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It would have been a very different place. In the IBM compatible world, the clones drove down the price then drove forward progress. It is doubtful that much o
by II2II 2y ago
It would have been a very different place.
In the IBM compatible world, the clones drove down the price then drove forward progress. It is doubtful that much of a clone market would develop in the Amiga/Atari world since the parent companies were already competing against IBM compatibles on price. Without clones to break free (as happened in the IBM compatible world), there wouldn't be clones to drive forward progress. I'm not even sure cloning the Amiga would be practical. Apparently Commodore had enough trouble "cloning" the Amiga (i.e. developing higher performance, yet compatible machines). Without the clones driving progress, companies like SGI and Sun would likely still be in the picture.
If Amiga/Atari domination somehow did happen, I suspect the CPU situation would be flipped around, with Motorola having both the incentive and finances to continue on with a fully compatible 680x0 line of processors and Intel chasing after its own equivalent of an 680x0-to-PPC transition.
As for the retrocomputing thing: DOS/Windows 3.x nostalgia is very much a thing in today's world. In that alternate reality, they would likely be higher profile (as Amiga/Atari are today).