What would an Amiga be today?

[amigadave]

bloodline wrote:

SamuraiCrow wrote:
The AAA chipset was going to get canned and Commodore was thinking of dropping their own operating system in favor of the PowerPC version of Windows NT.  Even if they hadn't gone belly-up they still would have made a terrible mess of things and still gotten it wrong.  Management at Commodore towards the end was outright anti-Amiga and pro-PC.

My opinion:  Commodore was doomed in many ways at once.  It would have gone under one way or another anyhow.

I agree with you mostly... but Both Haynie and Ludwig have said that the PPC was not a choice for the future of Amiga... it was dropped early on in development meetings... HP's PA-RISC was the choice...

Custom Chipsets were on the way out, and yeah NT was in as far as Commodore was concerned. The Amiga as we know it would have faded out after the 1992 machines :-)

The Amiga was doomed almost from the very start when so little chipset advancement was made between the A1000 and the A500/A2000 and again almost no graphic advancement from the A500/A2000 to the A3000.  As has been repeated over and over again, AGA was "too little too late" and the A4000/A1200 was almost an embarrassment to the Amiga community, as most of us knew very well that the PC and Mac were not only catching up by the time the A4000/A1200 was released, but that they had already surpassed them in many ways.  

Commodore management appears to never have taken the Amiga seriously and just made one bad decision after another and never fully funded the kind of development needed to keep the Amiga ahead of other platforms, where it should have stayed and could have easily stayed, if only they had not wasted all their development money trying to compete with the dozens of other PC manufacturers (where they lost horribly and killed the Commodore cash cow that had been created by the C64).

[amigadave]

pan1k wrote:

70% people could use a "notepad" for writing a documents, 15% could use FinalWriter from 1995 for putting the tables and pictures and basic formatting of fonts, rest could use PageStream 3.0.

I still use FinalWriter '97 and Pagestream. It does the job.. and loads VERY fast on an '060.

My Dad just wrote to me and my sister for advice about getting a new computer.  He is 78 now and did not get a computer until I gave him an A3000 some time around 1998 or so.  He used it for about a year before it became necessary for him to get a Windows computer to share files with his work and friends and better Internet access.  He then bought an eMachine (can't remember the specs) that he still uses today and I loaded FinalWriter for Windows on it for him as he was familiar with FinalWriter 97 on the A3000.

Well now that he wants a new computer he is concerned that his Family Tree software and his word processor (FinalWriter) won't work on the new computer.  I told him to go to WalMart or Costco and buy a new computer as that would probably be the best bang for his buck and satisfy his computing needs, but he has a local shop that wants to build him a computer.  I am afraid that they are going to gouge him with an out of date machine for a middle of the road price.  He did not like my suggestion of going with a Dell as he had heard stories of bad reliability.