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Comment by spankibalt | Hacker News Reader

> Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.

Not a chance, I think. Combine both and you still would not have beaten the sound philosophy, openness, speed, and flexibility of the IBM PC & compatibles. Ironically, to increase your chances massively, you'd needed to have enhittification (with its preference for locked-down rubbish antithetical to general-purpose computing) already dominating the market. Even as Amigas and Ataris were much more open than their cousin's terrible grandchild of today: Apple. A platform which many Amigatari nerdlingers of yesteryear gravitated to...

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Being earlier to market seems like it would have made a huge difference in competing with the IBM PC. I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985. If the Amiga and ST could have been relased in 1984 it might have made a difference. Either way it's fun to think about counterfactuals.

I think the Amiga could have been released at least 6 months earlier if not for the litigation between Tramiel's Atari and Commodore gumming-up the works. The Amiga was massively more capable than the Macintosh of the day-- with preemptive multitasking, color, and NTSC video compatibility. There wasn't a Mac that held a candle to to the OCS Amiga graphics until the Macintosh II in 1987. I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.

VGA didn't come to the PC until 1987. The Amiga easily exceeded the capabilities of EGA. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and is much less capable and sophisticated than Workbench. I don't know much about the evolution of the native Amiga productivity software market. Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC. That wasn't until 1987 in our timeline. It might have happened sooner in my hypothetical, but probably not years sooner.

Atari could have marketed the Amiga better than Commodore ever did. I recognize that's not really saying much. The post-Tramiel Commodore was an adrift ship of fools when it came to choosing which products to produce and how to market them. Commodore couldn't figure out what to sell (and how not to cannibalize or compete with their own products) or how to sell what it did produce.

I'm less sure what would have happened if the ST had been released as the Commodore product it arguably was. I do think a world where Tramiel stayed w/ Commodore would have made them more focused. They would have have developed fewer products (and likely no products that competed with other Commodore products) and aggressively driven costs down. I think a Commodore with Tramiel still heading it up would have been in a better position, financially and in terms of market perception, to put out a GUI-based business computer than Atari. I'm just not sure how much sooner I'd want to speculate a Commodore ST could have been released in this hypothetical.

The ST was also positioned more as a Mac killer than a PC killer, like my hypothetical Amiga.

You're likely right, though-- by 1985 the IBM PC was probably destined for dominance.

> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985.

I firmly believe it was, as it's the philosophy (i. e. the open architecture) that gave it such a headstart that the competition couldn't have catched up. Keep in mind what an open architecture really means in the world, i. e. not just the West.

> Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC.

Pitting an already well-established and rapidly expanding open architecture and Commodore's first foray into an open architecture against each other wouldn't have, and indeed didn't, play(ed) out in the latter's favor.

The A2000, a workstation-class machine, arrived in March '87. Too late. Around that time Compaq had already sold around 25,000 of their first Deskpro 386 machines, which hit the streets half a year earlier. According to Michael Geran of E. F. Hutton & Co., Compaq sold 90,000 Deskpro 386 computers in the second quarter of '87 alone.

The bridgeboard was an option for cost-conscious operators, especially those with small businesses. They were well-received especially in West Germany where the A2000 sold well. Their limiting nature and performance wouldn't have made them relevant.

> I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.

That is an intriguing possibility!

> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985

It absolutely was. Simply on account of the name on the grey box.

If it hadn't been IBM, maybe somebody like DEC may have gotten their shit together to take the market instead of farting around with overly high margin products and eating themselves from the inside.

But the way "business" culture was in the 80s the "respectable" productivity machine could not have come from the games/"home" market. Apple maybe but they opted instead to go close off the Apple II line (which in fact had a strong productivity sector thing going on, especially in schools) and push the Macintosh which was a good product but started off weak in terms of capability and costly on price.

In the early to mid-80s it was either going to be a CP/M machine or a CP/M-like machine (like the PC). These are Visicalc/Lotus-123/WordPerfect machines to their customers, and they cared not at all about graphics capabilities until later. Just needed 80 columns, floppies, and reasonable amounts of memory.

Hell there was terror in the microcomputer market when IBM made moves to go "downmarket" into it with the PCjr (which was a flop). The hype leading up to it, and the noises about how it would be a Commodore and Atari killer was insane.

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