Comment by jagrsw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagrsw | Hacker News Reader

I vaguely remember those days, late '80s and early '90s, and a lot of it probably had to do with IBM's reputation. Amiga had its pro uses - like smaller TV stations using it with VideoToaster or Scala for broadcast management. But PCs had this vibe of being "serious" or "professional" that Amiga, Atari, and Mac just didn't have.

On the technical side, Amiga had some downsides too. Its OS was in ROM, and while it was way ahead of DOS and early Windows back in '87, it got outdated by the early '90s. Smaller Amiga models didn't support hard drives without buying a pricey add-on, making them more like game machines where you were stuck swapping floppies.

But if you look at OS and CPU architecture, it was almost like comparing a well-designed system to a mess. DOS was clunky, and x86 had its weird quirks: limited registers, awkward 8-bit compatibility, segmentation over paging, unnecessary IO mode/addressing instead of MMIO, messy assembler (prefixes, segments, adhoc instructions) you name it.

Motorola 68xxx is not just Amiga and fun and games. I used to own a Sun 3/60 which is 68020 and most definitely very much business, much more than IBM PC

As well as NeXT computers which started out on 680x0.

I don't know how you can say that Sun machines were "[more] business" than IBM PCs when you look at the number of IBM PCs sold to businesses versus Sun.

IBM PCs and clones effectively OWNED the small and medium business market entirely, and a sizeable portion of large businesses, too.

Motorola was in everything. There must be two dozen different workstation-class computers from the 1980s and even early 1990s that were based on it, and a half dozen home computer platforms besides.

For professional PC users one additional thing was important. The display refresh rate. In those days you put up with a lot of crap if you had to sit in front of the computer for the whole day. That’s why black screens with green or amber text was popular. The monitors were cheaper, but also you did not notice the screen flicker so much. The popular Hercules card had a higher Hz rate than the usual Color graphics and was considered for professionals. Despite the simple look. A while it was accepted to have lower rates, but in the beginning of the 90th the display refresh rate was a thing.

The Amiga had great graphics but especially in Europe with the 50 Hz PAL system they flickered too much. Even at that time 50 Hz were seen as unergonomic. The US and the Atari ST with 60 Hz were a bit better but in general 70 Hz was seen as necessary.

The Atari ST mono had 70 Hz but a small monitor. Still quite successful in professional places. If you just got away with it at the end of the 80th, in the early 90th the display refresh rate had to be 70 Hz.

At that point the graphic of the Atari ST and Amiga was not that impressive anymore compared to the PC (the ET4000 graphics chip was out) and if the ergonomics don’t fit either then it was hard to argue that they were a good fit for professional use where you use the computer longer during the day, like text processing etc.

Later Amigas supported VGA timings. The Amiga 3000 through de-interlacing "scandoubling" "flicker-fixer" hardware, which had been an add-on for Amiga 2000. ECS and AGA chipsets had "Productivity Mode" but only desktop programs used them, and ECS only with up to four colours on screen at once.

I used an Amiga 1200 with a VGA monitor for a few years. Because video modes were programmable, I traded a little refresh rate for higher screen resolution: 704×520 @ 50 Hz or thereabouts.

>Its OS was in ROM

This does not mean it wasn't upgradable by using RAM, as both SetPatch and soft kickers (mkick, skick and so on) demonstrate.

Replacing the ROMs is also possible, although not ideal, and kits with Workbench disks and ROM chips were sold cheaply.

Later, it could have been replaced by an EEPROM, too, but Commodore died first.

>Amiga had some downsides too

The main issue was the way pointers were passed around as if handing out candy, not providing IPC mechanisms not reliant in memory sharing. This hinders attempts to properly leverage memory protection in later models, as well as the ability to reasonably implement SMP later on.

In no small part, Commodore was to blame. The first Amiga released in 1985; MMU-capable m68k CPUs had been available for years. Yet they chose the plain 68000, which was not MMU-capable. A corner-cutting measure that would later bite them. E.g. move from SR/CCP discrepancy, vector base forced into low chipram and so on.

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