wow. I guess your a midi boy through and through? ST was great for MIDI, and had great midi software.
But the 'toys' you put away had photoshop, lightwave, deluxe paint, quark express octamed, and the one we are all here for had one of the biggest freely downloadable software archives in the world (aminet), and the first computer to feature a digital soundprocessor.
Now your here...you might as well try them!
Nah, MIDI is important to me but there was a DTP program for the Atari so good especially when it came to multilingal constructs and font control that I know people that still use it today, even though it is 20 years old, calamus or something like that, I was pretending to be a publisher at the time ....
I had a Mac 128 and an SE (literally the first SE shipped to Europe, I had to scream at a lot of people to get it) and an Amiga 1000, the 128 was useless but a neat toy, the 1000 blew my mind but the software never showed up really (I stopped playing games in the early 80's) and there was a problem with interoperability both at the hardware level, i.e. floppies (running around with a null modem and Kermit, silly) and the Amiga specific file formats and so on, the lack of output filters on the digital audio on the Amiga made it unusable for pro sampling etc
Animation and especially titling animation was the only professional use I personally saw the Amiga used in and they were dropped in the late 80's because Acorn Risc computers with genlocks could do the same task faster and cheaper, there was also a problem with a lot of the USA Amiga titling software, most of them only supported the ASCII character set, so only usable in the USA, Holland and South Africa .....
The first 2 versions of Photoshop were playing catchup with a DOS based program that the pros used at the time, it was not until V3 that it came into its own
The Atari was sold in France almost as a cheap intelligent terminal so there was a trickle from there of serious specialised software for the ST that was sometimes not even available on the PC, we could use the ST as a frontend for a Norsk Data pre-press unit which otherwise required an expensive ND terminal etc., people tend to forget how important those niche markets are.
Remember the Apple II? already outdated in 1979 but still selling in the late 80's because of specialised hardware that was too costly to redevelop for the PC et al, people talked about the Apple II software base but it was really the Apple II hardware base that kept it going in the professional markets.
I even knew a guy who ran an Apple III software development business until 1998, the accounting software he wrote integrated so well with the Appleworks app and the Pascal based OS on the III that his customers refused to move over to the PC version he had introduced in the late 80's....
The Amiga today needs something like that, stop playing catchup with all and sundry and start filling niches, move sideways ....
