How would have been the computer world if Amiga and Atari would have survived?

[mdwh2]

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"...

[mdwh2]

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)

[mdwh2]

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.