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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

It is certainly interesting to compare the full colour, hardware accelerated graphic, multitasking, large memory Amigas of the mid 80s with contemporary Macs... The future could have been very, very different (and arguably computing would be 5-10 years ahead of where it is now, as that was the lead Commodore had back then).

Or the Acorn Archimedes of the time, which was turning in floating point benchmarks 10x faster.

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What was responsible for the Amiga ultimately failing, if it was superior in all those ways?

A series of business blunders by Commodore. Apple made similar blunders a decade later and barely survived them.

It's complicated: http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

The Amiga OS was very advanced in some ways, but extremely primitive in others. It was basically a hyper-advanced games console with a keyboard. The UI was minimally functional, limited to non-existent support for printers or peripherals, etc. It just wasn't intended to be used as anything other than a games machine and provided none of the features a business machine would need. I speak as a very proud owner of an Amiga 500 since 1989.

The A1000, the 1985 original was a conventional 3-box design aimed at businesses who wanted to get into this new "multimedia" thing.

The desktop GUI system (Workbench) was more Xerox than Macintosh, and stayed stuck in 1982 for a long time. But the Amiga was far more than just a games machine: Its multimedia capabilities were so far in advance of anything else for a decade that it became to music and video what the Mac was to design and publishing.

The best example of this would be the Video Toaster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster For much of the 1990s, it was the king of real-time broadcast video production, unsurpassed until the advent of hardware-accelerated PC graphics late in the decade.

Yes, this. My housemate had a 1000. It was by far the best video game console of it's era, and a few after that. As a general productivity computer, not so much. Serious lack of good software and some strange decisions by Commodore. I think the largest mistake was a lack of an internal hard drive. Sure you could buy an external, but at the time we were so new to computing we did not know we needed one and they were half the price of the base computer...

They were good for high end graphics and video of that era but I think SGI quickly caught up and surpassed them there. The other bit about Amiga that seems to be forgotten, just how proprietary the hardware was. We had a floppy drive go out and, to this day it remains as one of the more difficult to get to parts of all the computers I have had to crack open to replace a part in.

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