[grond]

I have been thinking about what things made an Amiga better than any contemporary IBM-compatible PC even if the latter could actually have higher resolutions or higher colour depth using high-end graphics cards. I came up with these:

- it had a 32 bit preemptive multitasking operating system
- it had a graphical user interface
- its minimum hardware stats included a blitter, a 12 bit palette and stereo sound
- it had a unified memory architecture where RAM could be used for graphics, sound and code, no copying of image content or samples from RAM to local memory in the expansion cards
- it could do smooth 50/60 Hz scrolling
- all relevant devices could do DMA which meant that graphics, sound, floppy and harddisk could read/transfer data without putting any load on the CPU
- hardware addons did autoconfig, no irq or IO conflicts that had to be resolved manually if even possible
- the copper made it possible to operate in synchronicity with the raster beam, a feature that never made it into the PC world and that meant that you could change color depth and horizontal resolution within a screen
- it had a 32 bit CPU as a standard (the 386 debuted shortly after the Amiga)

Of course, some of these advantages became obsolete within the Amiga's lifetime such as the blitter and minimum graphics specs which were outdated at the end of the 80s when VGA and 386s became a standard and even turned out to be detrimental to the Amiga as they became a legacy burden. The unified memory architecture also was quickly replaced by the chipmem/fastmem divide.

For several years the Amiga could do quite a few things better than the PC but the PC was abstracted away from the hardware out of pure necessity which then made it able to take the pole position of technical progress.