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“the Macintosh-Microsoft monopoly” very funny statement circa 1994… just three years before the infamous “Pray” issue of Wired. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/ap

“the Macintosh-Microsoft monopoly” very funny statement circa 1994… just three years before the infamous “Pray” issue of Wired. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ I've always been kind of amazed by nostalgia for the Amiga. I was a young computer user in this era, and — despite having heard of the apparent media superiority of the Amiga — had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. I felt like more people claimed to have portals to Narnia in their closets than had Amigas.

vidarh 3y ago
> had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. Are you in the US maybe? Most of the Amiga market was in Europe (though here too it varied greatly by country). In my school classes alone there were several Amiga owners. In the US Tramiel managed to burn Commodore's computer shop dealer network to the ground with his pricing shenanigans and deal with Kmart to bypass computer stores for the Commodore 64. As a result, when the Amiga was too expensive to sell well in budget outlets, Commodore US basically had to rebuild their dealer network from the ashes that Tramiel left on the way to buy Atari. Meanwhile, in Europe, most Commodore subsidiaries grasped the opportunity to push the Amiga as a games machine starting with the Amiga 500, while Commodore US kept pushing it as a professional machine. You see this difference very clearly in the computer press - where the US Amiga magazines are all serious, while e.g. in the UK the most famous Amiga tie-in was a package with game for the 1989 Batman movie[1]. While many of us also used it for non-gaming stuff, it was games that sustained the bulk of Amiga sales, to the point of e.g. putting Commodore UK in a position where they considered a management buyout of Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt... [1] https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commodore/recreated/packaging/2022/09/03/amiga-500-batman-pack.html https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commod...

vidarh 3y ago

> had never even heard of someone seeing one, let alone own one. Are you in the US maybe? Most of the Amiga market was in Europe (though here too it varied greatly by country). In my school classes alone there were several Amiga owners. In the US Tramiel managed to burn Commodore's computer shop dealer network to the ground with his pricing shenanigans and deal with Kmart to bypass computer stores for the Commodore 64. As a result, when the Amiga was too expensive to sell well in budget outlets, Commodore US basically had to rebuild their dealer network from the ashes that Tramiel left on the way to buy Atari. Meanwhile, in Europe, most Commodore subsidiaries grasped the opportunity to push the Amiga as a games machine starting with the Amiga 500, while Commodore US kept pushing it as a professional machine. You see this difference very clearly in the computer press - where the US Amiga magazines are all serious, while e.g. in the UK the most famous Amiga tie-in was a package with game for the 1989 Batman movie[1]. While many of us also used it for non-gaming stuff, it was games that sustained the bulk of Amiga sales, to the point of e.g. putting Commodore UK in a position where they considered a management buyout of Commodore International when their parent company went bankrupt... [1] https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commodore/recreated/packaging/2022/09/03/amiga-500-batman-pack.html https://amigaposters.github.io/amiga%20500/original%20commod...