The Amiga Video Toaster: Why superior technology doesn’t always win the day

[Aegis]

Yes, the Toaster was hugely successful, helped kick-start the desktop 3D revolution with LightWave and is still around today in the form of NewTek's Tricaster - hardly a failure.

Commodore's mismanagement was the death of the Amiga, I still remember the video of Jay Miner chastising people for applauding Commodore's gaming ads - he knew exactly what the Amiga was capable of (in terms of an enabling technology for the masses) and how far ahead of its time it was - Commodore sadly, didn't.

[Aegis]

Yes it cost less, but it also came whit less RAM then PC's, this was true for all cheap models, this was huge frailer because, as Amiga was marked it as home computer / gaming computer, the result was that many games came as cut down versions, also a letter failed because the A1200 did not come whit built in CDROM while it was common to have it in the PC's, only 2MB while PC did have 4MB in 1992, it was a failure to adapt to the marked, also the CPU was too slow in the A1200. It was great computer but it was crippled.

To be fair, by the time the A1200 appeared, Commodore was already in a downward spiral - AA appeared far to late, it was an incremental upgrade and shipping a 'new' low-end Amiga with a 68EC020 and no fast RAM was inexcusable.

Not to take anything away from the A1200 - it was popular and was (is) a great Amiga, just not the one that was needed at the time - so much R&D had already been wasted on superior systems by then but it was all thrown aside.

Commodore had plenty of time (and money) to compete with PCs of the time but instead of making better Amigas they made... PCs *facepalm*

Another thing the Amiga did not have that PC did have, it was easy to upgrade a PC, just replace the CPU, or put in some extra ram modules, the A1200 and A500 required special upgrades.

Easy for who? Not your average user of the time, that's for sure - Autoconfig was one of many features the Amiga had that made upgrades (comparatively) a breeze - considering their form-factor, Amigas were incredibly easy to upgrade - want more memory? Slot in a board and switch on - how much easier does it get?

As my friends puts it, he left the Amiga because he wanted more adult games, not just Mario games, he was more intro adventure games, and the rpg (role playing games).

Which was as I mentioned, the point where the Amiga was already in decline - games like Dune 2, Monkey Island, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master etc. were all superior on the Amiga when they debuted, when these more 'adult' games started to become PC exclusives the Amiga was already well into decline.

The Amiga's glory days were during the A500/A2000 heyday - once the A600 appeared it was all downhill from there on

[Aegis]

Yes, PC's continued to evolve in directions the Amiga should have taken - the A4000T was the first (and last) Amiga to take a more modular approach.

My perspective on things though is that by the time the 486 came around (1989), the Amiga was already on an irreversible decline - its custom architecture kept it somewhat competitive with PCs of that time but in 1985 when the A1000 debuted, the Amiga quite literally blew away all the competition.

The A500 was hugely successful (particularly in Europe) but between 1987-1992 (introduction of the A1200) there was no significant improvements made to the Amiga line - 5 years may not seem like a lot but PC's changed drastically in that time.

Commodore didn't know how to sell the Amiga and they didn't anticipate the need to upgrade the line - most of their development went into cost-cutting so they could make old hardware cheaper - a legacy from the C64 I guess which was sold in the same basic configuration from 1982 'til 1995.

They were incredibly slow to market with things like hard disks and CD-ROM - of course, financial black-holes like the CDTV, A600 and their PC business didn't help...