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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Fransexy_ on January 18, 2009, 08:48:59 PM
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In a nostalgic Sunday afternoon I thought about how computing would be today if Amiga and Atari would have been survived as the mainstream computers instead of MAC and PC
What do you think?
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Accelerators would be a bit cheaper, probably. :-)
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Between those two perhaps Amiga would have a 95% share and perhaps Atari fanatics would brag about how Atari's don't need virus checkers.
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@weirdami
You just made me slip of the edge of my chair, laughing :lol:
Ouch :bigcry:
But, I think you just may be right :-)
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That probably would have meant that Commodore was still around (sorry, the Yeahronimo Commodore business is not what I call Commodore) and would have implemented a 'Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga' button on the Amiga keyboards. And Say would have grown into a version 10 or so, with some pre-sets for perfectly impersonating George Double You, Bill Gates and Madonna. It probably would have a 'sister' program called 'Sing'.
It also would probably mean that JPEG and GIF would never be so popular also meaning that, on web-sites, there wasn't the transparency problem most IE versions deliver.
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Well assuming that Commodore never messed up in the 80s and 90s with regard to the Amiga (possibly by not losing millions on PC clone making), and having a wider range of computers available to cover more market areas through the 90s and get ongoing repurchases and upgrades ...
I would presume that they both would have had to change CPU architecture in the 90s. Amiga was meant to go PA RISC at the high end, but possibly that would have changed in the long run to PowerPC. I imagine Atari would have gone PowerPC if the ST/Falcon had continued, or MIPS. The 90s had so many different architectures!
Still, if they were both PowerPC in the early part of this decade, the cumulative marketshare of Apple, Amiga and Atari would have been a higher impetus for PowerPC CPUs to be improved sooner and better than they were ultimately. So PowerPC could still be around in desktop computers, in a similar manner to x86 CPUs today, perhaps a bit ahead even.
However the Amiga and Atari would be using the standard buses - PCIe, graphics cards from ATI, NVIDIA, etc, and so on, rather than custom chipsets. I think custom chipsets would have been dead by the end of the 90s, or even earlier. AmigaOS/Workbench would be similar to modern Mac OS X or Windows 7 in function, style, etc. It may have gone through a Mac OS -> Mac OS X transition period to make up modern in terms of memory protection and so on, but it would have remained AmigaOS.
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Zorro V
that would have been nice...
ah well.
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maybe we have power brick the size of a small fridge to power it hehe
hopefully they whould have got cdrom drives let alone blu ray or dvd
l must admit is nice day dream oh excpet the power brick u need wheel barrow to move around :-D
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Most people would still remember what it meant to crash a computer.
Amiga Inc would be producing creepy snowmen for Atari based mobile phones (which would be the size of toasters and not be able to dial and look at your phone book at the same time).
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I never owned Atari but a High School friend said that software publishers had a hard time making money due to all of the software pirates and a lot of games were pirated before they hit the shelves. He said the Atari platform had the worse piracy.
I don't particularly like the hardware out there on the IBM side but it is faster than anything currently available. I'm interested in writing my own operating system as a hobby to replace what I don't like in terms of operating systems.
Anyone who attempted to do this would be far behind because the other companies are years ahead and programming the USB port or flash animation is complex and involved but if you don't like the operating system then change it and use the existing hardware.
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If CBM and Atari had won.... in other words, without the ultra-fierce competition between technology developers, because they're both closed companies....
Our computers would have about 200MHz processors, about as powerful as a Celeron 300, using about 128MB RAM and about 4 Gig hard disks. Permedia-2 equivalent power for graphics cards.
The internet would be at about HTML 3 standard, no dynamic HTML, no streaming video in good quality. Broadband would be about 512KBps.
However, the operating systems would still run faster than they do today.... and computing might still be fun.
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Well if Commodore maintained it's competetive edge by making it's own CPU's like it did for the C=64 they could have maintained their dominant place in the market. The C=64 was a huge hit in part to the low price and Commdores ability to hit the lowest price point.
As soon as they started using CPU's from Motorola they lost that edge.
They also had lots of talent under one roof. Personally I'd have those guys designing graphics chipsets, and sound dsp's for use in amigas first then license out to others.
To give you some context for todays world. Imagine if INTEL set out to make a low cost home-media center pc. They produce the CPU's and supporting chips. They could undercut everyone.
If I remember correctly Commodore tried chapter 11, but from what I know about the process your piers (vendors and suppliers) decide if they want to allow you to live or die.
Now who was supplying Commodore with their parts? Chinon, Sony, HP, ETC. Their competition.
Lets face it, Mr. Tramiel didn't make many friends in the industry either. I think when push came to shove it was time for Commodore to get theirs.
Sadly the Amiga paid for all those transgressions.
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spirantho wrote:
If CBM and Atari had won.... in other words, without the ultra-fierce competition between technology developers, because they're both closed companies....
Our computers would have about 200MHz processors, about as powerful as a Celeron 300, using about 128MB RAM and about 4 Gig hard disks. Permedia-2 equivalent power for graphics cards.
The internet would be at about HTML 3 standard, no dynamic HTML, no streaming video in good quality. Broadband would be about 512KBps.
However, the operating systems would still run faster than they do today.... and computing might still be fun.
I doubt that that since Atari and CMB would still be competing with game consoles, Sega released a computer based on their console back in 1983 during the boom of Z-80 based home computers and there would be no reason why Sega wouldn't have done it again if the specs of home computers were close to the specs of its home consoles.
I think we'd have seen Atari, Amiga and Mac share the some basic architecture, they might differ with graphic and audio chipset but odds are they would have been pushed onto cards to make them far more upgradeable with low end models having these chips integrated.
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To give you some context for todays world. Imagine if INTEL set out to make a low cost home-media center pc. They produce the CPU's and supporting chips. They could undercut everyone.
its called the ATOM :lol:
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Well, just a note... if Amiga had survived, it would now be a poor man's Mac...
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In what sense survived?
Today's "Macs" are nothing to do with the Mac that was around in the Amiga's time - different hardware, different OS, only the trademark name remains. Windows today is a derivative of NT, not the DOS or Windows 9x we knew back then.
If Commodore had have survived, any modern "Amiga" would similarly likely have been a very different platform, only sharing the name (e.g., consider that Commodore's plans were at one point to move to RISC machines running Windows NT).
In an alternative Universe, it might have been Commodore who bought NEXT, and slapped it on x86 machines as "Amiga OS X"...
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bloodline wrote:
Well, just a note... if Amiga had survived, it would now be a poor man's Mac...
Or the Mac is a ripped off man's Amiga (or PC) ;)
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Amiga would have had to survived Commodore first. Assuming they had done that, then maybe computers today would be more fun and less complex.
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If Commodore survived, I suspect they would be hiring someone else to write the operating system because I can't imagine that Microsoft would be affordable or still be willing to do it.
This question should really be asked of former Commodore employees.
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well i have been through just about every make of computer and type, last year i put together a amiga 1200 ppc and i wasnt impressed with it and imediatly sold it as i then remember that 3d game support was awefull maybe if they had made it with better 3d graphics chips like the first old pc 4mb s3 virge cards and then voodoo,s who knows she might have survived,but the pc advanced more quickly than home computer because of the business use,
i remember i saw rebal assualt in a shop window playing its demo all bye itself and seeing what stunning 3d graphics which were being dislayed ,on a 486dx 33 with a soudblaster wow now just those tiny things made me ditch the amiga straight away and get into pcs im glad i did ,especially around that time i think the cd32 was out and i brought 1 and was gutted how crap it was ,
it would never have survived because of the power of the pc and its faster development time,
if it had survived it would be in the realms it is now for us old folk who remember it with rosy tinted glasses.
the amiga and even the new amga stuff is just for pure pleasure something to do when the wife says no :)
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I think what doomed the Amiga was the mounting of the Graphics chips on the motherboard and trying to develop them in house. They didn't have the R&D to continue the OS, what gave them the idea that they could do the graphics as well?
In the end I guess there must be an alternate universe where Amiga and Atari survived and Apple and Microsoft didn't, but it probably self destructed shortly afterwards....
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If Commodore had funded the Amiga properly we would've had AAA right on time before the PC gfx cards became usable. If you remember that AAA was to have 24bit support at decent resolutions, a 32 bit Copper able to change pixels at standard TV resolution, and add that to the fact that we had very good assembler programmers that could push the Amiga chipset tricks to the edge, and if you add that the toaster could be used with that, well...
It would have been the standard in video / art / multimedia / gaming for the whole 90s, that's for sure, and that's a whole bunch of market's.
Those Commodore managements were such a bunch of idiots.
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persia wrote:
I think what doomed the Amiga was the mounting of the Graphics chips on the motherboard and trying to develop them in house. They didn't have the R&D to continue the OS, what gave them the idea that they could do the graphics as well?
I think the problem was penetration, Sega used it own chip sets till 1998. If the Amiga sold in the tens of millions then Commodore could have easily paid for developing it own chip sets at least till 1998 when it become highely cost prohibitive to do so.
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You are missing some history though, by the end, HP was doing the R&D for the new graphic chip (Hombre).Commodore was in a position where MS would have done the OS and HP would have developed the chips. This has all been documented in "The BOOK". Look at the LISA chip, it was made by HP also.
The Amiga by 1995 would have been a joint Commodore/ Hp hybrid machine. If they would have lasted, its very likely that HP would have absorbed them and The Amiga would have evolved into a Intel platform by now, because Motorola hasn't made chips for years. It may have gone to a PPC platform, but then IBM would have been brought in the mix,so that would have been doubtful.
Psy wrote:
persia wrote:
I think what doomed the Amiga was the mounting of the Graphics chips on the motherboard and trying to develop them in house. They didn't have the R&D to continue the OS, what gave them the idea that they could do the graphics as well?
I think the problem was penetration, Sega used it own chip sets till 1998. If the Amiga sold in the tens of millions then Commodore could have easily paid for developing it own chip sets at least till 1998 when it become highely cost prohibitive to do so.
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persia wrote:
I think what doomed the Amiga was the mounting of the Graphics chips on the motherboard and trying to develop them in house. They didn't have the R&D to continue the OS, what gave them the idea that they could do the graphics as well?
I don't think it doomed it - back then, it made sense. What doomed the Amiga was Commodore going bust, but had they have survived, they could have switched to using 3rd party graphics chips.
I'd also argue that using custom chipsets would still have provided an edge over PCs even into the late 90s - consider how hardware 3D support on PCs was still primitive and required expensive cards, and PCs had yet to fall down to the low end price (under £500), whilst the Playstation was doing it at a much lower price. Imagine a low end computer doing that, with a built in 3D chipset. It was only from about 1999 that PCs filled this gap with low end machines that had hardware 3D support. Of course, it would've required something newer than AGA - if Commodore couldn't do that themselves, there's the possibility of partnering with another company.
Note that most computers these days are back to having graphics chipsets on the motherboard.
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Well..
Anyone subscribing to the infinite alternate universe probability theory can rest assured that somewhere, out there in the space time continuum, Amiga is the dominant platform, Bill gates flips burgers at McDonalds, and Amiga accellerators are reasonably priced...
:-P
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Yep, it seemed right back then, it could do some nice graphics and sound out of the box, with no messing around with addresses, jumpers and such for your expensive Soundblaster card. If they had kept going, they of course wouldn't be stuck with the AGA chipset, would probably have followed the Apple route as at the time, PPC was the logical progression. PCs at the time were still very expensive for "multimedia" and gaming, and given another generation there's no reason why big-box Amigas couldn't have had PCI, and therefore not taken advantage of all the new 3D graphics cards on the market.
As for using external chip suppliers, why not? Look at Nintendo. PPC processors, graphics chips made by Radeon, yet it's still an individual machine.
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Daedalus wrote:
Yep, it seemed right back then, it could do some nice graphics and sound out of the box, with no messing around with addresses, jumpers and such for your expensive Soundblaster card. If they had kept going, they of course wouldn't be stuck with the AGA chipset, would probably have followed the Apple route as at the time, PPC was the logical progression. PCs at the time were still very expensive for "multimedia" and gaming, and given another generation there's no reason why big-box Amigas couldn't have had PCI, and therefore not taken advantage of all the new 3D graphics cards on the market.
And they might have bought out BeOS and turned it into the Amiga's OS X which actually would have been pretty cool.
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...despite 20 years of technical advances, eurocoders would still be writing trackloader games for A500's that failed to work on systems that had more than 512k Chip-RAM and Fast-RAM. :-P
And the majority of Amigans would moan and complain about having to upgrade from that to run any other given game! :-P :-P
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AndyC wrote:
Well..
Anyone subscribing to the infinite alternate universe probability theory can rest assured that somewhere, out there in the space time continuum, Amiga is the dominant platform, Bill gates flips burgers at McDonalds, and Amiga accellerators are reasonably priced...
:-P
I'm with you! :insane:
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Three things are implied:
1) world would have been better
2) current PC sound & graphic performance would have been achieved in 1999 if not earlier
3) Microsoft and Apple would have had to try really harder :-)
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DiskDoctor wrote:
Three things are implied:
1) world would have been better
2) current PC sound & graphic performance would have been achieved in 1999 if not earlier
3) Microsoft and Apple would have had to try really harder :-)
:-)
And ppl would be writing in 5th generation programming languages, computers would have very little to no boot time, the OS would be way more flexible, both to use it as well as for programs to.
*sigh*
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If anything, I'm sure modern OSes wouldn't need about 1024 times the amount of RAM (and a processor several hundred times as fast) that they needed back in the Amiga's heyday in order to run smoothly.
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Modern OSs do a lot that '80s OSs didn't, I doubt a modern AmigaDos would be any smaller or faster than OS X, MS Windows or Linux.
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In this alternate universe... 2009
--Computing World--
Commodore International: 40% Market Share and gaining
Current Products: AmigaONE Notebooks and Desktops,
Operating Systems: Amiga OS V rel. 3, Web Broswer: Galaxy 5.0
MP3: Vicky Shuffle, Touch, Deluxe
Cel Phone: The Pet Phone G3
Other Products: iCDTV mini, AmigaBlu Gameconsole
Retail Stores: 678 worldwide
Clone Makers: Gateway, Acer, Asus
Current Aquisitions: Assets of Apple Inc.
(defunct as of 1997), Palm Inc., RIM
Milestone: Purchase of NeXT and QNX in March 1994 prevented
Commodore from losing the market.
Plans for future: Cloud Computing
Atari Inc. (Disney/Time Warner Corp.): 60% and losing
Current Products: Falcon X PC Series Machines Notebooks and Desktops
Operating Systems: GEM Operating System release 6 with Aero interface, Web Browser: TOS Explorer 8
MP3: None - Moon Player (Defunct as of 2004)
Retail Stores: None, Atari's are sold everywhere
Clone Makers: HP, Compaq, Packard Bell
Other Products: Atari Office 2009, Atari Xbox, Atari Lynx V
Milestone: Purchase of Microsoft in 1994 and Sega in 2001,
Atari was the shining star in the late 90s and early 00s
during web 1.0 and early web 2.0
Plans for future: Cloud Computing
Linux and Open Source Timeline was never touched.
-- Gaming Consoles --
AmigaBlu - 1st Place
Atari Xbox - 2nd Place
-- Gaming Portables --
Nintendo Gameboy Color 3 - 1st Place
Atari Lynx V - 2nd Place
I would love to be in this future.
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Really, the question in the topic is wrong... it should read:
"How would have been the computer world if Amiga and Atari had not messed up?"
Since the only reason for the death of Commodore and Atari was themselves. They failed to keep up with the rest of the industry and take advantage of their dominant Home Computer positions!
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"Since the only reason for the death of Commodore and Atari was themselves."
That has pretty much been the history of computers for everyone. MS isn't dominant because they did everything right. The are dominant because they shot themselves in the foot fewer times than everyone else.
The only reason that Mac is still out there as a far second run competitor is because MS bailed them out so that they could claim competition.
It will be interesting to see what the long term holds for Linux. Is giving everybody pellet guns safer for you foot than having your CEO swinging a shotgun around or does it just mean that you die the death of a thousand cuts in a strung out mixed metaphore?
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You know as much as it hurts me to say this, as someone who knows they will never ever be as happy about computing as the day I read/watched reviews of the Amiga 1000, we wouldn't have the CPUs we have today.
Amiga died because Commodore was selling the same 8mhz bullcrap 4 years after the A1000 went on sale and not investing in R&D. Doom/Polygon games were released...PCs had byte per pixel screens...Amigas were stuck with bitplanes and slow CPU+2D custom chip assistance only...cue the 'wooo I want a PC' from discerning gamers!
However, if chipsets had been improved more than once every half decade and OS development been continued on form we probably would have had OS 4 in 2000 so god knows how great things would be OS wise. What I remember about the Amiga is it was an efficient and elegant system, and just imagine how creative you could be now if things had kept a pace with what I was doing in 1990 with my 8mb A2000 + framegrabbers....like painting with 200 frame animbrushes and composing my own scenes of Battlestar Galactica from ripped footage of recorded Videos :)
If you take it to its logical conclusion you would have an almighty system for manipulating sound/video/images that also happened to play games on a par with the latest consoles so...
PS3/360 quality games
Truly mind bending realtime graphics manipulations in 1080p HD
Writing music without the need to buy any expensive music
An OS that made you feel like you wanted to use the machine
Ahhh it's nice to dream now and then :)
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If Commodore had have survived, any modern "Amiga" would similarly likely have been a very different platform, only sharing the name (e.g., consider that Commodore's plans were at one point to move to RISC machines running Windows NT).
Yes. And it's a good thing... Much like cars done today have nothing to do with cars made 24 years ago, fortunately!
Fortunately, today's "amigas" have nothing to do with original "amigas", but unfortunately, todays "AmigaOS" is the same as the one we had in 1985. Same limitations.
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Maybe we would have World War 3 since "AMIGANS" and "ATARIANS" hate it each other so much plus the MAC and PC people on the other side.
Greetings to all "AMIGANS":)