Fallen giants - comparing the '80s second-generation home computers
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 ( Read more... )
The thing with the 8-bitters is that there were so many of them, it's tricky to distinguish clear influences.
One of the best-designed was the BBC Micro. Very capable and elegant and clean. It bequeathed a bit of genetics to the Archimedes, and that's the healthiest product line by far today.
CBM bought the Amiga in, so it has no commonality with the VIC20/C64. Actually it was built by Atari designers who did the Atari 400/800.
The ST shares no kinship with its Atari forebears -- Commodore hired 'em.
The Commodore OS is alive: http://www.amigaos.net/
You can buy at least 2 models of brand-new Amiga today:
AmigaOne 500:
http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=hardware&pid=7
AmigaOne X1000:
http://www.a-eon.com/
The 2 unrelated Sinclair lines died off, except in the Eastern Bloc, where the Spectrum flourished & developed into 16-bit machines with ISA slots and hard disks (!).
Most of the smaller players went nowhere.
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