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

[bloodline]

Well, just a note... if Amiga had survived, it would now be a poor man's Mac...

[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)

[bison]

Amiga would have had to survived Commodore first.  Assuming they had done that, then maybe computers today would be more fun and less complex.

[ChuckT]

If Commodore survived, I suspect they would be hiring someone else to write the operating system because I can't imagine that Microsoft would be affordable or still be willing to do it.

This question should really be asked of former Commodore employees.

[webhead]

well i have been through just about every make of computer and type, last year i put together a amiga 1200 ppc and i wasnt impressed with it and imediatly sold it as i then remember that 3d game support was awefull maybe if they had made it with better 3d graphics chips like the first old pc 4mb s3 virge cards and then voodoo,s who knows she might have survived,but the pc advanced more quickly than home computer because of the business use,

i remember i saw rebal assualt in a shop window playing its demo all bye itself and seeing what stunning 3d graphics which were being dislayed ,on a 486dx 33 with a soudblaster wow now just those tiny things made me ditch the amiga straight away and get into pcs im glad i did ,especially around that time i think the cd32 was out and i brought 1 and was gutted how crap it was ,

it would never have survived because of the power of the pc and its faster development time,

if it had survived it would be in the realms it is now for us old folk who remember it with rosy tinted glasses.

the amiga and even the new amga stuff is just for pure pleasure something to do when the wife says no

[persia]

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?

In the end I guess there must be an alternate universe where Amiga and Atari survived and Apple and Microsoft didn't, but it probably self destructed shortly afterwards....

[Jose]

If Commodore had funded the Amiga properly we would've had AAA right on time before the PC gfx cards became usable. If you remember that AAA was to have 24bit support at decent resolutions, a 32 bit Copper able to change pixels at standard TV resolution, and add that to the fact that we had very good assembler programmers that could push the Amiga chipset tricks to the edge, and if you add that the toaster could be used with that, well...

It would have been the standard in video / art / multimedia / gaming for the whole 90s, that's for sure, and that's a whole bunch of market's.
Those Commodore managements were such a bunch of idiots.

[Psy]

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 think the problem was penetration, Sega used it own chip sets till 1998.  If the Amiga sold in the tens of millions then Commodore could have easily paid for developing it own chip sets at least till 1998 when it become highely cost prohibitive to do so.

[quarkx]

You are missing some history though, by the end, HP was doing the R&D for the new graphic chip (Hombre).Commodore was in a position where MS would have done the OS and HP would have developed the chips. This has all been documented in "The BOOK". Look at the LISA chip, it was made by HP also.
The Amiga by 1995 would have been a joint Commodore/ Hp hybrid machine. If they would have lasted, its very likely that HP would have absorbed them and The Amiga would have evolved into a Intel platform by now, because Motorola hasn't made chips for years. It may have gone to a PPC platform, but then IBM would have been brought in the mix,so that would have been doubtful.

Psy wrote:

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 think the problem was penetration, Sega used it own chip sets till 1998.  If the Amiga sold in the tens of millions then Commodore could have easily paid for developing it own chip sets at least till 1998 when it become highely cost prohibitive to do so.

[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.

[AndyC]

Well..

Anyone subscribing to the infinite alternate universe probability theory can rest assured that somewhere, out there in the space time continuum, Amiga is the dominant platform, Bill gates flips burgers at McDonalds, and Amiga accellerators are reasonably priced...

 :-P

[Daedalus]

Yep, it seemed right back then, it could do some nice graphics and sound out of the box, with no messing around with addresses, jumpers and such for your expensive Soundblaster card. If they had kept going, they of course wouldn't be stuck with the AGA chipset, would probably have followed the Apple route as at the time, PPC was the logical progression. PCs at the time were still very expensive for "multimedia" and gaming, and given another generation there's no reason why big-box Amigas couldn't have had PCI, and therefore not taken advantage of all the new 3D graphics cards on the market.

As for using external chip suppliers, why not? Look at Nintendo. PPC processors, graphics chips made by Radeon, yet it's still an individual machine.

[Psy]

Daedalus wrote:
Yep, it seemed right back then, it could do some nice graphics and sound out of the box, with no messing around with addresses, jumpers and such for your expensive Soundblaster card. If they had kept going, they of course wouldn't be stuck with the AGA chipset, would probably have followed the Apple route as at the time, PPC was the logical progression. PCs at the time were still very expensive for "multimedia" and gaming, and given another generation there's no reason why big-box Amigas couldn't have had PCI, and therefore not taken advantage of all the new 3D graphics cards on the market.

And they might have bought out BeOS and turned it into the Amiga's OS X which actually would have been pretty cool.

[B00tDisk]

...despite 20 years of technical advances, eurocoders would still be writing trackloader games for A500's that failed to work on systems that had more than 512k Chip-RAM and Fast-RAM. :-P

And the majority of Amigans would moan and complain about having to upgrade from that to run any other given game! :-P :-P

[taunusand]

AndyC wrote:
Well..

Anyone subscribing to the infinite alternate universe probability theory can rest assured that somewhere, out there in the space time continuum, Amiga is the dominant platform, Bill gates flips burgers at McDonalds, and Amiga accellerators are reasonably priced...

 :-P

I'm with you! :insane: