5 ms·

I saw the Mac and was intrigued, but never touched one at the time. I hadn't played with one yet. BUT, about a year later, I DID check out an Amiga. Same CPU in

I saw the Mac and was intrigued, but never touched one at the time. I hadn't played with one yet. BUT, about a year later, I DID check out an Amiga. Same CPU inside of it, but this one was in color. And had a GUI also, but also a CLI if you wanted to use that. AND it pre-emptive multitasked out of the box (no protected memory though, so it did crash). I got involved with the Amiga before the Mac...and I couldn't understand why people liked the Mac so much with how limited it was comparatively. Just shows the power of presentation and a company behind a product that could launch it to bigger things. Commodore never really understood what it had with the Amiga, but Apple did...which is why the Mac has stuck around and the Amiga is just a footnote now.

doctor_eval 3y ago
I had access to both Macs and Amigas, and the Mac was simply way more polished. It was a complete product that did useful things. It didn’t have a command line because it didn’t need^ one. The Amiga was very flashy but, ultimately, it felt like a toy to me. It was more fun to hack on than the Mac, but most people don’t care about that. ^ I’m so happy it has one today.
- nevster 3y ago
  Agree about the polish. The UI of the Amiga always looked kinda gross. And the Amiga mouse buttons felt horrible. Almost as bad as the iMac hockey puck mouse!
  - foobarian 3y ago
    What about the boxy hand holding the floppy when you turned it on! Heh.
    - doctor_eval 3y ago
      I remember the sales pitch one guy gave me for Amiga, where he got all the images on the screen to cycle through all the colours of the rainbow. And then they had this weird printer that printed colour images on quarter sized thermal rolls? Am I remembering right? I suppose it was supposed to be an impressive demo, but even though I was in my early 20s I was like, wtf? Why would anyone want this?! Especially when I had a laser printer in my office!
- timbit42 3y ago
  The Amiga was vastly superior to the Mac. Sure the Mac had every pixel in place. It looked like something overpriced, and it was for what little it could do. The Amiga didn't look as slick but I could digitize images and record sound, and edit them in full color and in stereo. On the Mac, you were limited to desktop publishing because you could do that with only black and white. The Amiga OS looked a lot better with v2.x.
musictubes 3y ago
Wasn't desktop publishing a big early "killer app" for the Mac? It had the Laserwriter and I am under the impression that its management and rendering of fonts were better as well. Amiga had a big impact on audio and art of I remember correctly. I took an art course in 1993 and the lab was full of Amigas. Not only did they have color screens but there was a rudimentary video capture system as well. We couldn't actually edit videos but we could incorporate video into projects. We did have a Mac in the electronic audio lab though. Mind you, it was a single Mac Quadra. We had just gotten a 60mb hard drive which really opened up audio editing capabilities. We would dump our projects onto a DAT and reload them in our next time booked in the lab. All that gear was really expensive. I ended up using the analog stuff more (Moog something or other, Otari 1/4" 4 track, razor blades, tape, etc.) because it was so much easier to get up and going and tape loops were a lot of fun.
kalleboo 3y ago
I only got to use an Amiga much later when it was already "retro" but the gigantic pixelated icons meant to be displayed on an TV over composite and ugly fonts and gaudy colors just gave me the impression that it was a toy. Reinforced by all the pirated games the one I had to use came with. It's a shame Commodore never properly iterated on the product to let it reach it's potential.
- timbit42 3y ago
  While the Amiga had NTSC output, of course that was limited to the resolution a TV could produce and so it was pixelated, but the Amiga could do 640x400 on a monitor and that looked less pixelated than the Mac. The Amiga 3000 could do interlaced without any of the flickering you get on NTSC. After Jack left Commodore in 1984, Irving Gould was in control and he seemed hell bent on pulling as much profit as possible out of the company for his personal benefit. He didn't leave R&D or Engineering enough money to do anything meaningful. That is what killed Commodore. The greed of one man.

doctor_eval 3y ago

I had access to both Macs and Amigas, and the Mac was simply way more polished. It was a complete product that did useful things. It didn’t have a command line because it didn’t need^ one. The Amiga was very flashy but, ultimately, it felt like a toy to me. It was more fun to hack on than the Mac, but most people don’t care about that. ^ I’m so happy it has one today.

nevster 3y ago
Agree about the polish. The UI of the Amiga always looked kinda gross. And the Amiga mouse buttons felt horrible. Almost as bad as the iMac hockey puck mouse!
- foobarian 3y ago
  What about the boxy hand holding the floppy when you turned it on! Heh.
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    I remember the sales pitch one guy gave me for Amiga, where he got all the images on the screen to cycle through all the colours of the rainbow. And then they had this weird printer that printed colour images on quarter sized thermal rolls? Am I remembering right? I suppose it was supposed to be an impressive demo, but even though I was in my early 20s I was like, wtf? Why would anyone want this?! Especially when I had a laser printer in my office!
timbit42 3y ago
The Amiga was vastly superior to the Mac. Sure the Mac had every pixel in place. It looked like something overpriced, and it was for what little it could do. The Amiga didn't look as slick but I could digitize images and record sound, and edit them in full color and in stereo. On the Mac, you were limited to desktop publishing because you could do that with only black and white. The Amiga OS looked a lot better with v2.x.

musictubes 3y ago

Wasn't desktop publishing a big early "killer app" for the Mac? It had the Laserwriter and I am under the impression that its management and rendering of fonts were better as well. Amiga had a big impact on audio and art of I remember correctly. I took an art course in 1993 and the lab was full of Amigas. Not only did they have color screens but there was a rudimentary video capture system as well. We couldn't actually edit videos but we could incorporate video into projects. We did have a Mac in the electronic audio lab though. Mind you, it was a single Mac Quadra. We had just gotten a 60mb hard drive which really opened up audio editing capabilities. We would dump our projects onto a DAT and reload them in our next time booked in the lab. All that gear was really expensive. I ended up using the analog stuff more (Moog something or other, Otari 1/4" 4 track, razor blades, tape, etc.) because it was so much easier to get up and going and tape loops were a lot of fun.

kalleboo 3y ago

I only got to use an Amiga much later when it was already "retro" but the gigantic pixelated icons meant to be displayed on an TV over composite and ugly fonts and gaudy colors just gave me the impression that it was a toy. Reinforced by all the pirated games the one I had to use came with. It's a shame Commodore never properly iterated on the product to let it reach it's potential.

timbit42 3y ago
While the Amiga had NTSC output, of course that was limited to the resolution a TV could produce and so it was pixelated, but the Amiga could do 640x400 on a monitor and that looked less pixelated than the Mac. The Amiga 3000 could do interlaced without any of the flickering you get on NTSC. After Jack left Commodore in 1984, Irving Gould was in control and he seemed hell bent on pulling as much profit as possible out of the company for his personal benefit. He didn't leave R&D or Engineering enough money to do anything meaningful. That is what killed Commodore. The greed of one man.