The other day, I linked to an amusing Miggy-versus-Jackintosh
page I'd found.
This led to a fairly well-mannered
reignition of the old argument. (Ta for the repost, Peter!)
I though my comment might be worth a post, since I don't post here as often as I'd like...
I think the Amiga was by far the better machine, yes, in hardware and in software. In raw CPU speed the ST had an edge and in a way I admire the simplicity of the ST's design: the Amiga was expensive and stuffed with custom chips and a custom OS unlike anything else, albeit based in small part on TRIPOS. (And the OS, like the Archimedes', was a last-minute stand-in for a failed project anyway.)
The ST was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the 16-bit era:
* the same COTS CPU as everyone non-PC-compatible used
* a bog-standard Yamaha sound chip
* bog-standard graphics derived from inexpensive chips from the x86 side of the fence - it was somewhere between EGA and VGA, basically, at CGA scan rates to work with TV sets.
* an OS kernel derived from CP/M-68K with some of the later semi-MS-DOS-compatible bits
* a GUI that was a straight port of DR-GEM from the PC, but not the version crippled by Apple's lawsuit.
* the PC/MS-DOS floppy disk format, basically
* standard joystick ports, serial/parallel IIRC, and MIDI, which was a stroke of genius, in hindsight.
The Lorraine, later the Amiga, later the Commodore Amiga - not a CBM product at all, originally - was a design tour-de-force from a bunch of ex-Atari people.
The QL was Sinclair's too-crippled take on a cheap 68K machine.
The Mac was a dramatically-cut-down but also simplified and less-weird Lisa, and it was still vastly expensive.
And off to one side, the Archimedes: proprietary from top to toe, although the result was stunning. No acceleration anywhere, very RISC, very stripped-down-and-simple, and as a result, as fast as feck - and quite expensive at first, albeit awesome in bang-for-buck.
Atari, having lots its chip gurus, said screw that, we can do a 68K box and we can do it faster and cheaper. It designed very little, almost nothing in-house: it was a COTS GUI on a the tweaked kernel of a COTS OS running on a COTS CPU with a COTS chipset.
And the result was a very good machine indeed for the money. No, not as fast as an Archie, but much cheaper. As fast as a Mac but about a sixth or an eighth of the price. Not as whizzy and cool as an Amiga, but cheaper and actually a very cool toy. Way more usable with a single floppy, too!
So don't diss the ST. I think it hit a sweet spot: not as constrained as the QL, not as elaborate & expensive as the Amiga, nowhere near as clever as the Archie, but simple, quick, cheap, solid, and stunning compared to the 8-bits that people were coming from.
The ST showed, for example, how past-it all the 8-bits were. I had a SAM Coupé, one of the latest and greatest 8-bit micros ever - stomped on MSX2 for spec - but the ST was a far better computer all round.
The ST may have paled next to the Miggy, but it made the Mac look very silly indeed.
And of course its media abilities stomped all over the PCs of the time, at a quarter of the price of a tricked-out PC.
As for their survival:
Well, there's no new Amiga H/W, but there is a current OS. 2 or 3 in fact.
The Acorn kit is dead but the chip and arguably elements of the chipset live on, are massively successful, and the OS - another stopgap - is still alive too.
The ST OS has been completely re-implemented as FOSS and it's alive too, just mostly on emulators.
The QL - well, that really is dead, but 2 forks of its OS are out there, one GPL, one with free source but not Free.
But the weird one in the corner, the Archimedes, that is the one that spawned an entire industry, even though the parent company withered and died.
Odd, that.
Probably the greatest British industry success story in many decades and almost nobody in Britain knows about it.