Fallen giants - comparing the '80s second-generation home computers

[liam_on_linux]

A friend of mine who is a Commodore enthusiast commented that if the company had handled it better, the Amiga would have killed the Apple Mac off.

But I wonder. I mean, the $10K Lisa ('83) and the $2.5K Mac ('84) may only have been a year or two before the $1.3K Amiga 1000 ('85), but in those years, chip prices were plummeting -- maybe rapidly

Comments

[liam_on_linux]

Good reply!

From my reading, as I understand it, the Mac started out based around the 6809. The 68000 was a later upgrade. I've not heard of a 68008 stage but I'm not saying you're wrong.

The evolution of the 680x0 series did seem even more undirected than that of the 32-bit x86s. Intel bolted stuff in as and when it could, then occasionally realised it had overshot and released a cut-down (e.g. 386SX) or intentionally crippled (e.g. 486SX) model.

Motorola, on the other hand, flailed.

But yes, Coldfire is still around, you're right, and there is an ST clone built around it, the FireBee:

http://acp.atari.org/

But the FPGA approaches seem to be winning IMHO -- some I never thought would make it have actually shipped!

MiniMig, an Original ChipSet Amiga clone:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=777

MiST, originally an ST, now does Amiga & some 8-bitters:

http://www.lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=96

(Yes, I vaguely want one of all of them. No, I'm not going to.)

[pndc]

I slighly misremembered the story I read in Revolution in the Valley, which also turns out to be at http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Five_Different_Macs.txt

Rather than selecting the 68008 directly, Burrell designed glue logic for the 68000 that hobbled it down to the same spec as the 68008 to produce the same cost-reduction on memory chips. This work was done in December 1980, whereas the 68008 was released in 1982. It seems likely that Apple would have chosen the 68008 were it available at the time.

Those various emulators are cute, but do rather look like reference designed bodged into cheap Maplin cases, rather than some nice retro hardware that also looks the part.