[Repurposed from Stack Exchange, here]

The premise in the question is incorrect. There were such chips. The question also fails to allow for the way that the silicon-chip industry developed.

Moore's Law basically said that every 18 months, it was possible to build chips with twice as many transistors for the same amount of money.

The 6502 (1975) is a ( Read more... )

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... )