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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

Cost more? Not really. The Amiga and Atari ST cost much less and were more capable than contemporary late 80's PCs. Less software is definitely true.

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Yes really. The clone market made PCs very cheap. Certainly a lot cheaper than anything 'Amiga.' Atari ST had poor expansion; you could get a clone PC with 8 expansion slots for the same price, plug in whatever you needed, leave out whatever you didn't. The market spoke.

Cheap, but not capable. You should price out an Amiga 500 and an equivalent 286 PC (VGA, SoundBlaster, etc.)

There were a lot of business users with no interest in the Amiga's A/V features, though. That was the strength and weakness of the PC platform -- it was adaptable for a lot of different use cases, in exchange for being worse at most of them than more specialized (or more expensive) platforms.

The Amiga 2000 series had ISA slots and IBM bridgecards to run DOS and Windows on the Amiga.

Commodore also had the PC Colt series PC compatible systems cheaper than IBM and Compaq etc.

The Commodore name and reputation of selling C64s in toy stores made businesses not see the Amiga seriously.

There also was that Amax Mac emulator for the Amiga as it used the same CPU as the Mac.

But all people could see was the AV part not the other parts.

Don't forget Commodore's marketing was so terrible, they were lucky if anyone saw the Amiga at all! The only reason I knew about was a fellow BBSer convinced me it was a much better deal than anything Apple was producing at the time.

Commodore nickle and dimed marketing in the USA.

Computer stores blackballed Commodore products because the VIC20 and C64 sold in toy stores.

By the time the VGA and Soundblaster came out as affordable (the early 1990s) the Amiga 500 sold for $299 and was replaced with the Amiga 600. Commodore was hit hard by PC cloners but could mass produce their computers cheap. About 1/3 rd the price of the Macintosh at least so did the Atari ST series.

A 286 was not as powerful as a 68000 with the coprocessors.

Yep, 286 was pretty lame.

68000 w/coprocessors "felt" on par with a low end 386... though clearly it still lacked in raw computational performance.

It has a low overhead to run faster than DOS Windows. IBM ruined OS/2 by sticking to 16 bit mode for too long and not support enough apps and drivers. Microsoft had a better sdk as well.

The Amiga ran games better than even a 486 thanks to coprocessors multitasking events.

Yeah, back then IBM was charging ridiculous margins, and so everyone else was charging merely fat margins. Depending on what brand and sales channel, PC prices were all over the place. And they certainly weren't priced for the consumer market.

And people were paying for the big heavy cases, expansion slots, full keyboards and etc. Amiga didn't look the part. (And neither did Apple until the Mac IIs came out.)

I had the PC Transformer 1020 5.25 inch floppy drive and DOS emulator with my Amiga 1000 in 1985. It was cheaper than a monochrome PC and I also got a 1200 baud modem.

I grew up on Ataris. When the platform died, I ended up on a Microsoft PC, and definitely felt like I had regressed.

Had the same experience

Atari and Amiga were about 5 years ahead of the PC. By 1996 or so, it was over. It's sad to think about what these platforms could've become with better financing and management. MacOS was crap back then, too.

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