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> PA-RISC, etc.) or just left the market entirely (Apple, Commodore). Worth noting that had Commodore's astonishingly out of touch and schizophrenic corporate

> PA-RISC, etc.) or just left the market entirely (Apple, Commodore). Worth noting that had Commodore's astonishingly out of touch and schizophrenic corporate management not driven the company into the grave, the Amiga engineering team had already settled on PA-RISC as their next generation architecture as well, and I believe even had reached prototype stage on the vapors of cash renained in their final months of existence.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Commodore's management sucked, but it doesn't matter. The mid-90s made it pretty much impossible for anything that wasn't a commodity PC clone to survive. Apple only barely made it, and really only rescued themselves by making brightly coloured plastic wrappings around what was basically a typical commodity PC but with a different CPU/OS (PowerPC with IDE drives and PCI bus). The 90s was the era of Dell JIT delivery and grey-box clones. The margins fell out of the whole market. There was no room for the likes of an Atari or Commodore. Apple only turned things around for themselves in the next millennium by becoming a luxury brand maker of consumer appliances, and "computers" as we know them have become a much smaller market than handheld devices. Maybe the "Amiga" brand could have continued as a high end graphics card line for PCs. (But it's not like there was any special sauce left in Commodore eng talent that could have made anything competitive). But Commodore as a maker of home computers or workstations? Nothing could have saved them.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Reluctantly agree. The total product is what matters in the marketplace, and the silicon itself, and arguably even the OS, together are relatively minor factors. Sometimes I wonder if there was a point in time - where real history switches to a fantasy history - in which a non-pc clone paradigm ends up winning that war. If so what was the earliest point this could have happened, and would it even matter since market forces would ultimately pull any alternate success in the direction of an informally standards-federated clone paradigm anyway.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Commodore's management sucked, but it doesn't matter. The mid-90s made it pretty much impossible for anything that wasn't a commodity PC clone to survive. Apple only barely made it, and really only rescued themselves by making brightly coloured plastic wrappings around what was basically a typical commodity PC but with a different CPU/OS (PowerPC with IDE drives and PCI bus). The 90s was the era of Dell JIT delivery and grey-box clones. The margins fell out of the whole market. There was no room for the likes of an Atari or Commodore. Apple only turned things around for themselves in the next millennium by becoming a luxury brand maker of consumer appliances, and "computers" as we know them have become a much smaller market than handheld devices. Maybe the "Amiga" brand could have continued as a high end graphics card line for PCs. (But it's not like there was any special sauce left in Commodore eng talent that could have made anything competitive). But Commodore as a maker of home computers or workstations? Nothing could have saved them.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
Reluctantly agree. The total product is what matters in the marketplace, and the silicon itself, and arguably even the OS, together are relatively minor factors. Sometimes I wonder if there was a point in time - where real history switches to a fantasy history - in which a non-pc clone paradigm ends up winning that war. If so what was the earliest point this could have happened, and would it even matter since market forces would ultimately pull any alternate success in the direction of an informally standards-federated clone paradigm anyway.