Hacker News Reader

Comment by RickSanchez2600 | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga had emulators to run DOS and Mac software. Sort of the OS/2 effect where they ran DOS and 16 bit Windows apps so there was no need for native OS/2 apps.

Commodore had a nickle and dime marketing plan and made PC clones as well. The Commodore 65 was going to be the next 8 bit C64 type computer after the C128. But it never got out of prototype.

Mac and DOS/PC tech caught up to the Amiga around 1987-1992 and Amiga could not make a newer chipset in time to compete with them.

The Amiga was like the Mac but with true preemptive multitasking and 1/3rd the cost of a similar powered Mac. Amiga didn't earn a lot of money with the Amiga because they lowballed the price and Apple won because they highballed the price until Steve Jobs could come back to fix the company. Amiga had no Steve Jobs savior and went out of business because the DOS/PC cut into their sales too.

View on HN

You are not wrong, but of what you mentioned only "nickle and dime" and "could not make a newer chipset" is very relevant. They never invested back their gains into Amiga R&D.

What they should have done:

kept Amiga extensible - kept the external bus when cost optimizing the A500 into the A600. (Instead the A600 was a crippled, slightly incompatible A500 that split the market and made it slightly less interesting to game developers.)

The chipset in A1200 and A4000 was too little, much too late. The A1200 was a case study in cheapskating and crippling an already anemic CPU. (It came with a disabled L1 cache. If it had only had 64 kilobytes of more RAM, they could have enabled the L1 cache.)

Should have partnered with SUN and made SunOS (Solaris-to-be) for high end Amigas, more powerful than what they ever produced. (They basically said "fuck you" to SUN.)

Etc etc.

It could also have helped to buy fewer business jets for the CEO, but I think that was more of a symptom of what was wrong. If they had done fewer completely idiotic moves, they could have afforded a few jets easily.

AmigaDOS was developed on SunOS Workstations that were modified.

I don't think the Zorro bus was as good as ISA or PCI and the A600 was like you said it was. The Amiga needed a networking adapter to work with networks and Apple Macs later had them as default or via a NuBus slot.

Plus most of the software for the Amiga was video games which limited the system to video games it needed more business software.

There's no need to "think" about it. Even old 16-bit Zorro had DMA and plug-and-play, which actually worked. ISA was a shit-show and often 8-bit wide, too. All PCs at the time needed networking adapter for Ethernet and the Mac network was dog slow. (I won't go into the software side, I don't have time right now.)

Zorro-2 was superior to ISA in pretty much all ways that count. It had auto configuration and just worked in general.

PCI is vastly superior to Zorro-3 though, in both features and performance. Z3 never achieved the performance given in the specs and had quite some problems. IIRC Dave Haynie said that he would have used PCI instead of developing Z3 if it had been out at the time.

Right on the money. The platform became too expensive for the home market and too cheap for the pro market, with ridiculously low (and expensive) expandability. There were distribution and manufacturing issues, and they treated their R&D in such a shocking way that inevitably pipeline and products suffered badly. Managers were old-world two-bit sharks who treated the company like a cash machine. It was tragic and completely avoidable, and had absolutely nothing to do with piracy. If anything, piracy kept alive an ecosystem that had no business existing, there and now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com