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Originally Posted by Photon
But your Dad made a theory why the Amiga didn't thrive in the US. He's misremembering the years. The year in which something was actually available must be fact-checked to hold true.
I advance a theory that is consistent with years of release instead.
Any computer can do a spreadsheet.
The Amiga had 640x200 4 colors as minimum spec. On A1000, double-click the system-configuration icon and flip a switch to get 80 columns...
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He's not misremembering.
You wrote:
Quote:
From research and talking to friends from the US, early 1980s, the conclusions are that a) most Americans couldn't afford a new computer, and b) those that could weren't enthusiastic about any computer unless it emulated DOS 8-bit from the 1970s.
Stuck in the old. And they already had such a computer. It sounds like your father expected the Amiga to be the WYSIWYG, print to laser printer work computer of the mid-1990s, but he's a decade off there. The Amiga would do that too, at that time.
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The IBM PC, the very first one, was 1981. I don't know where your friends got "DOS 8-bit from the 70s."
And no, not just "any computer" can do a spreadsheet. Visicalc, for instance, was the killer app for the Apple II just like 123 was for the PC. Sure, technically you can do it on "any computer" (my HP48SX has one) but it's a question of actually wanting to use it.
The Mac (1984) had WYSIWYG btw. Apple Laser Writer was 1985. My dad wasn't expecting the Amiga 1000 to be a 1990s level machine. He was expecting it to be able to at least match the C-128 or Apple II in word processing / spreadsheet potential but it couldn't because of the display.
Have you ever tried to run Word Perfect 4.1 on the OCS? It exists but you wouldn't want to use it versus doing it on a PC because of the screen resolution.
Until I talked to my dad, I hadn't really given it much thought. I was a teenager back then and it became rote that the Amiga didn't take off because of bad marketing by Commodore. Commodore had been given this amazing gift by the Amiga team and they squandered it. That's the opinion I always held until I talked to my dad recently.
Now, if Commodore had released the Amiga 500 in 1985 as a console and was somehow able to price it like a console and made that its target with no ambiguity of what it was for (graphics, entertainment, video) maybe things would have gone differently.
I don't think I am the only Amiga fan who had this blind spot to the NTSC resolution limitation. I was a kid then and only used the Amiga for playing games and used BBSes where I could download, format a floppy and play games at the same time. It was magic.