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I wonder if they boxed themselves into a corner by putting so many features into ASICs. Custom chips take forever to design and iterate even today, I can only
by foobarian 2y ago
I wonder if they boxed themselves into a corner by putting so many features into ASICs. Custom chips take forever to design and iterate even today, I can only imagine how painful that was in the 80s. Couple that with a frugal management and I can see how they would be reluctant to sink resources into a fantastically expensive development process.
- hapless 2y agoThey absolutely did box themselves into a corner, and also, they had no god damn money The 1st gen products (500/1000) never caught on in the world's largest market. They were always struggling. The ASIC-based architecture did not help
- fidotron 2y agoI think with hindsight the tragedy is the home computer market getting split between Commodore, Atari and possibly Acorn. The ST looks like a far more reasonable foundation from which to start building a computing legacy than the Amiga, which really was a one trick pony. Have an ARM in an ST running a pre emptive multitasking OS in 1990 . . . now that would have been an interesting machine.
- TheAmazingRace 2y agoThey kinda already were getting there when Atari hired Eric R Smith to work on MiNT. MiNT also supported protected memory!! At least this is what I remember from my time playing around with it on my Atari (C-LAB) Falcon before I sadly sold it off. As a collector, I vastly prefer the ST lineup over the Amiga for this reason. The hardware was more "bog standard" and easier to understand than the custom chipset on the Amiga, even if the Amiga seemed cooler on paper back in the day.