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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years.

The 500, 2000, and even 3000 were all refinements of the same original system. The basic platform hardly changed at all until the Amiga 1200 and 4000 in 1993, when they added AGA graphics. And it was too little, too late.

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> I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years.

EVERYBODY lacked business acumen. Motorola, MOSTEK, TI (although they were better than most), Apple, Radio-Shack (Tandy), Tramiel, Commodore, Amiga and Intel. What a mess! It's a wonder that they ever got out of the swamp.

I guess MS, ARM and Intel all turned out doing OK. And, Steve Jobs grew up and returned (in greater numbers with a turtle-neck!) and became an incredible intuitive design-evaluator and huckster (is that what you call the person who starts a new religion?), but having lived through so much of this (including Compaq and Star (the Dallas one - not the Xerox one - but that counts too!), [EDIT: I forgot about ComputerLand and their sinister hand in all of this - and of course Garry Kildall missing the IBM meeting - I'm not even getting into the software stack with zip-zip-zimmerman] and the origins of Dell and the ending of Compaq (and Tandem and DEC and HP!), everything seems to chaotic and random.

I know that we all (probably) like to feel like we are the gladiators on the field, and winning from strategy and planning and cunning and intelligence and skill - but in retrospect - everything seems so random to me.

Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical.

The expandability of the original Amiga platform is what kept the ecosystem so vibrant that there almost wasn't a need to update the platform for so long - so many expansions that the Mac people could only dream about. Video Toaster, to name but one. I started with an A1000 that I hacked a 20MB hard drive into, along with the usual RAM expansions. I moved on to a fully-loaded A2000 system with a 68030 CPU, 1GB of hard drive space, 64MB of RAM, ethernet card (coax), an Apple Mac emulator card, a PC card that ran PC software on the card, a PBX card to hook up to interface with the phone line, and just so much more - while the Mac was still pushing black and white graphics and 512KB RAM (and very, very difficult to expand the RAM).

I later got an A1200, and then an A4000 as well. While the platform updates were great, those weren't what really made the Amiga shine - it was the multitasking OS that the Mac and PC didn't really have - they were nowhere near Amiga OS, which was pretty amazing. Through AREXX any application could control any other application, which is something Windows and OSX still don't really do. I mean to some extent it's sort of possible now, but not as easily as it was with Amiga OS.

If Commodore was still around and had not gone out of business, I'd absolutely be using Amigas today. (yes, I know it sort of still exists, but it isn't really funded or widely used)

The Amiga OS really was amazing. I learned a ton on that system. I taught myself C, wrote a BBS program, connected my BBS to UUCP news and email, etc. I started off with an Amiga 500, added a Supra 2 meg expansion and a hard drive. A couple years later, I moved on to an Amiga 3000, added more RAM, more HD's, a multi serial board, etc. I remember workbench 2.0 being such a huge upgrade.

It was really cool for the time, but I always felt Commodore let it stagnate. In the late 80's, they could've kept up. By 1993, 486's were common, lots of folks had super VGA, soundblaster cards, etc. Amigas needed a LOT of expansion to keep up.

I still play around with Amiga emulators. I have a MIST box, and am hoping to get a Vampire standalone board.

I lusted for a video toaster - though I was like 7yrs old at the time.

I had an amiga 1000 my dad got and the preemptive multi-tasking is what really set the amiga apart. The engineering was next level: 512K with double-sided, double density disks was enough for anyone.

> Through AREXX any application could control any other application, which is something Windows and OSX still don't really do. I mean to some extent it's sort of possible now, but not as easily as it was with Amiga OS.

AppleScript was introduced in System 7.1.1 back in 1993. Maybe ARexx scripting was much better, I don't know.

(Support for scriptable Macintosh applications actually arrived in 1991, but there was no built-in scripting language for it.)

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

AREXX was around in 1987. It was amazing. Pretty much every application had an "AREXX port" to allow scripting. And I used it extensively. The closest I've seen to anything like it is OLE on Windows, but it's not very accessible or pervasive like AREXX was in every application.

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