I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.
That said, I was a kid, so I don't really remember the numbers well.
We were definitely not rich.
I believe the out of the store price was something like $2,300. With a model below that available for under $2,000, I think with less ram or only one floppy or something. But anyway this was for a fairly atypical take on the PC and a regular white box of the same era could have been had for perhaps half of that with the same or better specs.
In 1988, I had saved up for an Amiga, but my father offered to match what I had saved for a hard drive if I bought a PC instead.
The PC was 15x as expensive as the C128 and still wasn’t any good for gaming. While C128 had the entire C64 games library available!
It also had the CP/M software library and could run productivity software in 80 columns. Yes CP/M software wasn’t as good as DOS software, yes your spreadsheets didn’t calculate as quickly, but for a couple of years the C128 was the best option, until the Amiga came along.
The Amiga was certainly the best option in 1988. Arguably it was the best until about 1995.
BASIC was actually slower on the original PC than on the 6502 and the Z80.
My first was a 386/20, which had a problem and Circuit City's guarantee saw us trade it out for a "better" computer for free... That turned out to be a 386/16. I didn't know enough about them at the time to spot the problem.
It wasn't long before I had a 486, though, so the problem wasn't long-lived. I've never forgiven them for the deception, but they went out of business, so I guess I won? (I see they're back now somehow. Wow, what a joke.)
Things definitely changed with 386s and Windows.
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.
It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance.
The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.
The 1st gen products (500/1000) never caught on in the world's largest market. They were always struggling.
The ASIC-based architecture did not help
Have an ARM in an ST running a pre emptive multitasking OS in 1990 . . . now that would have been an interesting machine.
As a collector, I vastly prefer the ST lineup over the Amiga for this reason. The hardware was more "bog standard" and easier to understand than the custom chipset on the Amiga, even if the Amiga seemed cooler on paper back in the day.
They never believed in themselves.
The IBM PC was launched in 1981 with 4.77MHz and 7 years later you could buy 40MHz PCs with wider buses.
Anyway, in the early 90s my father wisely chose PC over Amiga to replace our aging ZX Spectrum. The reason - PC was open and easier to upgrade. Maybe that's what actually killed Amiga and Atari ST.
Commodore didn't give the hardware development team the resources and go-aheads that they needed in order to keep the Amiga competitive, mainly as a gaming machine and incidentally as an extremely popular demo platform. And it wouldn't have had to be "insane" upgrades to at least buy Commodore more time in the race to figure out the platform's future shape:
* A few more (and ideally also a bit wider) sprites.
* 8 channels of sound, with actual panning. The low sample rates were "OKish".
* Chunky mode, or at least hardware chunky-to-planar like the CD32 has.
* Bumping e.g. the 14 MHz EC020 in the A1200 to the 25 or 33 MHz variant.
* More chipmem and an equal amount of real on-board fastmem.
56kHz (ECS) != low.
Other than this, most was taken care of in the chipsets that management cancelled, such as Ranger (it was even finished!), or AA/AAA.
Fair. PS3M is how I used it.
>and you forfeit so many CPU cycles per raster line.
Only if you use more than 2 colors and have no fast ram at all.
They spent a ton of R&D getting ahead on things that would be commoditized in a few years. Later, their sound card had to be better than the best of a half-dozen PC variants, and so did the video card, CPU, monitor, keyboard, disk drive, etc, etc.
Sure, they could have bought commodity versions of some of those (and probably did), but then they’d have to be the best at choosing commodity components, and there were 100’s of strong competitors doing just that for PCs.
Now that moore’s law is slowing down, and everything has long-moved into system on chips, vertical integration seems to make sense again (look at Apple).
Android was trying to create an ecosystem of interchangeable hardware vendors (like Microsoft did with DOS, and, later, Windows), but it basically failed because driver compatibility is so poor in that space, and key components, like cell modems are locked behind anticompetitive OEM licensing agreements.
Android succeeded at other things, but it’s definitely not the case that you can assemble components into something with better specs than a flagship android for half the price, even if you had access to a pick + place / IC soldering machine. It was/is that way for desktop PCs.
What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead.
And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.
The only reasons Commodore was successful is that their hardware engineering was great and their products were inexpensive. Apple had weak hardware and high prices, Atari had great hardware and high prices.
Jack Tramiel never used a computer until he was given an iPad. He never understood computers. He would have been just as successful selling bicycles.