@BigD

Quote:

The Amiga was a plenty good enough home computer in 1992 and the idea if dragging in a IBM PC into the home environment with MS-DOS and its clunky hardware is an abomination.

An abomination!

I never did get the "computers as religion" thing, even when I was primarily an Amiga user. If I had had more money back then, I would have had one of each.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

They were big ugly slabs of utilitarian beige with substandard software and hardware that clutered up the corner of a room! What's to like?

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@bison

The only Windows machines I've had at home was a Windows 98 laptop which was good for Red Alert 2 but appalling for dial up Internet and basically nearly caught fire when my sister attempted to install MS Messenger on it in 2004!

Secondly a Macbook Pro with Windows 7 which was very much more usable. There certainly were very dark days for the IT industry between the demise the Workbench and Windows 7 which I actually like using!

Last edited by BigD on 07-Dec-2021 at 04:25 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

AGA Was a big improvement on ECS but was too little too late.
The A1200 was a good machine but had too few RAM and was still limited to the 880K Floppy Drive with too expensive HDD options.

In order to have success the A1200 should have existed instead of the A600 and the A4000 instead of the A3000. Then, a couple of years later, Commodore should have produced an AAA Amiga with backwards AGA compatibility, Chunky Mode, 3D Acceleration; Low End should have been a 030-33Mhz and Hi-End 040-40 or 060-50

But that was not the case and we all know ho history went

Last edited by ErikBauer on 07-Dec-2021 at 05:28 PM.
Last edited by ErikBauer on 07-Dec-2021 at 05:26 PM.

_________________
God created Paula so that Allister Brimble and Dave Whittaker could do music

Check my Amiga gameplays (ITA)!

@BigD

Quote:

The Amiga was a plenty good enough home computer in 1992 and the idea if dragging in a IBM PC into the home environment with MS-DOS and its clunky hardware is an abomination. You may well have seen the way it was gaining traction in the business sphere but the Amiga apps were more than good enough for home office needs. I think dragging a PC into the home was more of a status symbol perhaps? No practical need were serviced by replacing an AGA Amiga with a PC in the home environment until at least 2000 whether you wanted to play Magic Carpet or not! CAD and Excel requirements may have necessitated the use of a PC but the Amiga could also use ShapeShifter for Mac productivity software so really it was all covered. It was just habits had been formed in the office and workers wanted to replicate them at home. The actual PC systems were a disgrace and had no place in the home until Windows XP.

It really didn't matter if the Amiga had business apps that you called "good enough" for home or home office needs because the perception of the Amiga as a gaming system or toy persisted. And perception is what drives markets. Businesses bought PCs and people who owned those businesses or worked at those businesses wanted a system at home that was compatible with their work environments, and the Amiga wasn't it. The various emulators and bridgeboards for the Amiga were expensive curiosities that required you to buy another library of software on top of your Amiga software.

And there wasn't anything clunky about PC hardware in 1992 unless you were poor and all you could afford was an 8086 CPU and monochrome graphics. By 1992 there was a plethora of CPU and GPU choices for the PC and you could put together a system to match your needs and your budget. Amiga users had very limited options.

And as I said in an earlier post, a 486-DX2 66Mhz (released in August of 1992) ran circles around any Amiga that Commodore offered, even accelerated Amigas. By 1993, the Amiga was relegated to a niche machine that only offered games and the Video Toaster. Niche systems ultimately die as did the Amiga. Most of the Amiga fanatics want to blame Commodore for the Amiga's failure and much of that blame is well-deserved by Commodore, but these same fanatics want to ignore the fact that by 1992, various PC venders were simply offering a superior product. Obsolescence is what ultimately killed the Amiga.

@ferrels

While I acknowledge that CPU speeds were increasing etc the PCs of that era were a kludgy mess of nuts and bolts hardware with minimal plug and play support and awful OSes. Yes, there was business software out there that people used at work but there were quite frankly more intuitive and cheaper Amiga alternatives that ran rings around the IBM PC offerings. We didn't miss anything by sticking with the AGA Amiga and we gained a lot.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

@ferrels While I acknowledge that CPU speeds were increasing etc the PCs of that era were a kludgy mess of nuts and bolts hardware with minimal plug and play support and awful OSes. Yes, there was business software out there that people used at work but there were quite frankly more intuitive and cheaper Amiga alternatives that ran rings around the IBM PC offerings. We didn't miss anything by sticking with the AGA Amiga and we gained a lot.

OK, I'm gonna call you out on this one too. I owned two Amiga 2000s and even though the Zorro bus was supposed to be plug-n-play, it wasn't. It was just as difficult to deal with, possibly even more difficult than the PC's ISA bus, especially when you added a RAM card, a SCSI card and an accelerator to the Amiga. Getting RAM to map to the proper address space on my Amiga 2000s was a nightmare, especially if I purchased expansion cards from different vendors. On my PC, all I had to do was add additional or larger SIMM sticks and it just worked. On my Amigas, there was always some DMA or address conflict that I had to deal with. And by June of 1992, the PC had a 32-bit bus that really was plug-n-play, unlike the Amiga. It was called the PCI bus. Most PCs sold around this time had PCI bus slots and retained the ISA bus slots for legacy cards. Any real Amiga hardware development had long-since stalled by this time and the Amiga was on life support.

Good, grief....what was gained by sticking with the Amiga and AGA? Only a handful of AGA games were ever marketed before Commodore folded and those games were nothing to write home about. And AGA didn't offer a single thing to business users. It really only benefitted 2D gamers.

Last edited by ferrels on 07-Dec-2021 at 08:01 PM.

@ferrels

All apps from that era started to get AGA version; Photogenics, Deluxe Paint, Scala 400, Lightwave, PageStream etc.
Since when did it become impossible to use an AGA Amiga productively in deference to a kludgy PC. I wrote my dissertation on mine in RTF format on AmigaWriter2 before importing to the uni computers in the early 00s. There was nothing that the PC had over the Amiga at a similar price point until Windows XP.

Last edited by BigD on 07-Dec-2021 at 08:13 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

ErikBauer Quote:

AGA Was a big improvement on ECS but was too little too late. The A1200 was a good machine but had too few RAM and was still limited to the 880K Floppy Drive with too expensive HDD options.

The Amiga 1200 had easy ram expansion through the PCMCIA slot but it was bottlenecked and more expensive. The Amiga 1200 had easy hard drive expansion internally but required a 2.5" hard drive which was more expensive. The Amiga chipset could have controlled a high density floppy but that wasn't planned until the chipset after AGA which was AA+. With all these oversights and including being late, the Amiga 1200 likely would have saved CBM if they had produced more of them instead of the Amiga 600.

ErikBauer Quote:

In order to have success the A1200 should have existed instead of the A600 and the A4000 instead of the A3000. Then, a couple of years later, Commodore should have produced an AAA Amiga with backwards AGA compatibility, Chunky Mode, 3D Acceleration; Low End should have been a 030-33Mhz and Hi-End 040-40 or 060-50

I think the Amiga 3000+ with AGA would have been fine for the mid performance machine. It would have been cheaper with AGA instead of the Amber and the CPU should have only been on the accelerator slot like the Amiga 4000CR. The high end should have been the Amiga 4000T.

low: Amiga 1200
mid: Amiga 3000+
high: Amiga 4000T
console: Amiga CD32

The problem in the '90s was the ECS CDTV, Amiga 500+, Amiga 600, Amiga 3000 and Amiga 3000T. There were way too many products with overlapping target markets and ECS had lost competitiveness in them. The Amiga AA+ chipset was the more compatible, practical and cheaper than AAA chipset.

o Two Chips with 100k Transistor each (cost reduction from 3 chips and newer HP CMOS process)
o 160 - 280 pin packages
o Synchronous to video clock
o Increased chip ram limit up to 8 MB
o 8x memory bandwidth increase over ECS
o 32 bit DRAM 60 ns Page Mode Chip Memory
o 57 MHz pixel clock
o Rock steady 800x600x8 Non-Interlace 72 Hz refresh rate (higher resolution screens at better refresh rates which can better match VGA and SVGA standards)
o packed chunky 16-bit color mode
o 256 colors planar mode with AGA registers compatibility
o 2x Blitter Performance (gets twice as many clocks as on AGA)
o Support for ALL 32 bit 680x0 CPUs
o 4 MB 4 Mbit/s Floppy Controller with Hardware CRC floppy drives using standard technology (cheap 1.76MiB HD floppy support)
o FIFO serial ports with large buffer
o 16 bit 8 channel sound

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_AA+_Chipset

AA+ (likely would have been renamed AGA+ for marketing) had what AGA was sorely lacking. Lew Eggebrecht understood the urgency to prioritize the development but AGA and AA+ were set back at least a year with management transitions and by Bill Sydnes blunders. AA+ would have most likely come without 3D at first. Either Hombre could have been added to AA+ or an aftermarket 3D chipset could have been licensed but this would likely have been mid to late '90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

CBM needed to upgrade to faster 68k CPUs and this was relatively easy but there didn't seem to be much urgency as x86 CPUs were clocked up. They did consider licensing the 68k CPU from Motorola which would have allowed them to make a cost reduced single chip Amiga SoC eventually (think Raspberry Pi in 2000-2010). They would have needed to develop the 68k for the Amiga to continue though.

ferrels Quote:

It really didn't matter if the Amiga had business apps that you called "good enough" for home or home office needs because the perception of the Amiga as a gaming system or toy persisted. And perception is what drives markets. Businesses bought PCs and people who owned those businesses or worked at those businesses wanted a system at home that was compatible with their work environments, and the Amiga wasn't it. The various emulators and bridgeboards for the Amiga were expensive curiosities that required you to buy another library of software on top of your Amiga software.

The Amiga did eventually get some innovative and professional business software.

WordPerfect, Excellence, WordWorth, FinalWriter
PageStream, Professional Page
Turbo Calc, Final Calc
MicroFiche Filer, SuperBase Pro, Twist2
Deluxe Paint, PPaint, TVPaint, Brilliance
ImageFX, Photogenics, Art Department Pro
Scala, Hollywood
LightWave, Cinema 4D, Skulpt 3D, Caligari
DynaCad

These are just the most professional software in popular categories that I can remember. There was more specialized business software especially for video production related to the Toaster. The basic needs are pretty well covered and I often preferred the usually cheaper Amiga offerings.

ferrels Quote:

And there wasn't anything clunky about PC hardware in 1992 unless you were poor and all you could afford was an 8086 CPU and monochrome graphics. By 1992 there was a plethora of CPU and GPU choices for the PC and you could put together a system to match your needs and your budget. Amiga users had very limited options. And as I said in an earlier post, a 486-DX2 66Mhz (released in August of 1992) ran circles around any Amiga that Commodore offered, even accelerated Amigas. By 1993, the Amiga was relegated to a niche machine that only offered games and the Video Toaster. Niche systems ultimately die as did the Amiga. Most of the Amiga fanatics want to blame Commodore for the Amiga's failure and much of that blame is well-deserved by Commodore, but these same fanatics want to ignore the fact that by 1992, various PC venders were simply offering a superior product. Obsolescence is what ultimately killed the Amiga.

The 68040 was higher performance per clock than the 80486 even though it would eventually top out at only 40MHz. The 486-DX2@66MHz was also very expensive in 1992-1993 as I wrote in post #8 of this thread. A high clock rated full 80486 CPU could cost as much as an Amiga 1200 in that time period. The 80286 was still the low end PC compatible CPU and it was "clunky" while the most common CPU was the 80386 which was between a 68020 and 68030 in performance but didn't clock as high as the 68030. The 68040 outperformed the 80486 but the 80486 was eventually clocked higher giving it a small advantage in performance. The 68060 was competitive with the Pentium but the Pentium was eventually clocked much higher (with die shrinks and design changes) while Motorola surrendered despite the advantage of an 8 stage 68060 pipeline vs the 5 stage Pentium which should have allowed to clock it up more and the clear 68060 superiority in PPA (Power, Performance and Area which is so important today). Instead, Motorola switched to the PPC and predictably had problems clocking up the shallow pipeline RISC designs while Intel learned to increase the x86 pipeline length and buried the PPC.

ferrels Quote:

OK, I'm gonna call you out on this one too. I owned two Amiga 2000s and even though the Zorro bus was supposed to be plug-n-play, it wasn't. It was just as difficult to deal with, possibly even more difficult than the PC's ISA bus, especially when you added a RAM card, a SCSI card and an accelerator to the Amiga. Getting RAM to map to the proper address space on my Amiga 2000s was a nightmare, especially if I purchased expansion cards from different vendors. On my PC, all I had to do was add additional or larger SIMM sticks and it just worked. On my Amigas, there was always some DMA or address conflict that I had to deal with. And by June of 1992, the PC had a 32-bit bus that really was plug-n-play, unlike the Amiga. It was called the PCI bus. Most PCs sold around this time had PCI bus slots and retained the ISA bus slots for legacy cards. Any real Amiga hardware development had long-since stalled by this time and the Amiga was on life support.

PCI entered the market in June 1992 to compete with the VESA bus standard. It took a while for it to catch on and the majority of PC clone owners to have PCI hardware which was not 1992-1993. In fact, wiki says...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect Quote:

PCI's heyday in the desktop computer market was approximately 1995 to 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_Local_Bus Quote:

VLB importantly offers a less costly high-speed interface for mainstream systems, as only by 1994 was PCI commonly available outside of the server market through the Pentium and Intel's chipsets. PCI finally displaced the VESA Local Bus (and also EISA) in the last years of the 486 market, with the last generation of 80486 motherboards featuring PCI slots instead of VLB-capable ISA slots.

Amiga hardware often gets compared to newer PC clone hardware after CBM went bankrupt but this is revisionist. Even if better PC clone hardware existed at a certain date, it was likely expensive and rare when it was introduced.

Last edited by matthey on 07-Dec-2021 at 10:00 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 07-Dec-2021 at 08:30 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 07-Dec-2021 at 08:25 PM.

@matthey

Quote:

The Amiga did eventually get some innovative and professional business software.

I already mentioned WordPerfect earlier in this thread and it was an awful port and all the other software offerings you mentioned had PC counterparts that were just as capable. Most of the Amiga titles you mention didn't adhere to industry standard file formats either. I also owned DynaCAD and it was impossibly difficult to use compared to AutoCAD. It also claimed to be AutoCAD DXF compatible for file interchange, but my experience was that it was compatible for only the simplest of 2D CAD drawings and didn't even support AutoCAD fonts properly. None of the software packages you mentioned were capable enough to dispel the perception in the business community that the Amiga was a toy or that the Amiga was capable enough to cause PC users to ditch their PCs and buy Amigas. By 1992 it was far too late to turn this perception around. Too much ground had been lost.

I owned PageStream for the Amiga and it was slow as molasses even with an accelerator and I was constantly running out of chip RAM, even with my 2MB MegAChip expansion board which cost me hundreds BTW. None of this mattered anyway because there was no easy way to move my data back and forth between my home Amigas and my PCs at the office....oh yeah, now you'll bring up CrossDOS which worked great if you had HD Amiga floppy drives which weren't offered on stock Amigas until the A3000/A4000 releases (underpowered and overpriced at release/aka obsolete). You had to lay down a small fortune for Amiga HD floppy drives for the very same drives that came standard on PCs. Every piece of hardware for the Amiga after 1991 was an after-thought or add-on that had to be purchased separately at great expense because Commodore didn't invest nor prioritize hardware development in order to keep the Amiga competitive and viable.

By 1992, the Amiga was obsolete on all fronts.


Quote:

The 68040 was higher performance per clock than the 80486 even though it would eventually top out at only 40MHz.

It doesn't matter that the 040 was comparable to the 486 because Commodore only offered a 25Mhz version of the 040 that performed at roughly half the horsepower of a 486-DX2 66. And adding 030/040/060 accelerators to my Amigas was an expensive undertaking. I invested 3 times the amount of money in one Amiga 1200 (RAM, 030-50MHZ CPU and hard drive upgrades) as I paid for my 486-DX2 66 system. Not to mention all the OS and ROM patching that had to happen just so AmigaDOS/AmigaOS would play well with the upgraded CPUs. I bought my a 486DX2-66Mhz off-the shelf with no need to mess with add-ons and no software issues.


Quote:

PCI entered the market in June 1992 to compete with the VESA bus standard. It took a while for it to catch on and the majority of PC clone owners to have PCI hardware which was not 1992-1993. In fact, the wiki for PCI says...

Thank you for helping me to make my point by referencing the wiki about the PCI bus. Apparently you didn't read the entire Wiki or just decided to create you own "facts" or take snippets out of context because it says the following:
PCI 1.0 1992 Original issue
PCI 2.0 1993 Incorporated connector and add-in card specification
PCI 2.1 1995 Incorporated clarifications and added 66 MHz chapter
PCI 2.2 1998 Incorporated ECNs, and improved readability

And I had a PC complete with a PCI bus and a 486DX2-66 CPU by 1993, so don't imply that they weren't in use or available to the average consumer and business user. By this time, the Amiga was already essentially a dead platform due to obsolescence in both hardware and software...Commodore's inaction and mismanagement aside.


If the Amiga had all these imagined advantages you and BigD are claiming in 1992, then the Amiga would have survived and carried on, but obvious to most folks, it didn't have those advantages nor did it survive except for hobbyists and fanatics who keep parroting the same bullsh@t year after year about how the Amiga was soooo much better than everything else out there. You guys have been living in an echo chamber so long that you've lost your grip on the past and with reality. The Amiga was an awesome machine when it was released in 1985, but from 1985 thru 1992, not much had changed (hardware nor software) and the rest of the world had advanced dramatically. You fanatics were still too hunched over your Amigas to notice that the rest of the world had moved on.

@ppcamiga1

>DOOM after all was playable on pc that cost as much as a1200 plus fast ram.

In 1992 low end PC's were selling for about $1,000. These were slower 386 chips, and at the high end 486dx to 486dx2's were going for $2,000 or more. Doom play on lower end PC's was pretty marginal playable at all.

I remember one of my brother in laws invited me to play Doom on a high end 486DX2 with a sound blaster sound card and some high end graphics card. He bought the highest end PC for the time because his work was footing the bill so he didn't shop around for the best deal but it was still over $3000. I have to say we played the heck out of Doom on that machine.

Still no way was I going to buy a PC for that kind of money just to play Doom especially as PC's at that time were almost obsolete as soon as they hit the store.

I bought my A1200 for $500 and a ram/fpu card for $129. I already had a multi-sync monitor and a laptop drive. The card could hold up to 8mb ram (2 slots). I had 2mb from a PC that we upgraded at work. Having just that extra 2mb ram really sped up the A1200 and I really didn't need more ram or speed for several years until I started using the A1200 for more graphic intensive work.

For me the 1200 was by far the best bang for the buck. It had most of the best games of that time, I used it to do video graphics and genlock to make videos, I used it in my small business to keep databases, create invoice, and desktop published sales flyers and advertisements. All much cheaper than possible on a PC.

Still the writing was on the wall in 1992, after all 1992 was also the year that Motorola released their first PowerPC chip. I knew a Motorola engineer in our Amiga users club who often said use the cheapest and best platform that can run the software that you want or need to run. Amiga was very quickly losing that battle.

@ferrels

Quote:

You guys have been living in an echo chamber so long that you've lost your grip on the past and with reality. The Amiga was an awesome machine when it was released in 1985, but from 1985 thru 1992, not much had changed (hardware nor software) and the rest of the world had advanced dramatically. You fanatics were still too hunched over your Amigas to notice that the rest of the world had moved on.

No, America had moved on as it was mismarketed the Amiga. Where the Amiga was marketed as a home computer it continued to do well throught the early AGA era and outperformed PCs at a lower price point. Incremental upgrades were possible and many bought third party accelerators. Stock Amiga CPU choices were sub par so people bought third party ones when they could afford to like upgrading a PC though more noticeable since the software was more efficient so you noticed the speed boost more!

AGA hardware was great and good enough for Wing Commander (256 colours), Doom, Sim City 2000, Napalm and Genetic Species though Doom came late once open sourced. RTG cards on Zorro III made the 040/060 Amigas capable of Full Throttle and Dark Forces as demonstrated when using Shapeshifter. The creative applications especially video editing, image processing and animation were unparalleled in the PC space at the time for the money. There were gaps for sure and maybe CAD and spreadsheets were gaps but you had Mac 68k emulation to pick up some of the slack. For simple 2D vector drawings DrawStudio2 was awesome and I still like how intuitive it is. The same goes for the TurboPrint Graphics Publisher which put anything on the PC to shame relating to home printing it really did!

Also, you could have easily used DD floppies on your work PCs to maintain compatibility with your Amiga if you didn't want to invest in an Amiga HD drive!

Last edited by BigD on 07-Dec-2021 at 10:59 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

No, America had moved on as it was mismarketed the Amiga.

That's the most illogical and ignorant comment I've heard in a long time. America had nothing to do with how the Amiga was marketed or mis-marketed. Amiga marketing and advertising was Commodore's responsibility, period, end of sentence. Not the American government's nor the American people's responsibility. Commodore was an international company at that time, in case you have forgotten. Your statement is as ludicrous as claiming that the Acorn or the Sinclair ZX-81 failed due to Britain's mis-marketing.

With that statement, you've lost all credibility as did Matt Hey several months ago when he made claims that AmigaOS would make a perfect RTOS.

And lugging 720KB floppies back and forth between my house and my office wasn't an option because I had PC files that were larger than 720KB and at this point I was done throwing good money after bad by buying more peripherals for an obsolete Amiga. My A2000 was already a Frankenstein's monster of add-ons by 1992 (2MB MegAChip chip, 50Mhz 030/881, CDROM and hard drive and fast RAM board, and unstable as hell. Half the apps hated the 2MB chip RAM upgrade and older apps constantly crashed. So I figured the A1200 with AGA would be an improvement, nope....not even close. It had all the drawbacks of the previous Amiga incarnations and even with the add-ons that I installed on it, such as an accelerator, CDROM, loads of FASTRAM, it still wasn't any better than a 486-33Mhz.....actually worse because I couldn't update to better GPU. And god help you if you already had an accelerator installed in the trap door and needed to add more RAM. Sorry, out of luck. So at this point I was done with the Amiga and a year later Commodore was done in the industry.

Last edited by ferrels on 08-Dec-2021 at 12:48 AM.
Last edited by ferrels on 08-Dec-2021 at 12:47 AM.
Last edited by ferrels on 08-Dec-2021 at 12:45 AM.
Last edited by ferrels on 08-Dec-2021 at 12:42 AM.

@ferrels

Quote:

America had nothing to do with how the Amiga was marketed or mis-marketed. Amiga marketing and advertising was Commodore's responsibility, period, end of sentence.

Let me clarify; America i.e. the North American market was mismarketed the Amiga by Commodore. Other territories including the UK and Germany had C= subsideries that understood their market and did a universally better job at selling these 'home computers' than the C= home territory that only really managed to sell niche video workstations/Newtek Toasters and Newtek deserve most of the praise for that!

Since your territory/marketplace didn't even know what the Amiga was it obviously didn't buy many of them.

A Zip Disk might have been a better option for transfering files.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@ferrels

Thanks for sharing your experience. I particularly liked how you used the example of the 1987 A2000 in a thread talking about AGA and its usefulness in 1992/93.

There's no need to get upset when people don't want to accept your US-centric view of Amiga and its place in computing across home, home-office, and business uses. And there's no need to get mad when people call out your anachronisms, e.g.

Quote:

And by June of 1992, the PC had a 32-bit bus that really was plug-n-play, unlike the Amiga. It was called the PCI bus. Most PCs sold around this time had PCI bus slots ...

It's not "by" June of 1992, it's "from" June 1992. Important distinction.

Quote:

And I had a PC complete with a PCI bus and a 486DX2-66 CPU by 1993

Congratulations. Is that January 1993 or December 1993?
Either way, just because you had a PC with PCI, does not mean that "Most PCs" sold around that time had PCI.
There's a difference between a technology being launched, and it having large (>50%) market adoption/penetration.

All that aside, your specific scenario of CAD work and trying to manage it between work-based PC and home-based A2000, is a legitimate one. But what you also have to understand is that in the early '90s it was largely an American one.

Guess what most working people in Europe in the early '90s didn't do after coming home from their 8 hours at their places of work?
They didn't continue to do workplace work.

Now we can get into a separate discussion about how the US productivity model is why it has been the world's dominant economy for the better part of the past 100 years, but that would be way off topic.

The reality is, people in the US tended to do workplace work at home much more than their contemporaries in Europe and to a degree in Canada and Australia.
Therefore, as extremely few businesses used an Amiga at work in the US, there was very little need to have one at home. Conversely, as most business had an IBM compatible PC at work, if one wanted to get ahead, they would have one at home.

So in that way you are right about the Amiga situation in the US: Irrespective of the availability of business software for the platform, the perception of the system was that of a gaming computer. If businesses don't buy gaming computers for work, we can't blame the average US family/breadwinner to buy one for home work.

In Europe, there was a much clearer delineation between work, and home. So the computer an average family/breadwinner would buy is the one that works for the entire family, for all other things except the continuation of work into the home. In such an ecosystem, the Amiga fit very well, particularly the minimal keyboard wedge design, as it is a known fact that the average European lives in a smaller home than that of the average American.

Last edited by agami on 08-Dec-2021 at 03:57 AM.
Last edited by agami on 08-Dec-2021 at 03:55 AM.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

No. AGA was not good enough for games when released at end of 1992.
It has not chunky pixels. So there was no 3D games especially DOOM back in 1993.
Rest is history. AGA was after few years and with fblit almost good enough for office apps.
But not for games and demos. These end with Amiga 500.

>And by June of 1992,... Any real Amiga hardware development had long-since stalled by this time and the Amiga was on life support.

Well, that clearly is not true.
The flow of new HW was insane.
There things like graphics add-ons that should have prompted CBM to deliver RTG library.

>And AGA didn't offer a single thing to business users.

For video business and multimedia kiosk systems it was nice.

But things like replacing the flixer flixer with double scan modes was not ok.
(multiscan monitors brought unnecessary extra cost)

In Finland normal work-pc was 486/60 in 1995, no sound card, 512kt..1Mb graphics.

In 1993 386 was the mainstream.
(I worked in a company who had recently sent 386sx/386dx systems to Olkiluoto Nucler plant with broken RAM, parity errors popped up when customer installed Windows to the system. )

Most customers used DOS & 640k, so that simm manufacturing bug/error was hidden for awhile.

CBM should have done something to push/enable/afford people to have more RAM and HDDs on their systems already in 1990.

Last edited by KimmoK on 08-Dec-2021 at 09:01 AM.
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Last edited by KimmoK on 08-Dec-2021 at 08:57 AM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@NutsAboutAmiga

Barely hanging in there... Amiga having started its life miles ahead of the competition was now barely keeping up and starting to fall behind.

The A1200, advertised as a 32-bit machine, should have had a chunky graphics mode with the ability of texture mapped 3D graphics (amongst other things) to keep up.

Spud

_________________
Founder of NWAG - North West Amiga Group

Night Operations

A1200 020/28MHz + 64Mb / 4Gb CF / OS 3.1.4.1 / 1438S
A500+ / 2Mb
A600

@KimmoK

I think it’s a bit funny reading this, lot mid-range PC being sold, in Norway.

People talk about 386 and 486dx, but don’t talk about 486sx computers.

Also I remember PC at schools where 2 or 3 years old, while people had at home was lot newer PC’s, at least for anyone who had some money, in Norway we doing pretty well in the 80’s, housing prices was low, and incomes were going up, strong unions, things where maybe going too well, well now things are different. We should have a population decline, but we have high emigration, resulting high housing prices around cities, and housing speculation. Funny housing prices is not included in the national gdp.

Anyway dad did buy Oleveti 386sx/33mhz, 2xCDROM (myabe not included),
i was around 92/93 not 100% sure, I'm pritty sure it had PCI slot, so maybe 93,

I did play some 3d games on it, doom being one, now I was not a big fan, I coded in Amos, and BlitzBasic, can’t see the same speed in QBasic, never tried Pascal until few years later, that’s when I realized what big fool I was. With Amiga blinders, I did not know about WindowsNT, my experience with PC was with Windows3.1 and 3.11, and it did not impress me a lot, not realizing I was not looking at best technology at the time. (I used std apps that was pre installed.), we did some photo editing on it.

I had friend with A1200+Blizzard060, and another friend with A4000/040 + graphic card, it was interesting see what FPS was games where one had better graphic card, and one had better CPU, it was clear to me that good CPU was nothing without a good GPU, something was confirmed to me in 1998, when got school mate with perfect combo an Amiga4000 with 060 and good graphic card, as in school and did not have money to buy it, I spent my money on a car, at school we had 200Mhz pc that run circles around old A4000, but it looked great to me.

Technically I had 166Mhz IBM laptop, got from government due to my dyslexia. it was to help with school work, to give me a spellcheck etc, then I spend my money my first PC a 800Mhz when I started working, and then Athlon 1800+ a few years later. So when the AmigaONE-XE 800Mhz was announced I jumped on it. Technology as few years old, the price was not too bad, and it was not totally unusable running Linux, it made sense to me, it was easy buy.

Also had my eyes on BoXeR, sad to see it never made it.
A\Box also got me existed. But then Phase5 went bankrupt.

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Barely hanging on.... Well it was probably OK for 1992 and start 93 but then it began to show how limited it really was as developments went fast in PC and console world.
Also it really brought to few new features to the table.

The A1200 was simply to little to late, even though it was nice design IMO it should have been launched with an 030 and fastmem as well as EASY expansion for a standard 3.5 HD (not voiding warranty installing a HD).

I wonder how much an 030 and some more memory would have added to the cost, maybe a socket for that ram. Here in Denmark A12000 was announced to have a socket for the Math co-processor in Commodores print material (why?), it didn't though.

Many people were willing to pay more for their computers by 1993, but perhaps not A4000 prices that was pretty high compared to the no name pcs many people bought.
But A1200 could have costed 30-50% more if it had offered more.

Last edited by Troels on 09-Dec-2021 at 01:12 AM.

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