2 ms·

You should look up “Commodore Amiga”, it was way more powerful than PC

by supportengineer 2y ago

anthk 2y ago
The 486 and later the Pentium killed it.
- snvzz 2y ago
  The PC being effectively an open platform killed it. (if not Commodore's incompetence. E.g. Apple did manage to hang on)
TheAmazingRace 2y ago
Although the Amiga was quite a neat piece of kit when it first came out in 1985, I disagree with your comment unfortunately. The custom chipset sorta "froze" the Amiga design to a particular level and it was very hard to make meaningful upgrades, unlike PCs, where you could slap a new CPU into the CPU socket, or a new video accelerator, sound card, etc, into the ISA or PCI busses. Yes I realize there were accelerator cards for Amigas later on, like the BlizzardPPC, but they weren't an officially supported option by Commodore (most accelerators came out after Commodore was pronounced dead in 1994) and were more like kludges.
- icedchai 2y ago
  I was a Amiga fan until the mid 90's, and you're spot on. The Amiga was too difficult to iterate on. Chip set upgrades like AGA were far too little, too late. (And forget about ECS, which barely added anything a normal user would care about.) By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA, Soundblaster, etc were cheap and common.
  - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
    As a collector, this is why I prefer Atari ST family systems over Amigas. Because they are simpler from the jump, they are easier to work on and less finnicky - floppies being a prime example of this... as Commodore liked using aggressive GCR encoding instead of IBM PC standards for formatting diskettes. For everything else, PC based hardware is just more familiar and flexible for me, since that's what I grew up with.
    - icedchai 2y ago
      The Amiga was definitely the more exotic platform! I learned a ton from Amiga OS though. It was my first exposure to a "real" operating system with libraries, multitasking, IPC, etc. Once I got a Linux box though, I never looked back.
      - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
        Very fair! Amiga did bring a good bit to the table, and on paper was certainly better than the ST. I kinda wish the Amiga came with an MMU.

You should look up “Commodore Amiga”, it was way more powerful than PC

anthk 2y ago

The 486 and later the Pentium killed it.

snvzz 2y ago
The PC being effectively an open platform killed it. (if not Commodore's incompetence. E.g. Apple did manage to hang on)

TheAmazingRace 2y ago

Although the Amiga was quite a neat piece of kit when it first came out in 1985, I disagree with your comment unfortunately. The custom chipset sorta "froze" the Amiga design to a particular level and it was very hard to make meaningful upgrades, unlike PCs, where you could slap a new CPU into the CPU socket, or a new video accelerator, sound card, etc, into the ISA or PCI busses. Yes I realize there were accelerator cards for Amigas later on, like the BlizzardPPC, but they weren't an officially supported option by Commodore (most accelerators came out after Commodore was pronounced dead in 1994) and were more like kludges.

icedchai 2y ago
I was a Amiga fan until the mid 90's, and you're spot on. The Amiga was too difficult to iterate on. Chip set upgrades like AGA were far too little, too late. (And forget about ECS, which barely added anything a normal user would care about.) By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA, Soundblaster, etc were cheap and common.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  As a collector, this is why I prefer Atari ST family systems over Amigas. Because they are simpler from the jump, they are easier to work on and less finnicky - floppies being a prime example of this... as Commodore liked using aggressive GCR encoding instead of IBM PC standards for formatting diskettes. For everything else, PC based hardware is just more familiar and flexible for me, since that's what I grew up with.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    The Amiga was definitely the more exotic platform! I learned a ton from Amiga OS though. It was my first exposure to a "real" operating system with libraries, multitasking, IPC, etc. Once I got a Linux box though, I never looked back.
    - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
      Very fair! Amiga did bring a good bit to the table, and on paper was certainly better than the ST. I kinda wish the Amiga came with an MMU.