Wow, I'll have to add this to my set of "how can I show people, especially my Apple zealot friends who obsess about the original Mac 128k, just how advanced the Amiga was" videos. This video, is one of my favorites (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs), it shows just how advanced the Amiga was in 1985, let alone after 1987 when the 2000 was introduced.
I learned to code on a Vic-20 and C64 (basic and assembly), but the Amiga was my first exposure to C, and LaTeX, and 3D modeling / video editing. I grew up relatively poor in Baltimore City, and this was an astonishing amount of capability for something so affordable. (I also learned soldering because I only had 512k of chip ram on my A500, and Commodore's official RAM upgrade was too expensive, so I bought my own RAM chips and soldered them directly to the mainboard)
I have an unlimited amount of nostalgia for this machine (and Babylon-5!)
Compare this to the 1984 launch of the Mac which cost $2485 MSRP, all of these capabilities came for only $1285 ($1595 with monitor), or the A500 ($699 MSRP)
As you can tell, I'm still bitter and annoyed at how Commodore mismanaged and squandered the marketing and sales of this machine. The Amiga was so advanced, it wasn't until PCs arrived with SuperVGA cards and SoundBlaster audio that I was enticed to leave the Amiga platform. The Mac128k at school seemed like a toy in comparison to my Amiga and what it could do, but somehow all of the media attention was on it. It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared.
> It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared
Commodore had no clue what to do with it. It's like Apple launched iPhone, then Jobs spent the rest of the marketing budget on a yacht then told engineering to make everything cheaper. Eventually Gould and Ali were on 3x what the CEO of IBM got in the same years.
Tucked away somewhere, I still have the 1985 issue of UK's PCW (the serious magazine, comparable to Byte) when the A1000 was first reviewed. Something like 15 pages of glowing praise and how nothing else is in the same universe, it'll change the world, etc. They barely touched an Amiga ever again.
I remember an interview with Jean-Louis Gassée that mentioned after he'd been fired from Apple but before he'd gone on to start Be Inc., Gould actually approached him to lead Commodore before he hired Ali. Gassée said he'd only do it if he got a guarantee of non-interference for a specific amount of time (three years, maybe), and Gould wouldn't go for it.
I don't know how that would have changed things -- Be came to a sad end itself, after all. But it's hard not to wonder.
I used AMAX II with my Amiga 500 to run Mac programs while at College. That was an example of how brilliant it was given the native speed of the Mac under emulation.
The Amiga platform is an era which I wouldn't trade for anything. I feel sad for people who didn't have the opportunity to experience and live it first hand.
I used Shapeshifter to bring my Amiga up as a Mac but way faster, if I recall the author (a German?) included a special thanks to Apple for making their firmware so trivially reversable
I was obsessed with the Amiga, and also a huge fan of the Mac. Couldn’t afford either. But I think the reason the Mac resonated in such an enormous way was a) because Steve Jobs was a master of media manipulation, but also b) because the Mac turned the computer into an appliance. It showed that computers weren’t these difficult scary things, and that they were approachable to everyone.
True to some extent, but it also was crippled by low RAM, a tiny screen, bad performance. The Amiga lacked coherence, but Amiga applications and games could do so much more with the exception of perhaps DTP (but a LaserWriter was out of the price range of most people)
Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!)
I did DTP on the Amiga, for example, by using LaTeX to do all of my work in college, produce postscript files with dvi2ps and then taking the files to my college lab and printing them on expensive printers. A $500 Amiga was producing reports with AMSTeX or LaTeX that looked like they were professionally typeset by a $5000 Mac setup (in 2018 dollars)
>Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!)
Sure they did. The Mac was “the computer for the rest of us”. It wasn’t supposed to be hackable, like the Apple II, which was a hackers dream machine.
I only take issue with the “creative” part of your comment.
The Mac was too expensive for "the rest of us". In terms of 2018 dollars, it cost about $6000 without a LaserWriter. Very few people could afford one, no matter how easy it was to use, which is why the Commodore 64 and Apple 2 far outsold it. 17 million Commodore 64's were sold. About 5 million Amigas. These were mostly sold to consumers, not schools. Sales for the original Mac128/Plus/SE/512 are hard to come buy, but looking at yearly estimates (about 70k Mac128k sold in 1984, and about 3x that every year after), the Mac never had any significant installed base of ordinary home users compared to the 8-bit or 16-bit competitors.
It wasn't "the suits" in general like that. Pretty much all the blame for Commodore's failure post-Tramiel can be laid at the feet of two people: Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali.
I learned to code on a Vic-20 and C64 (basic and assembly), but the Amiga was my first exposure to C, and LaTeX, and 3D modeling / video editing. I grew up relatively poor in Baltimore City, and this was an astonishing amount of capability for something so affordable. (I also learned soldering because I only had 512k of chip ram on my A500, and Commodore's official RAM upgrade was too expensive, so I bought my own RAM chips and soldered them directly to the mainboard)
I have an unlimited amount of nostalgia for this machine (and Babylon-5!)