How about creating a Open AMIGA Consortium?

[JetRacer]

@ sig999: Well, I was actually writing about the A500 (I'm a 75'er). At the time it was technicly possible to get a PC to do what an A500 with gen-lock and sampler could do. But the economics was horrible - just like the quality of the result.

@ persia: The Amiga wasn't more expensive than a PC at it's time (not A500 nor A1200). The Macs were more expensive.

The Macs have zero 3:rd party products to attach (atleast that's Steve Jobs wish). The Amiga have/had a range of 3:rd party expansions of which a fair share employed the same dirty custom implementations we see in Windows today.

Today Macs run Linux with Apple GUI. And your soundbite there sounds awfully close to the Linux guys favorite argument: "compiled for hardware" which Steve Jobs knicked in a speech.

Macs are expensive - that far I agree. Fact: identical hardware is always cheaper due to bulk sales. What you're saying there sounds more like Apple propaganda trying to shift focus away from the cost it takes to run the company and how it affect the horrendous price of the Macs.

Drivers are not an issue; those can be harvested from Linux for a number of processors. Which we've seen happen frequently in the past for the PPC (or whatever acronyme-of-the-day applies to modern G3-G5).

[persia]

Actually Macs are not that expensive, take an intel motherboard, put quality components on it, a nice video card, a glass protected high definition monitor (if iMac) and you aren't very far from the price of a Mac.  You can buy an EEEEEEE machine or some other such cr@p for less, but you get what you pay for...

Apple today has more third party hardware than Amiga could have dreamed about when the company was alive, you can't buy Apple clone Motherboards, but you couldn't buy Amiga clone motherboards either.  Most Amiga users never open their computer boxes back then, the idea of stretching the hardware came about the time of the death of the company.

My original Amiga 1000 and 2000 cost substantially more than a generic PC back in the day, folks at work thought I was stupid for dropping a large wad of cash on a non-compatible machine.

Yes, OS X is based on BSD (not Linux), my point is that Apple was able to make that vchange because they are Apple, they define what Apple is and what Apple isn't.  The AMiga lack such leadership, and so can't really enter the 21st Century technology wise.

Finally drivers, unless you are talking about AROS hosed on Linux or UAE, Linux drivers have little meaning to Amiga, you can't use Linux drivers on AROS or AmigaDos directly.

[Sig999]

JetRacer wrote:
@ sig999: Well, I was actually writing about the A500 (I'm a 75'er). At the time it was technicly possible to get a PC to do what an A500 with gen-lock and sampler could do. But the economics was horrible - just like the quality of the result.

 JetRacer opens casket and howls:

Many people totally miss this very important point: the Amiga was everything-in-a-box. A user streamlined package - while the PC was and still is a production industry streamlined concept. At the time of the A1200 the PC could do it all (in one degree or another) - only each plugin card that added an Amiga feature costed as much as an Amiga.

I beg to differ.

If we're talking about the 1000/500/2000 the PC couldn't do what it was doing, and this was the 'glory day' of the Ami.
After that the PC's and Mac's started playing catchup - and C= did very little with the Ami at all. By the time AGA and the 1200 came out - it was already pretty much too little, too late.

The Amiga had many great accomplishments on it's own without needing them to be sensationalized or embellished - how many home computers were launched by someone like Andy Warhol? I think exaggerating things like that not only makes Ami enthusiasts sound an awful lot like Mac and PC followers of the early 90's, but also cheapens the actual accomplishments the machine made.

Besides - after finishing a 10 year career in TV News, I've had all the sensationalism I can stomache.

[JetRacer]

@ Sig999: reg. A500/A1200 (Cough) the keyboard slipped or something :-) Sorry about the confusion. And in the other matter: if we talk A500+ the PC did have the cards - in theory - but the cards wouldn't deliver. So we're both right I guess.

@ persia + varius people: it's a bit confusing for everyone here when the posts span the latest 20 years. If I put it this way: before the historical paranthesis of the x86 Mac the prices were a little bit on the high side, right? Which is a nicer way of saying outright unaffordable coupled with a massive 2:nd hand market.

[persia]

Yeah, there was a brief period of time where, had we known only on (besides MS) would survive, it sure looked like Amiga.  Unfortunately it was not to be.  CBM marketing and research was not behind it.    Hardware updates didn't come, the OS updates were too far between.  The technological advantage was wasted by not maintaining it.

he Amiga had many great accomplishments on it's own without needing them to be sensationalized or embellished - how many home computers were launched by someone like Andy Warhol? I think exaggerating things like that not only makes Ami enthusiasts sound an awful lot like Mac and PC followers of the early 90's, but also cheapens the actual accomplishments the machine made.

[amigaksi]

>As for OS complexity - ... and things that were supposed to be in the original Amiga like memory protection should be considered.

As long as you can disable it so real-time analysis remains simple.  I just got through writing code to remove I/O protection under Windows '98SE so I can write code in user mode that runs as fast as Windows 3.11.

Speaking of the topic, I guess you would need some entity all concerned parties can trust-- sort of like people trusted George Washington to be president unanimously since he was devoted to the cause and not for some side motive.

[awe4k]

I think that Commodore could have never won the battle.

On the PC side you have one big company constantly researching to increase computing power, a big bunch of large companies researching on optimising data transfer within the mother board and all its components, a bunch of very big companies struggling to deliver the best video performance ever, one enormous corporation developing an OS plus many communities developing powerful free OS's, etc, etc. You all know what and who I am talking about. Do you seriously think that Commodore on its own could have come up with all the massive amount of technological advances that all of these dedicated companies have come up with? I very much doubt so. Sooner or later, and no matter how much Commodore would have brought the Amiga forward (had it done so), Commodore would have been catched up with and surpassed.

In other words, and in terms of how many efforts could have been put into enhancing Amiga and PC, the Amiga is and was a boat powered by a few people rowing, whilst the PC market is and has been a larger boat powered by a myriad of powerful engines. I fail to see how Commodore could have survived in such an environment no matter how many efforts they would have put into the job.

I agree that AGA was too little, too late, but one single company could not have done enough and fast enough to catch up with Microsoft, Intel, ATI, and NVidia, all toghether (and this is to name just a few companies). Yes, it could have adopted Linux as standard and that would have rid Commodore of the burden of constantly updating the OS, but there would have been too many giants to fight against for one single company like Commodore.

Greetings,

Ed.

[HenryCase]

awe4k wrote:
In other words, and in terms of how many efforts could have been put into enhancing Amiga and PC, the Amiga is and was a boat powered by a few people rowing, whilst the PC market is and has been a larger boat powered by a myriad of powerful engines. I fail to see how Commodore could have survived in such an environment no matter how many efforts they would have put into the job.

I see what you're saying, but look at Apple. They didn't have the huge technological lead that the Amiga had when it was launched, and yet they've only just started using Intel CPUs. Think about the advances the Amiga could have made with strongly funded R&D.

awe4k wrote:
I agree that AGA was too little, too late, but one single company could not have done enough and fast enough to catch up with Microsoft, Intel, ATI, and NVidia, all toghether (and this is to name just a few companies). Yes, it could have adopted Linux as standard and that would have rid Commodore of the burden of constantly updating the OS, but there would have been too many giants to fight against for one single company like Commodore.

Linux? Linux was barely out of nappies when Commodore went bankrupt (1994). nVidia didn't have any products on the market at the time, and ATi were no threat. This is before the time the high powered GPU was seen as a standard PC component.

If you really want to know what killed the Commodore Amiga line of computers (other than Commodore's own incompetence), you need to look at the Amiga in the home market and the Amiga in the business/school market.

In the home market, which was much smaller back then, most people used computers for word processing (basic DTP at most), for spreadsheet/accounting software, and to play the odd game or two. The audiovisual and creative opportunities available on the Amiga were not high on Joe Public's agenda, other than for gaming. The most important factor was making sure the kid's schoolwork could be transferred to the school computers and similarly that the report you spent all of last night typing up would load on the computers at work.

The choices made by the business world had a great influence when it came for people to pick a home PC. So why didn't Amigas become popular in the business world?

There's the classic phrase 'Nobody gets fired for buying IBM'. IBM's endorsement of the x86 PCs ensured those companies who had been buying IBM computers for years would see the IBM-compatible PC as a logical path to take. Amiga suffered from an image of being too flashy and unstable for the business world, which a bit of marketing and R&D from Commodore could have fixed. Also the business applications which were popular at the time of the A1000/A500/A2000 weren't ported, Lotus 123 for example. Why switch to a different computer if you can't use your most business critical apps?

Had Commodore not messed everything up they could have won over the business community, and the Amiga's future would have been much brighter.