6 ms·

There are many contributing factors as are being mentioned. I would say the most dominant one is the success of the x86 PC. That success depended on the continu

There are many contributing factors as are being mentioned. I would say the most dominant one is the success of the x86 PC. That success depended on the continued cost/performance value. M68k systems on the whole were considered workstation machines that looked down upon less capable hardware. Exceptions to this were the Amiga and Atari ST, which unfortunately competed themselves out of existence rather than against the PC market which was squeezing them out. The Macintosh was more capable due to its software rather than CPU. Once you have the success of DOS PCs and add growing exposure of Windows 2.x (e.g. Windows/386) filling in capabilities it's hard to compete with technically better but also much more expensive systems except in smaller or niche markets over time. Even the server market switched from the likes of Sun SPARC to x86 systems. The theme is that cheaper and minimally viable has a larger market potential that wins if able to find a way to survive. An earlier/smaller example of this is how the 6502 ate the lunches of other/better 6800 or Z80 based systems. That success later failed due to stagnation of the hardware and operating systems, and again in-competition. The x86 PC-compatible market allowed competition between vendors while still using the same ISA and ecosystems DOS & Windows. I grew up in this era having multiple Atari 8-bit & ST systems, using Apple ][, Macintosh, and rare access to Amigas. I was extremely disappointed with DOS+Windows prevailing over the more exciting systems from a graphics/sound gaming perspective. Market size won.

leptons 3y ago
> An earlier/smaller example of this is how the 6502 ate the lunches of other/better 6800 or Z80 based systems. That success later failed due to stagnation of the hardware and operating systems, and again in-competition. 6800 and Z80 weren't much if at all better than a 6502 in terms of performance. They're all 8-bit CPUs and limited in various ways. They all also had 16-bit iterations in the 68000, 65816, and Z800. Intel x86 and the PC and the software being written for the platform is what killed off demand for those other chips. If there were a 68090 (or whatever 68k variant it would evolve into) today inside a modern Amiga platform with a modern GPU, that people still wrote software for, I'd be using it as my daily driver.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  But 6809 was better in many ways.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    But not in the way in which most customers cared (price).
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Yes, that's true it was a bit more expensive. But the real money back then was not in the CPU but in the RAM. Silly prices for tiny memories.
    - naikrovek 3y ago
      yeah, technical superiority matters very little when cheaper alternatives exist which meet requirements.
    - ddingus 3y ago
      Yeah, had Moto basically matched the 6502, 8 bit land could have been very different. The 6809 is a lot of fun to program. Beautiful 8 bit machine.
- glimshe 3y ago
  I feel the nostalgia, but what would you expect this platform to do that Windows or Linux on PC wouldn't? You can kind of have a very, very fast Amiga running on an emulator today.
  - leptons 3y ago
    Amiga OS was lightyears ahead of MacOS and Windows in the 80s and even into the 90s. If the Amiga had continued to be developed and gained the adoption that Windows had, and it became a dominant platform, then computing would likely be far ahead of where it is today. Amiga was revolutionary. Business mismanagement was Commodore's downfall as well as the general stupidity of humanity kept pushing the PC platform and Windows forward, and Commodore went out of business. Sure I can run an Amiga today in an emulator, but Amiga OS didn't really continue to be developed. My comment was more talking about what computing would be like if Amiga was still a popular platform and did continue to be developed in a meaningful way.
Aloha 3y ago
In the end I think specialized hardware always looses over software - that's why those things failed.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > In the end I think specialized hardware always looses over software - that's why those things failed. In my opinion this statement only holds in times of massive performance growth in hardware. This held true at that time, but does not necessarily hold anymore. There is a reason why modern SoCs contain more and more specialized blocks, say, for video decoding/encoding, NPU, graphics processing (GPU), raytracing (modern GPUs), perhaps DSP, ...
- panick21_ 3y ago
  That ignores that the Unix and Mac ecosystems weren't so small. So I wouldn't call the RISC processors back then 'specialized'. We tend to look at the present and say 'this is the only way it could have been' but that just isn't necessarily the case. Companies have been in good positions before and fumbled and other companies could have competed differently.
deleted 3y ago
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leptons 3y ago

> An earlier/smaller example of this is how the 6502 ate the lunches of other/better 6800 or Z80 based systems. That success later failed due to stagnation of the hardware and operating systems, and again in-competition. 6800 and Z80 weren't much if at all better than a 6502 in terms of performance. They're all 8-bit CPUs and limited in various ways. They all also had 16-bit iterations in the 68000, 65816, and Z800. Intel x86 and the PC and the software being written for the platform is what killed off demand for those other chips. If there were a 68090 (or whatever 68k variant it would evolve into) today inside a modern Amiga platform with a modern GPU, that people still wrote software for, I'd be using it as my daily driver.

jacquesm 3y ago
But 6809 was better in many ways.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  But not in the way in which most customers cared (price).
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, that's true it was a bit more expensive. But the real money back then was not in the CPU but in the RAM. Silly prices for tiny memories.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    yeah, technical superiority matters very little when cheaper alternatives exist which meet requirements.
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Yeah, had Moto basically matched the 6502, 8 bit land could have been very different. The 6809 is a lot of fun to program. Beautiful 8 bit machine.
glimshe 3y ago
I feel the nostalgia, but what would you expect this platform to do that Windows or Linux on PC wouldn't? You can kind of have a very, very fast Amiga running on an emulator today.
- leptons 3y ago
  Amiga OS was lightyears ahead of MacOS and Windows in the 80s and even into the 90s. If the Amiga had continued to be developed and gained the adoption that Windows had, and it became a dominant platform, then computing would likely be far ahead of where it is today. Amiga was revolutionary. Business mismanagement was Commodore's downfall as well as the general stupidity of humanity kept pushing the PC platform and Windows forward, and Commodore went out of business. Sure I can run an Amiga today in an emulator, but Amiga OS didn't really continue to be developed. My comment was more talking about what computing would be like if Amiga was still a popular platform and did continue to be developed in a meaningful way.

Aloha 3y ago

In the end I think specialized hardware always looses over software - that's why those things failed.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> In the end I think specialized hardware always looses over software - that's why those things failed. In my opinion this statement only holds in times of massive performance growth in hardware. This held true at that time, but does not necessarily hold anymore. There is a reason why modern SoCs contain more and more specialized blocks, say, for video decoding/encoding, NPU, graphics processing (GPU), raytracing (modern GPUs), perhaps DSP, ...
panick21_ 3y ago
That ignores that the Unix and Mac ecosystems weren't so small. So I wouldn't call the RISC processors back then 'specialized'. We tend to look at the present and say 'this is the only way it could have been' but that just isn't necessarily the case. Companies have been in good positions before and fumbled and other companies could have competed differently.

deleted 3y ago

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