Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[psxphill]

In 1984, Commodore was also getting ready to release the Commodore 900 UNIX machine, that was developed inhouse by Commodore Germany(the same team would later design A500 and A2000).

The Commodore 900 and the Amiga 500 were designed in the US.
 
The A2000 is slightly more complex. The first A2000 was designed in Germany by taking the A1000 and adding the Los Gatos Zorro 1 backplane and turning it into Zorro 2 by changing the form factor to fit the PC style case. They also added the cpu slot, video slot and isa slots. This was developed around the same time that the Amiga 500 was being designed in Westchester.
 
The second A2000 (the one that you want if you buy an A2000 as it's the one that actually works properly) was designed in Westchester based on the A500. The cpu slot was fixed so you could insert an accelerator without having to remove the onboard 68000. The video slot was made useful and a lot of the new ttl logic was shrunk down into buster.
 
The Commodore 900 might have been a good unix workstation, but it had been stuck in development hell for a long time & Commodore prototyped a lot of machines and only manufactured them if they got orders for them. The Amiga 2200 was one such system, on the other hand orders kept coming in for the c64 into the 90's.
 
The Commodore 900 was offered for sale as a development platform for the Amiga before development was self hosted. The few that made it out were likely left over from that.

[psxphill]

What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM?

Atari were the only company that were likely to buy them and ship computers that we would have bought.
 
Supposedly some workstation manufacturers were interested in the chipset, but this was way before it was finished and they would have used their own software. It's unlikely we would have ever afforded to buy one & there would have been no real reason for us to either.
 
Commodore pumped a lot of money into Amiga to get it finished, the os didn't really exist and it was outputting yuv instead of rgb at the time. While the Los Gatos group were treated as heroes and commodore treated as villains who paid no part in the development, it wasn't really like that.

[psxphill]

And for those who've not seen what could be done with mid 80s UNIX, go try NeXTSTEP in virtualbox (the hw is really hard to get, although it's brilliant). That GUI was a generation ahead from what was available at the time!

NextSTEP came out towards the end of 1989, not really the same timeframe as the commodore 900 (which had blown the development schedule by 1985).
 
The commodore 900 wouldn't have been able to compete with the next computer on hardware, it's likely that commodore would have milked it as they did the Amiga & it would have ended the same way.

[psxphill]

By 1989, C= could be using Z80000, which blows the NeXT's 68030 away.

The z80,000 was cancelled in 1984 before it was completed, either because the z8000 was a failure or because the z80,000 never worked.
 
It's likely competitive to the 68020, although it's irrelevant. Commodore were still shipping 68000 based Amiga's in 1992. There is no way they'd have switched from the z8000 to a z80000 by 1989.

[psxphill]

I swear, it's like half the people in this community operate on the logic that the way things did go is the only way things could have gone - because Unix/Unixoid is the "in" thing right now,

Unix always had a following & it's basically the same people who followed it in the 70's that follow it now. Amiga was different, some people ended up getting sucked into Unix but it's just a pretender to the Amiga legacy.
 

I think a generic UNIX box is a little harsh to say about the C900.
It had custom graphics system. Commodore's own windowing system on top of Coherent.
And it was pretty cheap(for an UNIX box)... 3000ish $, and that's without the inevitable educational discount... I

The 8563 was horrible in the C128 and it would have been no better in the serial terminals for the C900. It would have sunk commodore quicker. At least with the Amiga they didn't have competition for people making compatible computers. How long do you think they'd have succeeded with competition?
 
The Amiga lasted so long because it was in a niche market.