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Purely for entertainment, what is the alternate history that might have allowed Amiga to survive and thrive? Here's my stab:

- in the late 80s, Commodore ports AmigaOS to 386

- re-engineers Original Chipset as an ISA card

- OCS combines VGA output and multimedia (no SoundBlaster needed)

- offers AmigaOS to everyone, but it requires their ISA card to run

- runs DOS apps in Virtual 8086 mode, in desktop windows or full-screen



the reverse was actually possible: there were PC compatible expansion cards for the amiga [1]. The issue is that they were very expensive and 8088 only.

[1] for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Sidecar although "card" is stretching it :)


Yes, those PC Card addons for Mac/Amiga/etc are endlessly fascinating to me. But with the benefit of hindsight, the crucial factor wasn't just being able to run DOS applications on your fancy propriety computer, it was riding the PC Compatible rocketship as it blasted off. Creative Labs and 3Com and Tseng and many others showed that there was more value in manufacturing a popular expansion in the massive PC world than in owning your own closed platform bow-to-stern.


They did make a 286 and 386SX Bridgeboard:

https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=329 https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=330


Nice. I did not know those.




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