If C= had produced an Amiga incompatible wonder computer would you have bought it?

[B00tDisk]

So a new gen Amiga not compatible with the originals? Seems if Commodore lived, that is what would have happened anyway. I might have bought such a thing provided it was better than other competing options and if it was well supported and if it were affordable. Back in the day I used to frequent an Amiga dealer down the street from me often. But as great as the big box Amigas were, I ran a pc compatible at the time due to cost. I had an A500 I bought used as well and it served me well for game playing mainly. So about the only way I would have been able to get the next greatest (and non compatible Amiga) would have been if it were in an A500 board format. I was poor at age 24
 
Now if the C65 was released I would have bought one for sure. The reasoning being I was a total Pet4032 and C64 burnout. C65 specs still cool to me today. Someone should FPGA that baby, resurrect the latest DOS they were playing with, and I would become again an 8bit burnout. Sorry for the off topic here.

The C65 was super cool.  I remember Grapevine Group had them listed for sale in AmigaWorld magazine after C= went under and I thought "Well what possible purpose could buying one of those serve?"

GAH!  WHY DIDN'T I BUY ONE?  OR THREE?

(They go for $10k on ebay x-( )

[B00tDisk]

I don't think I would have jumped ship in 93. By that time, for good or ill, the pc was pretty much the standard. That was not the case when I bought my 1000 in 87 or so. Back then, jumping from the Atari 800 to the Amiga was a big leap in power, but there was no particular reason to pick any of several contenders except for the focus each machine had. Amiga with multimedia, Mac with publishing and the PC with early business stuff.

I think if you go read infoworld magazine (the entire catalog of issues is online at google books) you'll find that as early as '87 the PC was pretty entrenched as a business machine.  As terrible as it was, Windows 1.0 had been out for two years and late '87 saw Windows 2.0.  VGA Standard came with the IBM PS/2 in April of '87.  

Meanwhile, by 1987, Apple had released the Mac II with a faster CPU than the A2000 and support onboard SCSI as standard (you had to buy a card for the A2000).

C= was starting their long, slow-motion fumble by then by not following up the Amiga's stunning debut with more improvements, instead content to rest on their laurels and let 3rd party devs come up with a use for the Amiga (and support hardware likewise).  OCS should have been gone, but ECS was still three years out.  

Things were a lot more dynamic than "Well the Amiga ruled the roost from '85 to '94 then C= fell and suddenly PCs appeared." (I know that's not what you're suggesting but there's a lot of that sentiment around - and I say that as someone who scoffed at the PC world from '87 to '94!)

[B00tDisk]

Who gives a damn?  Terabytes of HD space, gigabytes of RAM, gigabytes of video card RAM.

S100 bus-based IMSAI users with 5mb hard drives, 24k of RAM and paper-tape readers would have viewed Amiga OS 1.3 as effete.  

Mac OS 1.0 ran in 128k; the A1000 shipped with 256 (but needed 512mb for apps as a practicality).  Was MacOS 4x better than the A1000 then?

[B00tDisk]

The hell with that. If you only view increasing hardware specs as an excuse for code to get sloppier, what the hell good is it? All you're doing is wasting what should be a mind-boggling bounty.

Sorry dogg, telling me my Win* install takes up an appalling 20gb out of one of my two 2tb hard drives means diddly/squat to me.  That's a drop in the bucket.  That's so tiny I can't hear it rattling around in there.  It doesn't mean jack.

I'm really sorry that technology has scaled.  I too wish I was fucking around with a 5mb RLL hard drive the size of a four-slice toaster and a green fisheye Lear dumb terminal, all stuck together on an Ohio Scientific home-build.

:/

[B00tDisk]

1984 Mac OS was barely more sophisticated than C64's GEOS + 1351 mouse and was silent and colourless so 128k was enough for that singletasking Apple fashionista £2500 wank. The 520ST ass raped the original Mac on every level possible (price/performance/speed,colour/OS,max res, appearace) within months...total wipeout....and STs 8mhz CPU is the only aspect it exceeds Amiga.

Oh please.  Look, I'm just as fond of memories of the Amiga as anyone else around here but Apple was years from making fashion accessory computers.  The Lisa, then later the Mac, were an attempt to put what Xerox was doing at Palo Alto on the desktop of ordinary people.  If they hadn't bothered, nobody else would have, and we'd be having this discussion in VI or some other godawful text-only medium.

Yeah, the 520 sure was a winner - that's why it ... uh, I'm sure I can think of something it did better which is why it's still around and the mac didn't last except oh wait it isn't and the mac did.

And finally: the original 128k Mac did have sound Virginia.

It's one thing to say "Man, the Amiga was a neat computer".  At the time you couldn't have convinced me I'd have the point of view I do now.  Except, you see, I grew up and can look objectively at the way things really were, not from inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Sphere where no other computers exist or if they did they were rough-edged abacuses made out of iron that delivered hepatitis and painful electrical burns when people tried to use them.

[B00tDisk]

well, on one hand, its nice to have more capabilities available.

On the other hand, I do think there's something to be said for efficient software. With mobile devices, that's becoming more of a factor at least.

If you don't believe me, try installing Windows Vista on a netbook

I have a buddy who bought one with 7 preinstalled.  I'll ask him what model it is.  (No, Aero isn't/can't be turned on )

[B00tDisk]

Well clearly I would love to hear about this personal/home computer better than Amiga 1000 between 84 and 87....go ahead Mr expert :roflmao: Even the 1982 C64 had advantages like longer filenames over Win PC <94

Hey remember back when I was talking about 1987 and beyond, then you came in and started up with a bunch of irrelevant bullshit about 1984?  Yeah, good times.

[B00tDisk]

Oh and by the by, the original mac wasn't a "Fashion statement" (although that's what apple makes these days): it was an attempt to put the power of the Xerox Star on the common user's desk (rather, the 2nd attempt, the first having been the Lisa).