[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Without either a text mode like the IBM AT or non-interlaced higher resolution graphics modes like the Mac had I don't see how the Amiga could have broken out of being a niche.

You just described 2 niches. How many PCs today run in text mode? How many only have a single 1 bitplane graphics mode with a resolution of only 512×342?

The Atari ST had a non-interlaced higher resolution graphics mode. Did this enable it to break out of its 'niche'?

It is baffling that it took Commodore so long to release ECS and the Amiga 500.

Commodore purchased Amiga Inc in August 1984, but they didn't have a finished product. They released the A1000 in July 1985 (less than a year later) but the OS wasn't finished so they put an extra memory board in to load it from disk, allowing users to upgrade to later versions without having to install new ROMs. The first stable version was WB1.2, which was released in 1987 with the A500.

There was little point in releasing another Amiga model before the OS was stable, so the reason for the two years delay has to be - because it took them that long to produce an OS stable enough to put into ROM.

Perhaps if Commodore had followed the PC way of doing it and produced a purely disk-based OS they could have released the A500 earlier. But would we have wanted that?

As for the time frame,

Microsoft Windows

The history of Windows dates back to 1981 when Microsoft started work on a program called "Interface Manager". It was announced in November 1983 (after the Apple Lisa, but before the Macintosh) under the name "Windows", but Windows 1.0 was not released until November 1985...

Windows 2.0 was released in December 1987, and was more popular than its predecessor. It features several improvements to the user interface and memory management...

Windows 3.0, released in 1990, improved the design...

Windows 3.1, made generally available on March 1, 1992...

The next major consumer-oriented release of Windows, Windows 95, was released on August 24, 1995

So it seems that 2~3 years was the typical time frame required to produce a sophisticated graphical OS.

But what about ECS? Surely Commodore could have a produced an enhanced chipset a lot sooner? I mean, 3 years from the previous chipset improvement (1987 to 1990) - what took them so long?

IBM introduced the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) in August 1981 with the PC, but didn't have a monitor for it until March 1983. Until then customers were expected to either buy a suitable 3rd party monitor, or connect it to a TV (NTSC only!) via the composite output.

The next graphics card IBM produced was the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), released in October 1984. This was an 8 bit card with 64k RAM on board, which enabled a maximum resolution of 640×350 in 4 colors. It obviously wasn't TV compatible, so they had to produce yet another monitor to support it.

It is baffling that it took IBM over 3 years after introducing CGA to produce a color card with non-interlace hires output.