Kronos wrote:
The differences between ST and Amiga may be rather subtle, but not how they were perceived by the general public.
The ST was seen as a cheaper Mac, with a simple professional looking OS running at a suitable resulotion, which could also be used for games.
The Amiga was a fancy game-machine with all bells&whistles, which featured an underdeveloped OS looking crap and to be used on the telly.
I'll actually concur there, though this was certainly more pronounced in Europe -- in the US, anything not a clone was pretty much weird by default.
Atari made an early and serious effort to pitch the ST as a "color Mac." Commodore... well, we know Commodore's marketing.
Of course, AFAIK, Atari had to shut up about the time Apple successfully sued Digital Research. I assume they might've even had plans to cobble together some actual Macintosh compatibility at some point otherwise.
Take for example the file-requester in early TOSes, simple but functional. AmigaOS1.x only offered a primitiv string gadget, and later tons of 3rd-party lib offering filerequster that worked in a ton of different ways.
Thats why we never really got good desktop-SW.
GEM was a toolkit in need of an OS. AmigaDOS was an OS in search of a toolkit. (Or seriously, Atari focused on having a relatively primitive MS-DOS-like loader with an environment of choice to load atop it; the Amiga team focused on the CAOS concept -- and then the Tripos-based reality -- then had to scramble to get Intuition and Workbench together, whether to demo the fact that they had something viable or actually get it to market.)
That said, obviously RJ and everyone did a pretty good job in terms of providing the framework that could be cleaned up by OS2.x.
