persia wrote:
There was virtually no chance of any of the closed systems surviving. It is impossible for a single company to produce a computer as cheaply as the parts assemblers do.
You mean like Intel, NEC, or Sun?
Amiga's only chance would have been to embrace Intel hardware and remove reliance on the custom chips or put them in an video card that would fit in an intel box. Even then it would be hard pressed to survive a dogfight with Microsoft, especially in partnersip with IBM, which meant computers back then..
In short, the Amiga to survive would have to stop being an Amiga and just be a PC with a boing logo on it? AInc tried that, didn't work too well
Face it, there's nothing but no win situations. There's no way that we could have had Atari and Amiga/CBM as viable companies in 2007. It was all a dream.
I can come up with several scenarios that would have made either a formidable foe that would have crushed the competition, all missed opportunities
Actually their is one way, unfortunately it involves the use of a Tardis to go back in time armed with the for-knowledge of what has happened. But even then you'd never convince CBM to go open platform with Amiga.
Plus you have to remember that a lot of us early Amigans suffered badly from Apple envy, we wanted an Apple, but back then Apples were more expensive than Amigas. I still remember the thrill that Emplant brought to the Amiga community. We could run MacOS! Even though it wasn't as sophisticated as AmigaOS, it was wonderful.
Amiga was open platform. I can still buy the hardware manual for the Amiga and write my own drivers. I cannot do the same with nVidia, ATI, XGI, SIS, VIA, not even Intel nor AMD release their docs in a timely manner. Amiga, the hardware manual shipped before the actual hardware did. That is the very definition of an open platform.
Amiga's main issue had nothing to do with openness, and everything to do with mismanagement.
