeed. The Amiga wasn't doomed because it did not use IBM-style keyboards or IBM-formatted disks or whatever.

To take the keyboard for example, there was the difference between XT and AT keyboards.

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