
The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up - mgunes
http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-amiga-they-fucked-it-up/
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billpg
Obligitory links as they are not on the page...

    
    
      Part 1: http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/    
      Part 2: http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-back/

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gaius
I sometimes like to escape into a fantasy daydream world when I'm at work,
where the British government of the 80s realized the importance of controlling
your own destiny, and just bought a million Acorn Archimedes for the entire
civil service, military, universities etc, enough that it became a no-brainer
for everyone else in the UK. We could be 10-20 years ahead of where we are
now. Same if the Germans and Dutch had just bought Commmodore and Atari
outright and moved their production over.

Of course if they had they would probably have been tricked into buying
Amstrad shit.

~~~
new299
I live in a similar fantasy land, however I think Acorn had ample help from
the UK government. After all, pretty much every secondary school in the UK
purchased them. That and free national TV advertising from the BBC.

The problem was that platforms that were limited to a single nation were not
viable, Acorn never really broke into the US market. I don't believe there was
even much adoption in Europe. You can see the same story in Japan with MSX.

That said, I agree that RiscOS was far superior to many competitors. But as we
still see, it is adoption and the ecosystem around the platform which is often
the deciding factor in success than the superiority of the basic technology.

Still more than a little nostalgic though... and wish it was able to address
international markets better. Anyone have some cash to buy the rights to
RiscOS and open source it? I think it only take 30K GBP or so. :)

~~~
jacquesm
If just the cash were the problem I'd be happy to do it but I think RiscOS's
time has past.

QnX now, that would be another matter but I suspect RIM will want more then 30
K for it. I already approached Quantum when they still owned it but there was
absolutely no way to get them to even respond. Which is a pity because I think
something like QnX in open source form would absolutely rock.

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niklasni1
This is a great series. I can also really recommend the book the author wrote,
which presents a more technical view of the Amiga:

[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-
here](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-was-here)

~~~
carlesfe
Are they complementary? As in, is it worth to read the book after reading the
blogposts, or do they tell the same story?

~~~
niklasni1
Yes, very much so. The book contains some quite technical walkthroughs of the
Amiga, both software and hardware. In enough detail that a technical person
will be able to understand more or less exactly what's going on, but without
requiring any knowledge about the Amiga.

~~~
mwcampbell
Conversely, the blog posts tell the story of the Amiga's origin in more detail
than the book. So they do complement each other.

~~~
carlesfe
Thank you both. I'll definitely have a look at it, I'm fascinated by computer
history.

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spiritplumber
I'm still wondering why the Amiga didn't become ubiquitous. I had one and I
kept getting called a liar about its price - for the performance compared to
PCs of the time, surely I omitted a zero.

~~~
bane
My parents insisted on buying a PC for home use. It was mainly so they could
do accounting for their business at home. I had a friend who had an Amiga and
I spent pretty much as much time as possible at their house using it. We even
had an Amiga only store in our local mall (in the U.S.!).

I think that, in the way that Apple products are now showing up in work places
due to people preferring them at home. The reverse happened in the 90s. People
wanted or needed to bring work home, and their offices supplied them with PCs.

The productivity situation on PCs was always just a bit better or standardized
than Amigas.

What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh
took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always
came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than
the stuffier Mac. Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output
during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc. But the Amiga just
felt more creative and fun to me.

Also, by the time the 68040 came out, it was starting to become clear to
everybody that Motorola wasn't going to be able to keep the performance edge
up. Apple switched to PowerPC but Commodore couldn't afford to. There was a
whole plethora of PowerPC cards for the Amiga, to try to keep them going, but
it was really obvious by then that it was game over, and people started to
hunt around for the next system.

~~~
digi_owl
"Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and
pre-press, better color matching etc."

Basically that. Whenever you wonder why something "odd" gets a foothold, look
for the money trail.

One thing to note is that there was a couple of Amiga variants that lived on
in broadcast media, as it was very capable of doing video work.

BTW, the BYOD kinda happened back in the day as well. There is a claim that
accountants brought their personal AppleII to work so they didn't have to
fight for mainframe time.

Edit: oh, and i wonder how much the dock connector had to say for the long
term uptake of iPhone in the corporate world. Never mind that Apple was quick
to offer a WSUS like service to handle app rollouts.

~~~
technofiend
The old saw goes VisiCalc sold more Apples than Apples sold VisiCalc. Of
course then Lotus 1-2-3 came on to the market and even MultiCalc struggled to
compete with that.

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yeureka
My favourite computers of all time were my A500 and A1200. I learned the most
about how a computer works and how to program it. I learned how to create and
control sound and graphics and how these are represented inside the machine. I
made my own games in a mix of high-level languages ( Amos! ) and 68000
assembly. I made 3D animations assembled frame by frame onto a VHS tape deck.
I even used the Amiga to VJ at clubs and student parties.

Really loved those machines.

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empressplay
The Deathbed Vigil: The Last Day At Commodore
[https://youtu.be/jvJjFYHGTnU](https://youtu.be/jvJjFYHGTnU)

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carlesfe
I just realized that the Amiga story is exactly what would have happened to
Apple in an alternative timeline where the company had filed for bankruptcy
without Jobs. Or the other way around, if they had succeeded we all may be
wearing Amiga Watches on our wrists right now.

It's very interesting to see how good/bad managerial decisions or tiny details
can totally sink an advanced technology and change the course of the future.
Can we imagine a present with a current technology without the advances that,
for example, Apple has brought? Maybe we'll all be still using Nokia phones or
Palm PDAs.

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cmrdporcupine
The Sharp X68000 was more successful and powerful than any other machine in
the "68000 wars." It came a few years later, but outsold both Atari and Amiga
(the number I heard was 15 million units sold). However it sold only in Japan,
and really only for games -- despite having higher spec'd multimedia and even
having video input that could have made a "video toaster" type app like the
Amiga possible. Just shows you how massive the Japanese gaming market was in
the 80s/early 90s that that niche machine sold only there could outsell them.

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kw71
My favorite 68k machine is the 3b1. It had a windowing system with mouse, but
never any apps that would be interesting for the desktop user. Funny that
Apple switched to UNIX fifteen years later. If they had started with it,
instead of that stupid system where half the OS was in ROM, it would have been
so far ahead.

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WalterBright
I had an Amiga for a while. You couldn't hook up standard keyboards and
monitors to it, everything was just different enough to be incompatible. It
didn't bode well for Amiga's future.

~~~
rbanffy
A "standard" keyboard here means "a keyboard made for IBM PC AT clones". When
you put everything in context (and consider the Amiga predates the first
386-based PCs by a couple years), it made no sense for the Amiga to have a PC
keyboard connector any more than it would make sense for an Apple II to have
one.

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vidarh
The monitor issue is/was more serious, though not really an issue early on.
The problem there was that the Amiga graphics modes would not work with many
cheaper PC monitors, so we had to spend extra on expensive multisync monitors
or Commodore branded monitors. And unlike the keyboard, that was something
people wanted to upgrade.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Yep same nonsense on the Atari. Computer vendors back then really did
frustrating things around peripherals. It was bad enough they were so
expensive, but external disks, monitors, mice, RAM everything was proprietary,
which made it worse. Eventually things settled on SCSI, then IDE, but there
were many years there where it was wild west on standards for all of the
above.

I just bought an Atari TT off eBay. It will nicely drive a VGA monitor, but
not for its highest resolution (1280x960), for which it needs a special
("ECL") monitor. An adapter from that to VGA is $175 from a hobbyist -- almost
as much as I paid for the computer.

