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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't all marketing. The Amiga was expensive for the day. I had a C64 and wanted one badly, but as a poor college student I could only upgrade to the C128. The Amiga also competed against the cheaper Atari ST.

Businesses buy computers for the software and the Amiga did not have Lotus 123, MS Word, Multiplan, or Excel.

Microsoft after a certain point stopped supporting niche platforms. I had Flight Simulator and Multiplan on the C64, for example. The Amiga did not have either.

The Amiga did eventually find a niche where it was known to be the best solution but it wasn't a large enough market.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/a-history-of-the-ami...

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The original Amiga 1000 was certainly expensive. The later Amiga 500 was a lot more affordable, and that's what my parents got for me when I somehow managed to convince them it was the best choice.

My own impression for why the Amiga and every other machine of the era lost out to the IBM PC was that the PC was what virtually everyone used at work, so that's what they got at home.

Apple managed to grab the art/music creation and education markets, so managed to stay alive that way, while the rest of those early computers never really found their niche outside of games, for which the Amiga was arguably best suited to. The Amiga was an early power gaming machine and had the potential to grab the art/music making market from Apple, but few people other than techies really appreciated it or would make their computer purchasing decisions purely on that.

Working in many places during that era, the non-technical belief and perception was that Amiga was good at games therefore couldn't be good at business. Of course the non-techies were much more disproportionately the majority then. Trying to explain that didn't get you far.

You could spec up an A2000, released at the same time as the 500, with SCSI HDD and the lovely long persistence paper hi res white monitor for less than a clone. In the UK all the marketing was for the 500, and offices filled with Tandons, Dells, Amstrads and so on.

Same problem happened again with CDTV (and Philips CD-I) inventing multimedia before anyone had the first idea what that was supposed to achieve.

> My own impression for why the Amiga and every other machine of the era lost out to the IBM PC was that the PC was what virtually everyone used at work, so that's what they got at home.

And it was also what you were taught on at school. Even if the IBM PC advanced the standardization of personal computers, I feel it also set them back by a decade.

Well, a decade is exaggeration, but the design choices of the IBM PC shaped personal computing, and those choices were made by people who thought personal computers were for serious business.

No exaggeration. Smooth scrolling, stereo sound and nice colours. Yep a decade. PC could not compete until 1995 against 1985 Amiga.

About the only thing MS did for the Amiga was Amiga Basic, which was bundled with AmigaDOS until v2 and was eventually surpassed by AMOS, GFA Basic and Blitz Basic.

There was a lot of good productivity software for the Amiga: Protext, Wordworth, Final Writer, Final Calc, Superbase, Professional Page (Gold Disk did a lot of good software, I wonder what happened to them?) but there was a kind of inferiority complex about being ignored by mainstream business. The Amiga magazines would often have to explain to their readers why they didn't use Amiga software to produce their magazine for example.

> I had Flight Simulator and Multiplan on the C64, for example. The Amiga did not have either.

Wikipedia says that Flight Simulator II was published for the Amiga, though not until 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Simulator_II_(subLOGIC)

ST was only designed as a last minute hack to piss on Amiga's bonfire after Tramiel failed to get the Amiga on the ugly terms he'd offered. MIDI saved ST and gave it a real niche and market.

C128 + external floppy was around A500 price point. And to exemplify Commodore business acumen at the time apparently C128 BOM was very close of that of A500 ....

The C128 was a crazy Frankenstein's monster of a machine,though, with two CPUs (and the disk drive adds another), and all kinds of other expensive additions to support the CP/M mode. It even boots the Z80 first and checks for certain conditions before switching to the 8502 (and in CP/M mode some BIOS calls switches between the Z80 and 8502, I believe to save ROM space by reusing IO code etc. across them).

It's a fascinating but totally bizarre machine trying to satisfy several contradicting goals at once (be a business computer; be a better c64; be 100 percent c64 compatible) and in doing so doing none of them well enough other than perhaps the c64 compatibility (which wasn't perfect, but was very close), but at a too high cost.

> the Amiga did not have Lotus 123, MS Word, Multiplan, or Excel

I remember having MaxiPlan Plus.

Manual: https://archive.org/details/MaxiPlan_Plus_v1.9_1988-06_Oxxi

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