When did you realize that the wintel machines had caught up to the amiga?

[adz]

Wolfenstein 3D caught my attention, Doom and Strike Commander sealed Amiga's fate for me.

[Golem!dk]

Around the time I first tried BeOS on a PC.

[persia]

I remember sitting in an Amiga user group meeting the day WIndows 95 was released, the presenter was making all sorts of false statements about Windows 95 and I realised that yes the Amiga was still better but that it didn't matter, the end was nigh, why would people buy Amiga now I thought.  That's the day the Amiga market died.  It would be several years before the PC out did the Amiga, but it was at this point that the perception had changed and with perception came the sales.

[guest3110]

I think a couple of different things on this:

1. There are still some ways in which Amiga OS remains superior--I think, mostly, in terms of the type of kernel arrangement (Amiga OS's kernel is closest to an exokernel, compared to Windows, MAC or Linux). The potential remains the greatest with Amiga OS, so long as Windows, MAC or Linux does not move further away from the Monolithic or Microkernel arrangement.

2. I think I realized the general PC had caught up, when I saw the game MYST years ago. But, given serious consideration, and the fact the computer industry specialized MORE since the 1980s--resulting in companies doing only video graphics cards, for example--it may be something of a misnomer to say the "PC" or Windows caught up. The result is the same, though: the Amiga OS was surpassed, because it was no longer capitalizing upon what was available. (to reverse this, the Amiga OS and Amiga programs would have to address industry standard video and sound cards).

3. Maybe the proliferation of GAMES on PC, too.  :lol:

[zylesea]

I think it was somewhen in 1995 when I sat in some unversity cip-pool in front of some PentiumPC using Netscape Navigator and discovered the www (had mailbox access with my Amiga and a 14.4 modem b4).
Now, with OWB for Amiga/MorphOS this gap has been narrowed again (there's still quite a gap, but it became narrower).

[B00tDisk]

1993, when C= imploded and I realized that there would be no developers of the software I enjoyed left.

I got a 486/100 with a 170mb drive, 8mb RAM, a 2mb VLB video card, Win3.11 and never looked back.

Still tinker with emulation from time to time - I configured a system and played the original Quake beginning to end on it (p96/uae) and it ran at a consistent 30+ FPS, which has way more to do with the emulation than with Amiga's OS...

[orb85750]

Have they?  OK, yes.  However, I find Wintel machines to be very powerful, but very bloated and inefficient too -- the GM Hummers of the computer world.

[freqmax]

PC hardware had a long story of miserably performance:
 * 80386 / 80486
 * ISA (Jumper hell)
 * EGA
 * Beep-beep

So why did manages decide to buy the crap. Well IBM has a history since WWII in big iron computing. And the PC was from IBM so it must be good.. doh! It's a good example of evaluating the PR rather than what's actually involved.
Key is also that workplaces as a consequence got it. And then workers had access to it "on the job". And wanted one hope to continue work at home etc.. Which platforms developers like and use also have big say because they actually make new applications happen!

Only this hardware made it possible overthrow Amiga:
 * Pentium
 * PCI
 * VGA
 * Soundblaster

And ofcourse low prices on Ethernet and DRAM. This especially became obvious when it became chepaer with an 80286 doing ISA-Ethernet + RS232 than buying an ZII Ethernet.

Nlandas, At this point I'm not so sure the source would be benfitial. The API is known. And there's clever people around
We don't even have the chipmasks for A500. Still we have Minimig.

Win3.11 was a PAIN. But then Linux came to rescue. And FreeBSD was even smoother The darkside is kept inside sandboxes where it belongs.

[Haranguer]

For me, in part, it was when XP got to service pack 2.

For the rest of it, though, I'm still waiting, and I don't really believe it will ever happen.  Amiga had something Windoze will never have - it gave priority to user input.  Windows doesn't value user input highly, which is why, no matter how fast the hardware gets, it'll always seem slow ...

If I could actually get hardware that runs Amiga OS (at a price I could afford without mortgaging the house), I'd jump right back on it in a second.

[persia]

Not a good comparison actually, an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine.  Add to that the downright piggishness of the 1084 or any other crt and your Hummer analogy falls apart.

[trekiej]

Quake or Doom

[orb85750]

persia wrote:
Not a good comparison actually, an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine.  Add to that the downright piggishness of the 1084 or any other crt and your Hummer analogy falls apart.

Persia, you've missed the analogy -- or more likely, you have chosen to.  I was not using the "energy" term as in Watts(E/s) or horsepower literally.  I (obviously?) meant the enormous "horsepower" of the Wintel machines that seems to go to waste -- Re: such incredible "under the hood" memory, CPU, hard drive size, etc. of the modern Wintels.

[mingle]

Yep, Win95 for me...

Plus 1024x768x24bit screens...

[recidivist]

My  first thought was Win95/Pentium.

Even before that ,Wolfenstein and Doom  on the PC  running Dos/Win3 meant Amiga needed  bigger improvements than it got.
Amiga has been playing catch-up ever since;without Newtek, Amiga would have died sooner.

But really,once Commodore failed to get the CD32 into the stores  for Christmas sales it was downhill....

[Jiffy]

1993. I was thinking about replacing my aging A500-system back then and had a good amount of money to spend. The choice was between a new Amiga (1200 or 4000) or a new pc. The amount of 486s to be found was overwhelming, the amount of Amiga shops was, well, not.

I bought a 486dx2/66 with 8 MB ram, 245 MB harddrive, 2 MB VLB card, Soundblaster 16asp with a 17" CRT and an internal 14k4 modem.

It was running Windows 3.1 and was damn powerfull with great software. True, Windows 3.1 wasn't as good as Amiga OS 3.0, but the software it was running (Lotus Amipro, some graphics software, other stuff I can't remember) was absolutely great.

The pc definitely won. It was easy to expand and tinker around with, you could use several different operating systems if you wanted to, hardware was easy to get and cheap, as was software.

Amiga hardware was expensive and hard to get, as was software for it. Productivity software on the Amiga was lousy compared to software for the pc. There was nothing back then on the Amiga which compared well to, for example, Lotus Amipro 3. Support for the Amiga in computermagazines was in heavy decline.

Since then, I have used a pc for my normal computing needs and other computers such as the Amiga just for fun, whether it be nostalgia, gameplaying, fooling around with a different OS or whatever.

So, all in all, for me, the Amiga lost in 1993. I have been very satisfied with the 486 I bought back then, which I have been using and upgrading as my maincomputer until 1998. The Soundblaster 16ASP was a very good soundcard for its time and the Diamond Viper (2 MB VLB videocard) combined with an Iiyama 17" CRT gave me fast, crisp and stable videoperformance.

[InTheSand]

Duke Nuke'Em 3D was what swung it for me! Running that on a friend's Pentium-based PC with 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard finally made me move on from my A1200 (which I still have and still use now occasionally).

The A1200 had done a fair job until that point (1996), and I'd had a work '486 laptop in the couple of years prior, which ran Win95 well enough once it was released, beginning the end of really bad Microsoft OSs that finally stopped with the release of Win2K.

Running those early releases of UAE used to make me chuckle but the writing was already on the wall, especially after the bankruptcy of Commodore. On an early Linux release running on a 486DX2/66, UAE used to be very slow - but it already pointed towards the future.

 -Ali