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> it seemed like Microsoft, the IBM PC, and Apple have kept us back 10 or 20 years with their dominance. I used to think so, too. However, the Amiga might've j

> it seemed like Microsoft, the IBM PC, and Apple have kept us back 10 or 20 years with their dominance. I used to think so, too. However, the Amiga might've just been a fluke. The very architecture that made it unique and so far ahead of its time also was its limitation in terms of technology. There wasn't really a way forward beyond the AAA chipset, which never even made it into production. Hombre, the proposed next generation of the Amiga, was supposed to be very different from and mostly incompatible with previous Amiga computers. The software had serious limitations from today's point of view, too. There was no memory protection and no multi-user capability. Adapting Amiga OS accordingly would have taken serious effort, perhaps to the point it wouldn't have been recognisable anymore. So maybe, while a truly awesome machine the Amiga sadly enough was just an outlier of computing technology that was the right thing at the right time but wasn't viable in the long run.

flohofwoe 10y ago
I've been recently thinking about this a lot. I think the critical year was 92/93 between the release of Wolfenstein3D and Doom. These were the PC's killer apps that showed everyone that a powerful generic hardware can be better than a highly specialised "hardware game engine" like the 8-bit homecomputers and later the Amiga and ST. But at this time the Amiga's architecture was already 8 years old and pretty much unchanged apart from the incremental 1200 update (just imagine what happened in the same time span after '93 on the PC!). I have to disagree about the OS being limited, even by today's standard. It was sort of cobbled together under the hood, but the end result was unbelievable when you put it next to a PC or even Mac of the mid 80's to early 90's. Even in 1990, when I was finally able to buy my own Amiga it was like alien technology (even compared to a Mac Plus, which was completely unaffordable).
digi_owl 10y ago
The problem of the Amiga was basically that it was clock cycle linked. To really get things going with the platform you had to count cycles so neither the CPU not the chipset got hung up waiting for the other. This made the platform frozen from the moment it shipped. In contrast the PC was less rigid, and only really had the x86 ISA and the BIOS memory map in common (and even the latter is falling by the wayside in recent years). There was also the whole clone aspect. The Amiga stood and fell with its parent company, Commodore. Once Compaq and the others cloned the BIOS chip, IBM could belly up and the PC platform would barely blink.

flohofwoe 10y ago

I've been recently thinking about this a lot. I think the critical year was 92/93 between the release of Wolfenstein3D and Doom. These were the PC's killer apps that showed everyone that a powerful generic hardware can be better than a highly specialised "hardware game engine" like the 8-bit homecomputers and later the Amiga and ST. But at this time the Amiga's architecture was already 8 years old and pretty much unchanged apart from the incremental 1200 update (just imagine what happened in the same time span after '93 on the PC!). I have to disagree about the OS being limited, even by today's standard. It was sort of cobbled together under the hood, but the end result was unbelievable when you put it next to a PC or even Mac of the mid 80's to early 90's. Even in 1990, when I was finally able to buy my own Amiga it was like alien technology (even compared to a Mac Plus, which was completely unaffordable).

digi_owl 10y ago

The problem of the Amiga was basically that it was clock cycle linked. To really get things going with the platform you had to count cycles so neither the CPU not the chipset got hung up waiting for the other. This made the platform frozen from the moment it shipped. In contrast the PC was less rigid, and only really had the x86 ISA and the BIOS memory map in common (and even the latter is falling by the wayside in recent years). There was also the whole clone aspect. The Amiga stood and fell with its parent company, Commodore. Once Compaq and the others cloned the BIOS chip, IBM could belly up and the PC platform would barely blink.