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... )
There are a couple of thinks to add here:
-With Tramiel leaving Commodore, Commodore lost most of its engineers, Tramiel took his money also.
-So Commodore bought Amiga, which was a costly business. At the same time 8-bit sales tanked. Tramiel's business tactics(low C64 price) also meant low margin for Commodore.
-Tramiel also did not have much money, so he had to hurry to make some product available.
-So both companies were restricted by their low capital by the end of 1985.
-Amiga was not really that useful when released. It did not have proper HDD support. It did not have proper flickerfree high resolution mode. It had very small amount of RAM. 256k for the multitasing OS was nothing. Basically the first thing to do for the Amiga was to buy RAM expansion.
-Atari TOS1.0 was on floppy, just like with Amiga. But with the ST1040, it was in ROM. The Atari with 1Meg of Ram was cheaper than the Amiga.
-Apple had laser writer and Microsoft Write in 1985. Atari also got good business support because it had an awesome mono mode, which the Amiga hadn't until ECS added productivity mode.
-The Amiga1000 was too expensive for the home market. The Ataris did not kill the Amiga. After the A2000/A500 was introduced those were quite good sellers. So much so, that Commodore did quite well in 1989/1990/1991 financially. If something killed the Amiga it was the cheap 286@16MHz CPUs which took over the lowend segment in 1990/1991
-i could tell more but it is late here... good night.
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