4 ms·

I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than anything else out at the time, yet never caught on. Is there anything like that happen

I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than anything else out at the time, yet never caught on. Is there anything like that happening today, where there is something significantly better than its competitors, but has no traction. I don't mean something debatable (e.g., Windows Phone vs iPhone or MacOS vs Windows), but something clear cut? Probably the closest thing I could think of is Tesla, if they go belly up.

kryptiskt 12y ago
Amiga was a major success, it did catch on after the jury-rigged A1000 was put out to pasture. It was Commodore that squandered it, by milking it financially and stagnating technologically. I wish Acorn Archimedes had had half the opportunity Amiga got.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  The Archimedes had processing power by the bucket compared to the 68K machines of the time but it lacked the fantastic software/hardware integration that the Amiga offered.
  - watmough 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure the Amiga couldn't have run Zarch at anything like the smoothness that the Archimedes managed. And the difference was purely down to the stripped down Acorn RISC Machine chip running at 8 MHz, compared with the 8 MHz 68000 CISC chip. There are so many if-only's about the Amiga. If only it could have managed 640x480 un-interlaced, and if-only someone with even a modicum of taste had worked on the Workbench GUI. If only they'd used a decent disk drive, like Apple were forced to on the Mac. Commodore's pivot to selling to Business was doomed when selling a games machine, though the cost-pared A500 was very successful as a gaming computer in (non-UK) Europe.
renaudg 12y ago
Never caught on ? No traction ? That certainly wasn't true in Europe. It seemed like every kid around me in the early 90s had an Amiga 500, a few years after they all seemed to have an Amstrad CPC (wildly popular in France, even though it was a British computer. The Spectrum was the UK darling, and the C64 was the more popular one everywhere else) A generation of game publishers (mainly in the UK and France) thrived on the Amiga and went on to become household names today (UbiSoft comes to mind) As the article notes, there were even Amiga magazines on UK newsstands as far as Y2K, years after Commodore's demise. So yeah, pretty big deal over here. In some ways, the Amiga reminds me of Techno music : invented in the US, but found its true home in Europe.
- krylon 12y ago
  I had an AMIGA 500 in the early 90s. Sadly, I only ever used it to play video games, got bored eventually and then sold it. I knew several people who did, too. I remember part of the reason to sell it was classmates mocking me for having a machine that was only good for playing video games, while they owned real computers, i.e. IBM compatible PCs. In retrospect this seems kind of funny, given that they usually had 286 machines with EGA graphics cards...
- kenjackson 12y ago
  Yes, in Europe it did catch on. In the US we used to say, "See how popular it is in Europe!" to our naysayers. Unfortunately, it never got traction in the US.

kryptiskt 12y ago

Amiga was a major success, it did catch on after the jury-rigged A1000 was put out to pasture. It was Commodore that squandered it, by milking it financially and stagnating technologically. I wish Acorn Archimedes had had half the opportunity Amiga got.

jacquesm 12y ago
The Archimedes had processing power by the bucket compared to the 68K machines of the time but it lacked the fantastic software/hardware integration that the Amiga offered.
- watmough 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure the Amiga couldn't have run Zarch at anything like the smoothness that the Archimedes managed. And the difference was purely down to the stripped down Acorn RISC Machine chip running at 8 MHz, compared with the 8 MHz 68000 CISC chip. There are so many if-only's about the Amiga. If only it could have managed 640x480 un-interlaced, and if-only someone with even a modicum of taste had worked on the Workbench GUI. If only they'd used a decent disk drive, like Apple were forced to on the Mac. Commodore's pivot to selling to Business was doomed when selling a games machine, though the cost-pared A500 was very successful as a gaming computer in (non-UK) Europe.

renaudg 12y ago

Never caught on ? No traction ? That certainly wasn't true in Europe. It seemed like every kid around me in the early 90s had an Amiga 500, a few years after they all seemed to have an Amstrad CPC (wildly popular in France, even though it was a British computer. The Spectrum was the UK darling, and the C64 was the more popular one everywhere else) A generation of game publishers (mainly in the UK and France) thrived on the Amiga and went on to become household names today (UbiSoft comes to mind) As the article notes, there were even Amiga magazines on UK newsstands as far as Y2K, years after Commodore's demise. So yeah, pretty big deal over here. In some ways, the Amiga reminds me of Techno music : invented in the US, but found its true home in Europe.

krylon 12y ago
I had an AMIGA 500 in the early 90s. Sadly, I only ever used it to play video games, got bored eventually and then sold it. I knew several people who did, too. I remember part of the reason to sell it was classmates mocking me for having a machine that was only good for playing video games, while they owned real computers, i.e. IBM compatible PCs. In retrospect this seems kind of funny, given that they usually had 286 machines with EGA graphics cards...
kenjackson 12y ago
Yes, in Europe it did catch on. In the US we used to say, "See how popular it is in Europe!" to our naysayers. Unfortunately, it never got traction in the US.