IIRC, the lack of a hard drive issue came down to keeping costs down.
I don't remember a specific issue with "low res graphics". Of course the flicker issue was present, but that didn't really become an an issue until later in the Amiga's life, and only on the low end models.
Regardless, it was certainly a very well-rounded platform. Definitely not "just a game machine" by any stretch.
Caveat: I was in the Amiga world in the 1000/500/2000/3000 days. I've never used or seen the later generation stuff, such as the 4000 or A1200.
I had the 500, then the 2000 and finally 4000/040, with RAM expansion, hard disk and a decent monitor. It was a wonderful machine but suffered from the same limitation of the former models: AGA was better than AA, but too little too late.
No bashing it any way, I just wish things went differently. What I learned on the Amiga helped me immensely with my jobs years later; I only have to be thankful for having the opportunity to use it and learn from it: a multitasking OS on hardware without memory protection forces one to be careful when writing code, for a small memory leak or invalid pointer can either render the system unusable pretty quickly or crash it altogether.
Amiga 600 standalone: £194.99
Amiga 1200 standalone: £289.99
20MB HDD £89.99
60MB HDD £179.99
80MB HDD £195.99
120MB HDD £219.99
210MB HDD £359.99
Amiga 600 with 20MB HDD £289.99
Amiga 1200 with 85MB HDD £499.99
Amiga 4000/030 with 120MB HDD £969.99
Amiga 4000/040 with 4MB Fast RAM and 120MB HDD £1699.99
RTC fix: £14.99
Commodore 10884ST monitor (requires interlace for 640x512) £199.99
Commodore 1940 monitor (640x512 without interlacing) £284.99
You can see how the prices add up very quickly and make things unaffordable for the typical family. A business could afford to pay £1300 per computer, but a family likely could not. Most people plugged their machine into their existing TVs, as it seems did you.
If anything, this gives a good example of how technology has beaten inflation. The 20MB HDD is £4.50 per megabyte, or £4.7 million per terabyte. Today you can get a 16TB drive for £215, or £13.44 per terabyte, which is 351,000 times cheaper
I looked this up and it appears the A2000 launch price was $1495 USD in March 1987, I don't know the UK price but it would've been around £950 at the time. That's ridiculously cheap (until you understand it's an A500 with Zorro and ISA slots). The A3000, probably the best machine Commodore ever made, launched for $3379 USD in 1990.
I don't have any magazines from 1987, but Amiga Format issue 1 (August 1989) has an advertiser selling:
A2000 standalone £799
A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard £1099
A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard and A2090a (HDD controller card for the A2000 because IDE hasn't been invented yet) with 20MB HDD £1369
A2090a with 20MB HDD £479
A2090a with 40MB HDD £750
A2058 (up to 8MB RAM expansion) with 2MB RAM populated £449
I can see why you'd offer a working system, 1MB RAM, floppies only, if it more than halved the visible price.
It is difficult to talk about failed business, business many many times are successful for reasons beyond the technology involved. Just look nowadays how organizations are using Microsoft Teams, they could be locked, have a high cost for migration, bad management, and the core business working seamlessly beyond this.
BBoAH has a pic of an actual A2024: https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863
There was also a separate video card containing the framebuffer hardware, that could be connected to a "normal" high-res mono monitor: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/moniterm
Yikes!
Folks who grew up in the post-CRT era might not realize what a difference 100hz vs. 60hz could make with CRT monitors when you were staring at a screen for 8+ hours a day.
(I'm a bit sensitive -- around that time, I removed a connection on the MB of my Schneider, nee Amstrad, CPC 464 so that it would think it's the NTSC version and would output the screen's content @60Hz and adjusted my monitor accordingly. 60Hz was just about bearable, 50Hz (PAL) only with dark background)
Is it really just default ports? If the Amiga had had a line in port rather than required an external sampler, would it have been known as "the sampling machine"?
The Amiga did famously form the backbone of 1990s NTSC broadcast television production as the Video Toaster, but that was because the Amiga chipset was able to genlock with an external video signal, i.e. it was an inherent feature of the machine rather than the default ports and peripherals it came with.
Commodore did eventually promote a standard library for MIDI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Amiga_MIDI_Driver) in 1990, perhaps too late to take anything from the lead the 520ST had gained
In some alternate universe there were Atari Amigas and likely no Atari ST.
Both sold PC clones, and I suspect if those lines had been very successful $$ wise they may have attempted to do something like what you said. Or more likely some kind of Amiga-esque runtime environment overtop of (choke, gag) DOS. We would have all screamed bloody murder about it though.
In any case, AmigaOS and Atari's TOS were pretty heavily tied into the 68k ecosystem. Switching ISAs would have really been starting over.
Moving from 68k to PowerPC almost killed off Apple, and they were many multiples the size of Commodore & Atari.
Myself I made the switch from 68k Atari ST to 486+early-Linux in 1992. At that point we were already doing Unix-like things on the Atari (MiNT with unix ports, or, on the 030/020 systems, full NetBSD Unix), so it felt like a natural jump. SVGA + a 486 was a pretty damn competitive workstation-like system at that point.
In 1996 I helped administrated a group of MacOS boxen, all PowerPC. At that point in time only half the applications were running native PowerPC, and it was buggy as hell. If I recall, even parts of the OS were still running 68k emulated.
In an OS with no memory protection or even proper dynamic memory allocation, it was just a shitstorm. Could not run FileMaker and Netscape at the same time without dying all over the place. I was shocked, because a couple years earlier I remember finding the 68k Macs I used extremely stable, even with Multifinder, etc. Limited, but stable.
IMHO Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls in the air.
Apple made a lot of bad decisions in the 90s, but I don’t see how the switch to PPC was one of them.
Put it this way: the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down instead of building a whole other, competing system that was technically inferior from an operating system perspective.
The original Mac was built as if it was a one-off product, and they lived with the results of that for two decades. And these were Jobs' choices.
Yes and no.
I mean, the Mac is a cut-down Lisa. But you're right, cut down too far.
(Aside: the Lisa was a 68000 as well, I am fairly sure. No MMU, but it did have multitasking.)
I think the problems were in scaling it down far enough to get the price down to vaguely reasonable.
That meant:
• 128kB RAM (same as the Sinclair QL, which launched 2 weeks earlier)
• No hard disk. Keeping a full multitasking OS when running from 400kB single-sided double-density floppies -- indeed, from one floppy -- would have been significantly hard.
Before an outraged Amiga fan jumps in: yes, I know Amiga did it, but that was 2 years later, with 4x as much RAM and floppies holding 2x as much data. Tech was moving fast in the 1980s.
A 512kB original Mac with 800kB floppies was technologically doable in 1984, I suspect, but instead of costing $2500 when it launched (~1/4 of a Lisa), it would have been $5000 or something, and I strongly suspect it would have flopped too, as a result.
My key point is around the operating system. They had a system in LisaOS that had multitasking, memory protection, proper dynamic allocation, etc. It was a better OS than what was shipped on the Mac. It was unfortunate they threw it away. Likely due to personal & organizational politics more than technical and cost reasons (Jobs hated the Lisa). A few years later they were running Mac OS on old Lisa hardware.
Up until MacOS 8.5 you could move some system extensions to 68K Macs and they'd work.
I had my Color Classic have MacOS 8 looks (even running on 7.5) that way.
Apple couldn't stay on the 68K though - Motorola was mothballing the 68K line and investing on their own 88000 and, being faced with an OS rewrite, Apple did the rational thing - find out who has the best chance of making something better.
> Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls in the air.
I remember that, when MacOS 9x seemed like a dead end, Apple published MkLinux. It was my first Linux desktop.
You might be surprised. Apple did an x86 port of Classic MacOS, based on DR-DOS.
https://lowendmac.com/2014/star-trek-apples-first-mac-os-on-...
That is not the problem. Even emulating the apps isn't the core problem.
Drivers, and support for the vast range of x86 hardware, was the problem, and secondarily, using the underlying hardware and supporting an MMU, memory protection, and preemptive multitasking... those were the big problems, and in the end, all Apple's attemps to solve them failed, and it moved to UNIX.
That worked, but it needed to happen when it became viable to run the entire "legacy" OS in a VM, and that didn't come until around the turn of the century. That was not feasible in 1992.
IBM licensed some Amiga technology for OS/2 in the 90s, which is probably about as good a "PC AmigaOS" as we'd ever get (absent recent efforts like AROS).
Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
8086 didn't have the instruction set to do preemptive, and the 286's memory model was 64kb pages... and barely good enough. The enabler for MPC (Multimedia PC) was the combination of 386 (and 386sx) + 16 bit sound card + CDROM + PCI VGA+.
Can you elaborate of that?
AIUI all you need is interrupts (CPU has them) and a timer (the PC platform has them).
Just for accuracy: Win3.x had pre-emptive multitasking. However, it could only preempt DOS apps. Win16 apps could not be pre-empted.
This compares quite closely to the FOSS RISC OS for Arm machines, which can preempt CLI apps in a "task window", but GUI apps only multitask cooperatively.
Co-op multitasking is faster and more memory efficient. That's why Acorn and MS chose it. But it's very vulnerable to a single app failing to relinquish control, locking up the OS.
Saying "some programs would be difficult to port" is putting it mildly; a huge part of the Amiga's software catalogue was written in assembler, and pretty much every single game wrote directly to the hardware, in a way that can't be abstracted without a complete emulation of that hardware. The Commodore graphics APIs were absolutely too slow to do anything except productivity software. There were retargetable graphics APIs (e.g. CyberGraphX, Picasso 96), introduced to allow well-behaved software to access expensive graphics cards you could buy for big-box Amigas. But generally you wouldn't use them for game graphics (unless it's a very simple game).
The Amiga really held well together; the custom chips were well designed to fit with the 68000. Perhaps too well, and that coupling became the downfall when the computer hardware moved faster than Amiga software could be brought along. It was destroyed once games became more about per-pixel operations (1990s 3D games) than blitting large areas (1980s platform games); the existence of VGA mode 13h made the former so much easier to write. Commodore even added a chip to provide a form of hardware-accelerated chunky-to-planar conversion, but it was too late, only in the CD32 and just couldn't compete with a native chunky framebuffer.
Both hardware and software moved ahead while Commodore invested in the wrong things. Amiga was late to adopt VGA monitors and PCs quickly surpassed its capabilities. When I mentioned porting AmigaDOS and Intuition to 2/386's, it would be to keep the OS compatible at the C source level as much as possible, with workarounds for hardware when it's different, but always at OS API level so that non-game software (or non-Amiga-like games) could be ported from source.
I don't think it'd have saved Commodore or the Amiga (I think the Sun deal, where Sun would sell 3000/UX boxes was a better bet for that, or maybe not ditching the CBM 900 but, instead, building Amiga with Coherent instead of AmigaDOS).
Anyway, it'd have been fun.
I don't think most of it was originally implemented in C.
> at OS API level
That's the problem. Keep the original non-protected-memory APIs and you can't have memory protection; add memory protection, and it can't be API-compatible.
It's catch 22.
IIRC, AmigaDOS was written in BCPL and later moved to C.
> Keep the original non-protected-memory APIs and you can't have memory protection;
Kind of - you can always give the process the illusion it's running alone (or alongside the processes it started).
I was an Amiga fan from roughly 1988 through 1994, started with an A500, expanded it, then moved on to an A3000. The platform was incredible. I learned a ton from it and taught myself C on that system. But by 1994, I wanted a Linux system, so a 486 it was...
It’s a reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1 that runs on x86, ppc, and m68k.
It was a wonderful, impactful lesson in foundations of software engineering, before I even what any of that meant.
> OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those decisions that now appear stupid could make sense.
It was pretty clear the leadership were making bad decisions, when they weren't absent.
At the time it seemed like a sane thing to do while now we know they probably should have bet the farm on the Amigas (and take that Sun deal for the 3000/UX)
What they needed to do was invest in the successor Amiga chipset to the original one. Yanking the funding for Amiga R&D in the late 1980’s is what doomed Amiga and Commodore.
Or perhaps you mean porting Classic Mac in the 90s would have been a bad idea?
I knew guys who ran early ISPs, tried it for servers, then realized they'd be better off with a Sun box and then eventually early Linux (Slackware). They were trying to run a news server off of it, IIRC.
However, the point remains that Apple ran consumer products on Intel chips for 14 years or so and this was successful. I'm trying to parse out the claim being made. Eg. Is it an argument that the timing would have been bad in the 1990s? Notable that Apple also killed the experiment around PowerPC clones around the time Jobs came back.
Apple also wasn't rolling in cash like the are today. They were struggling. They wouldn't have had the resources in the late 90's to support consumer-level x86 and the various hardware/driver configurations. NeXT was fine with supporting a limited set of configurations since they weren't targeting the "consumer" anyway. They were targeting high end commercial "workstation" customers. NeXTStep 486 cost something like $800 if I remember. The developer tools were more $$$. The people running that stuff could afford to spec out their machines properly.
No, it could not, and this is why:
AmigaOS is sometimes called a microkernel, but it's not really, inasmuch as one of the biggest problems in microkernels is efficient communications between the kernel (in supervisor mode, i.e. x86 ring 0) and the servers running in user space (x86 ring 2 or 3 depending on OS).
AmigaOS did not have that. It ran on a 68000 and everything was in the same, flat, shared memory space. This makes inter-process comms easy, but it also has a cost: a rogue program can trample all over other processes' memory, including the kernel's memory.
Thus bringing down your system, the famous Amiga "guru meditation".
You can't do this on an 80286 because it doesn't have a flat memory space, even in Protect Mode. You need an 80386 running in 32-bit mode: what we now call x86-32.
But AmigaOS has that total absence of memory protection. You can implement that on a 386, no problem, but it makes your OS unstable. This is why a rogue NLM could bring down a Netware 3 or 4 server: a flat memory space.
This is why many alternative OSes of the late 1980s flopped: they couldn't use the memory-management hardware that appeared in the 386, and in Motorola's 68030 (in the 68020 it was an external MMU chip, IIRC.)
This is also why CBM couldn't take advantage of the MMU in the 68030 and 68040. If it rewrote AmigaOS to use the MMU, all the legacy code would have broken and failed to run, because the mechanism it used to communicate with the kernel would have gone away.
(This is aside from the issues of 68000 assembly code conversion and register starvation and all the other things others have brought up later in the comments, which are legitimate and valid.)
So, while it might have been technically feasible to port AmigaOS to the 386 -- I mean, today, AROS shows it's possible -- you'd inherit all the limitations of the original, but on much more expensive hardware.
This would make it un-competitive.
This is why OS/2 flailed and then failed. This is why Windows 3 evolved into Win9x but then had to die: it was replaced by a true 32-bit OS that used the MMU: Windows NT, derived from bits of Portable OS/2 and some of the design of DEC VAX VMX, because MS hired the lead programmer of VMS and his team.
It's why MacOS couldn't fully exploit the 68030 and 68040, and indeed, the PowerPC. It's also why Apple's Copland project failed. This stuff is really hard. Apple ended up moving to UNIX.
The world could be a lot different had Commodore management been so boneheaded.
OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those decisions that now appear stupid could make sense.