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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

It’s too bad Microsoft didn’t port their apps to the Amiga.

It probably would be alive today but people bought computers for the apps.

Amiga died thanks to Commodore mismanagement, Microsoft was still not that strong back then.

PCs were still a mix of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x or Novell Netware when the downfall begun around 1994, Windows 95 was still around the corner.

They stopped innovating.

The A1000 was released in 1985, the same year as the NES was released in America. It was a huge leap in capabilities over it's contemporaries.

But their massive lead was slowly whittled away by technology improvements. In 1992 they released AGA, which was barely twice as good as the original A1000 chip-set, while the IBM PC had innovated all the way from 4 color CGA, though EGA to VGA/SVGA with CPUs which were fast enough to any 2d (and increasingly 3d) effects in software.

Commodore really needed to get AAA out the door by 91 to hold onto their lead.

Doom was probably the final nail in the coffin, you simply couldn't implement it on the Amiga chipset due to it's planar graphics.

Doom killed the Amiga kind of like how Quake killed Cyrix x86 clones and to a lesser degree AMD's K5.

It's interesting how John Carmack's technical vision decided the winners in the computer industry at the time.

The best Wolfenstein 3-D ports were on the Apple IIgs, Atari Jaguar and Panasonic 3DO. FWIW.

3DO, so much promise...

Doom was just the nail. Economically, Commodore was messed up by the time Doom came around. But I agree, Doom made it very evident, I remember it well - suddenly, a 486 became a "must have" for rich geeks.

I grew up with a Commodore 64 but once my older brother started getting loaner machines from work, it was quickly dispatched.

We were usually playing Pirates!, Carmen Sandiego, Cauldron I & II, Ultimate Wizard & the Bard's Tale games and dialing into BBS on the C64. The usual way of dialing with leaked calling card numbers.

Eye of the Beholder on the 386SX machines was cool and all, but once he 'liberated' a 486DX from work and we started playing Doom and using his job's dialup service, the C64 was done.

Management stopped and restarted AAA and 3000+ several times, including replacing a significant chunk of hardware people with PC guys. That ultimately led to the cheap hack of AGA, the cheap and nasty (4000), and the cost saving entry (600) that cost significantly more to produce than the 500.

AAA was started in 88 if I remember right, and abandoned when the rest of the world had pretty much reached it.

The drama between Commodore and Atari in the 1980s is really interesting. I wonder what kind of computing world we'd be living in today if Atari had gotten the Amiga technology, rather than Commodore. I suppose with Tramiel still at the helm at Atari it wouldn't have been so different. I do wish could just spin-up a scratch universe to see what another company would have done w/ Amiga, though...

Yes, planar graphics had their strengths, but no chunky graphics (or only via a slow software routine) really made it difficult for the Amiga to keep up.

There were like 200 people left in Commodore who identified and send up proper invention for promotion, and the chiefs who were good to salute good groundswell instead tried to fund moving design to Flash LSI in which there could be no production future. All producers, all bad put orders; not that local foundry accord answers how to go into production in Massachusetts ca. 1990!

> Microsoft was still not that strong back then

Microsoft were pretty well established and very successful by 1985 (when the Amiga was launched). The following year they IPO'd for $61 million dollars - not a lot these days, but back then it was a reasonable chunk of cash for a company of its size in the day.

For Commodore, the edge of the pan was well in sight by 1985/86 because their management and overall strategy was a mess.

I dunno, MS ported the Mac version of Word to the Atari ST but by the time it got there (late, and buggy, and overpriced) indigenous ST developers had made their own superior products.

Interlace video for hi-rez modes on the Amiga also made it non-ideal for office type applications. Maybe if Commodore had bothered to include a scan doubler by default?

Amiga had quite a few cool office type applications like Pagestream.

The video wasn't an issue when using Commodore monitors.

Man, this brings back memories. I spent many sleepless nights using it to format friends' school work.

There was a WordPerfect port, but at least the initial versions were slow and did not feel like they took advantage of the OS. In other words, it was a bit of a rush job.

It was far from perfect, but Amiga WP 4.1 was way better than WP 5.1 for DOS! (I was a heavy user of both at the time.)

Yes it was. I used an Amiga with a Commodore monitor and while it was a lot better than any TV or other composite monitor, the interlacing was still noticeable and people's eyes would go wonky staring at that for eight hours a day.

I bought an A2024 monitor and ran all apps at 1024x800 60Hz. It was a glorious time.

Any monitor from back then would look awful now. I do remember noticing the interlacing on the Amiga though.

It was awful when compared to the paperwhite monochrome displays of a Mac or the Atari ST. It's frankly one of the things that set the Amiga back in the productivity regard.

It's competition was PC of that time which was worse in every regard including price. However, it did not have an image of being a game machine which helped a lot.

I am old enough to remember having these kind of discussion with people buying more expensive PCs because they were for serious work.

> Maybe if Commodore had bothered to include a scan doubler by default?

They did in the Amiga 3000; It has a VGA 15pin d-sub connector on the back. Only works with modern LCDs if the Amiga is in NTSC mode though.

The first Microsoft software I ever used was on the Amiga (AmigaBASIC). And while it was kinda cool for a BASIC implementation in those days, it was pretty damn buggy.

Microsoft used open source to kill the Amiga. They acquihired the developer of Bars & Pipes Professional, convinced him to open source it and had him work on DirectMusic instead. The fact that a leading MIDI tool for the Amiga was now open source basically left the Amiga music software industry a smouldering ruins, where it might have hung on for a few more years, forcing developers to look at Windows instead.

Open source destroys value, and Microsoft used that to their advantage.

Actually B&P wasn't open sourced for many years after the Blue Ribbon Soundworks acquisition. During this time, B&P was in limbo: the most powerful MIDI sequencer on the Amiga, locked up by Microsoft. The source code was only released when Microsoft decided it had no value to them.

After this there was a flurry of activity: Alfred Faust took up development, the manuals were scanned, and it all continued from there.

Huh? How does open-sourcing a program ruin its industry?

(I'm also skeptical about your thesis that music software was the cornerstone of Amiga's popularity. That was most likely games, and Doom was the most obvious killer there.)

> Open source destroys value

Fucking LOL. Tell that to any internet startup since 1995 and prepare to get laughed out of the room

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