I have always felt that the best machine Commodore made was the Amiga 3000 and Amiga 3000T. To me, the Amiga 3000 represents the last truly all-out effort of Commodore to produce a high-end Workstation. The manuals were very well done, the new OS really brought a polish that OS 1.3 lacked, they offered multiple OS's including 1.3, 2.x, and AMIX. They offered a fantastic corporate warranty (for the time) and the documentation/brochures were some of the best Commodore ever made. Lastly, they really tried to promote it to all the usual suspects in the media. Byte had a great cover, CC did a story on it, it was in a lot of business magazines as well, and our university at the time even had information on it (to purchase).
Their push into education via AMIX through Unix was also quite good. The AMIX documentation was/is just terrific AND it was created entirely in AMIX to boot! (Ha, pun!) It was in the manual and gave you something visual that you could say, "Wow, they did this kind of documentation in AMIX, that is pretty impressive!"
Besides the new AmigaOS, Commodore was pushing Amiga Vision as a tool for people to build great applications with in the same manner as Hypercard. I thought Amiga Vision was a great bungled tool that allowed new users to put together some great multimedia applications. The drivers for Laser Discs and other media at the time really showed off the different input devices you could glue together for you productions.
Finally, the look of the Amiga 3000 reflects care and attention to detail. You have a solid metal box that looks like a professional workstation. It truly made any desk look good. You have the built-in Amber chip for video correction and all the necessary slots and ports. Granted, the inside might not be as good as it looks outside -a zillion screws, slots a bit tight, the Video Toaster was difficult to wedge in there- but those are superfluous in the end.
While the Amiga 4000 and 1200 are nice machines they just didn't have the same look or push that I think Commodore did with the Amiga 3000. They are nice machines with AGA but it was the beginning of the end for Commodore.
I'm not trying to offend anyone, but just my reflection on the past.
Cheers!
-P
