Their point was that the Amiga was a gaming machine, and they had no intention to make a full personal computer out of it, at least that was their idea when they stubbornly refused to ship it without a hard disk. That would be understandable given the high prices of storage back then, but they also insisted with low res graphics and lack of a cheap RTC chip, which killed almost all chances to use it in offices. I consider myself brave for having drawn my own business cards using Pagestream on a A500 with one megabyte of RAM and a flickering interlaced TV screen.

I remember things differently. While the Amiga was a great gaming machine, I remember Commodore pushing it as a desktop productivity machine, more emphasizing stuff like paint and music apps.

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 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.

I'm looking at an advert in Amiga Format 54 (the Christmas 1993 edition from 29 years ago)... probably the pinnacle of the Amiga's popularity. Here are some sample prices:

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 agree pretty much on everything, adding a hard disk would have placed the smaller machines in a whole different segment. I however recall also the A2000 was sold without a hard disk, just to advertise it ad a lower price, which I find absurd since that way it was essentially an A500 plus expansion slots.

To be fair, the expansion slots were a pretty useful thing and allowed a lot of extra hardware (including the Video Toaster) that the A500 sidecar was incapable of. But yes, the original A2000 was a souped-up A1000, later upgraded to a souped-up A500.

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.