What did Commodore have? AmigaOS was very mature but had no place to go. It was so tied to the hardware that any small change would kill legacy apps. Look what a mess it was going from 1.3 to 2.x/3.x.
That's an urban legend... DRACO ran AmigaOS3.1 quite fast without the need of custom chips.
BTW, 2.x to 3.x software transition was quite smooth. You had professional high quality software like ImageFX, AdPro, Photogenics, Lightwave, Cinema4D, Real3D, Imagine, Caligari Truespace, Bars'n'pipes, Pagestream... you could even paint with TrueBrilliance, and there were professional and affordable video solutions not available for any of the listed systems. Final Copy, Final Writer and Wordworth were excellent packages too.
In 1994 we were happily multitasking and most computer users didn't know what that meant and even claimed it was useless. And our applications were quite professional and most of them more affordable than similar programs in other systems.
AmigaOS 4 should have been developed along with AAA and included modern features like memory protection. By the late 80's, everybody in the computer world recognized that memory protection is a must for a stable, modern OS.
really? Win95 crashed much more easily than AmigaOS. And it crawled in hardware way faster too. And needed 8MB to be useable. By the late 80's most of people used monotask-OSes like MacOS or MSDOS+Windows. But most of them didn't have a clue about what multitasking meant and as you can suppose memory protection was an even more strange word for them.
Microsoft developed NT (based on ideas from VAX) with memory protection (among many other things) because its where you had to go. Consumer Windows was always planned to intersect Windows NT and they did a great job of slowly getting everybody there.
I think MS did a pathethic job with Win95. They should have marketed a NT workstation version as Win95 instead of creating that "thing". OS2 was simply superior and even allowed running Win3.1 apps too. It was not until WinXP that peecee users got a stable Windows system. Until WinXP you could hang Win95/98/ME as easy as AmigaOS3.x. Win95 with 4MB was unusable. Swapping floppy disks in my A500 was a less painful experience and usually more productive.
AGA in 1994 was not as bad as you may think, it allowed you to watch ham8 pr0n and animations smoothly. They should have improved more the CDXL format to take advantage of 030/040. Amiga was very cost effective solution.
Amiga also sported Autoconfig(tm) and it has worked very well until today.
A3000/4000 16MB limit was not really important until many years later. With 2MB of chipram you could do many things at once while other systems had to spent money in both gfx and normal ram. Even soundcard ram in some cases.
Amigas used to sound much better connected to a 1084s monitor than the old and crappy yogourt-like speakers used by 90% pc users in the 90s.
In 1994 AmigaOS was simply superior
