Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[TEG]

I agree with your dad. Even Glenn Keller agree: [ Show youtube player ].

The Macintosh 128K had a resolution of 512×342 and the Amiga main resolution was 320×200 (60 Hz, NTSC), or 320×256 (50 Hz, PAL). It' very lower. And if you had an Amiga you wanted to use this resolution because you wanted all the colours.

And there is this: "The Mac had specifically square pixels, and small. That monitor was supposed to be a big deal, with pixels exactly 1 point wide and 1 point tall."

The other point which did not suit for a professional environment is the flashy look of the workbench at the time and the free size of icons which can rapidly lead to a merry chaos.

Console roots, yes. The colours was choosed to operate on a TV.

However Commodore had a card to play in the artistic field I think. They did not push it.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Photon

Your dad is an average American. He just didn't get it. I'm sorry but it just sounds like making up excuses from hindsight.

Did you buy an Amiga in 1985? If not, what one was the first one you got?

I'm pretty sure my dad "gets it".

The Amiga, the very first one and the only one that was available for the first couple years, the Amiga 1000 didn't have a text mode for doing 80 columns (which the C-128, Apple II and IBM PCs had) nor could it do acceptably high resolution graphics non-interlaced out of the box like the Mac had.

As a result, it was at a big disadvantage for spreadsheets, word processors, desktop publishing or most of the other things people in 1985 were using computers for for work.

As a gaming platform, it certainly did thrive for awhile but the origin of this thread was me asking my dad why the Amiga didn't beat out at least the Mac if not the IBM PC.

It's not like my dad is bitter about the Amiga. He has no vested interest. I asked him his opinion and he gave it to me as someone who had one of the very, very first Amigas and got it as a general purpose computer.

I'm not even sure the Amiga could have done anything differently given where monitors were at the time (the Mac was physically integrated into its display at the time). And the ST had a text mode and that didn't save it.

I'm not sure if the Amiga could have had a 512x384 non-interlaced resolution (would it require a special monitor or was it just something that Denise could have had?).

My dad still has his Amiga 1000 btw. He thinks of it quite fondly. He had an Apple II before that and a homebuilt "mainframe" before that along with a NeXTStep later and these days (he's 80+ years old) still messes around with Raspberry pi's and is quick to use his soldering iron on something or other.

edit:
@TEG: Thanks for sharing that video. Key moment starts at 19:02.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by TEG

I agree with your dad. Even Glenn Keller agree: [ Show youtube player ].

The Macintosh 128K had a resolution of 512×342 and the Amiga main resolution was 320×200 (60 Hz, NTSC), or 320×256 (50 Hz, PAL). It' very lower. And if you had an Amiga you wanted to use this resolution because you wanted all the colours.

And there is this: "The Mac had specifically square pixels, and small. That monitor was supposed to be a big deal, with pixels exactly 1 point wide and 1 point tall."

The other point which did not suit for a professional environment is the flashy look of the workbench at the time and the free size of icons which can rapidly lead to a merry chaos.

Console roots, yes. The colours was choosed to operate on a TV.

However Commodore had a card to play in the artistic field I think. They did not push it.

Huh Amiga max no interlaced res of 320x200/320x256??

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Did you buy an Amiga in 1985? If not, what one was the first one you got?

I'm pretty sure my dad "gets it".

The Amiga, the very first one and the only one that was available for the first couple years, the Amiga 1000 didn't have a text mode for doing 80 columns (which the C-128, Apple II and IBM PCs had) nor could it do acceptably high resolution graphics non-interlaced out of the box like the Mac had.

As a result, it was at a big disadvantage for spreadsheets, word processors, desktop publishing or most of the other things people in 1985 were using computers for for work.

As a gaming platform, it certainly did thrive for awhile but the origin of this thread was me asking my dad why the Amiga didn't beat out at least the Mac if not the IBM PC.

It's not like my dad is bitter about the Amiga. He has no vested interest. I asked him his opinion and he gave it to me as someone who had one of the very, very first Amigas and got it as a general purpose computer.

I'm not even sure the Amiga could have done anything differently given where monitors were at the time (the Mac was physically integrated into its display at the time). And the ST had a text mode and that didn't save it.

I'm not sure if the Amiga could have had a 512x384 non-interlaced resolution (would it require a special monitor or was it just something that Denise could have had?).

My dad still has his Amiga 1000 btw. He thinks of it quite fondly. He had an Apple II before that and a homebuilt "mainframe" before that along with a NeXTStep later and these days (he's 80+ years old) still messes around with Raspberry pi's and is quick to use his soldering iron on something or other.

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 Apple II did, a little over two years after release.

The Amiga had 640x200 4 colors as minimum spec. Perfect for spreadsheet or word processing software. On A1000, double-click the Prefs icon and flip a (GUI, hires, color) switch to get 80 columns... how come this setting was not found?

Now, if you were to say that your dad abandoned Amiga despite software and hardware excellence to get DOS text mode applications, you would be closer to the truth, there would be no theory about other US computer buyers, and you couldn't put the thread title you did.

The Amiga thrived. It sold millions. That's why we are here and remember correctly, in infinite detail, the strange phenomenon of the US computer buyers ignoring the software and hardware breakthroughs of the Amiga compared to the rest of the world.

It's not very fair this, pitting our combined knowledge of what happened versus memories of an individual. It's just that theories are a dime a dozen, and these days you must fact-check before even starting one because so much is documented.

[Frogs]

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...

He's not misremembering.

You wrote:

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.

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.

[AmigaHope]

People had no trouble word processing on CGA 640x200 15Khz. For most MS/DOS apps, this remained the standard through the mid-80s -- even if you had an EGA card, most of your software worked in 80x25 640x200 CGA textmode. The Amiga definitely was not as good at this in 16 colors, especially if you had no fast RAM, but you could switch to monochrome or 4 colors and get nice performance.

The interlace argument though is false because of this. Most MS-DOS software was written to work in a 15Khz non-interlaced mode (even if it was run on a system that automatically switched it to a 31Khz textmode).

The "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." was the real reason, as someone mentioned. It was NOT a cult though, it was simple business politics. When you are in middle management at a company, and you try to do something innovative, you get punished when something goes wrong. You do not get punished if you do what everyone else is doing and something fails, then it's either attributed to bad luck or a mistake by your suppliers.

In the IT departments of most major companies, the vendor they went to for computing was IBM. If you bought from IBM and something went wrong, you wouldn't be blamed for it. If you bought from Commodore and something went wrong, you'd be blamed for anything you did out of the norm. It's just how companies work. This doesn't go just for computers, it goes for any business process. Anytime you introduce change you are putting your career on the line. Success *might* lead to career advancement, but if it's in something like computers that upper management doesn't understand, they might not even notice. Keeping your job safe takes priority.

None of this applies to home computers, which is why Commodore was able to have such a huge presence in the home computer market. The difference is that the home computer era in the US ended sooner than it did in Europe. Once IBM-compatible clones dropped in price, there was more of an incentive to "take them home for work", and more of an incentive for people to write home software for them that might also be used at the office since the installed base was so large.

Since Americans had more disposable income, that price was starting to be reached around the time the Amiga was coming to market, particularly with Tandy's relatively affordable line of PCjr clones. By 1989 or so the home computer market was lost in the US, not because the IBM clones were better on a price/performance basis, but because of software availability. Back then I could still show people "Shadow of the Beast" and people would gasp and say "Your computer can do THAT!?", meanwhile there'd be no place you could actually BUY Shadow of the Beast for a hundred miles.

The price/performance gap being closed and exceeded was what caused the fall of home computers in Europe. This was driven entirely by the huge market share in the US allowing for incredible amounts of R&D that no one company could match.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

The "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." was the real reason, as someone mentioned. It was NOT a cult though, it was simple business politics. When you are in middle management at a company, and you try to do something innovative, you get punished when something goes wrong. You do not get punished if you do what everyone else is doing and something fails, then it's either attributed to bad luck or a mistake by your suppliers.

It's a nice quote and to some extent it was a contributing factor. But to use it as a sole "reason" is just another magic bullet narrative. In reality businesses went for IBM because aside from being a well known brand, their PC computers had some very strong qualities, such as being truly modular or having killer apps such as 1-2-3. The near instaneous appearance of the clones unified under the "IBM-compatible" banner also hinted at the incoming future with many manufacturers (ergo cheaper prices) but one standard - something which is a huge boon for both business and home users.

The other thing is that in 1983 alone "50-70% units sold went to households". It was a home computer from the get go, not just a business machine.

The funny thing is that the openness and standards which IBM has introduced, and which eventually swept away everything else, also did it for the IBM itself. Once they realized it and tried to put the genie back in the bottle, it was way too late.

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

The price/performance gap being closed and exceeded was what caused the fall of home computers in Europe. This was driven entirely by the huge market share in the US allowing for incredible amounts of R&D that no one company could match.

The R&D everybody could contribute to was was there from the get go, because of the open standard, and the huge market share is partially the function of that, not the other way around.

The home computers fell because they were not needed anymore. PCs got cheaper and were used for school/work/creativity - but also had their own PC-centric game libraries. Consoles served the other type of games. Eventually, people could afford to own both, should they want to.

Personally, I'm quite happy with how things have turned out in general. The home computer sphere has some dominant players and problems, (mostly related to uinternet-enabled surveillance capitalism) but offers workable alternatives, if you really hate MS, or, say, Nvidia.

Conversely, if one of the old firms "won', which seems to be the underlying wish in these threads (on any forum) what would be the real outcome? We would be locked into one Apple-like hegemony, and the Amiga name would be despised just as much as Intel or MS are today, if not more, because there are alternatives to their stuff.

So, I'm quite happy to have the memories of being a part of these brilliant Amiga times back then, and the fact it still lives on as a hobbyist scene. I'd much rather have that, than it taking over the world and falling on its own sword in the process.

[grond]

Perhaps the Amiga did much better in the PAL-world because 640x256 weren't as bad as NTSC's 640x200 while with the long glowing phosphors of the time the 50Hz of PAL weren't that much of a disadvantage at the time. I certainly think that 200 lines are very limiting for a desktop computer, even more so because monitors weren't as sharp as LCDs are today which made low pixelised characters even harder to read.

Looking at modern computers and extrapolating back from them with their ever increasing resolutions we arrive at something very much like the Amiga which is why we believe it was the most suitable computer back in its time. But GUIs come at a cost and the first pixel-based UIs were not as good in the relevant discipline as specialised hardware that could only do that one important job: display text.

Commodore's primary goal for the C128 was exactly that: add an 80 columns text mode to the C64. That was considered the most important selling point for anything that was asking more money than toy computers. Computers were advertised with information such as "80x40 text mode".

[redblade]

Amiga also had overscan resolution so that bumps NTSC from 640x200 to 640x240.

Comparing textcraft and multiplan to the excel and mac write, maybe less is more in the colours department, excel and mac write do look very professional but they would of had a bigger budget behind them.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

Huh Amiga max no interlaced res of 320x200/320x256??

320x200/320x256 is 32 colours, 640x200/640x256 is 16 colours. I said, if you bought an Amiga it was to work with all the colours.


Anyway 640x200/640x256 give pixels too stretched, it's uncomfortable to work with.


I wonder if there was not a limitation with the ram at the time which was enable to deliver enough data for a better resolution and the Amiga team did the best they can with the available electronic at the time.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by TEG

Anyway 640x200/640x256 give pixels too stretched, it's uncomfortable to work with.

Yeeeeessssss, I've heard of this weird anomaly with PC owners and their graphics, like they DESPISE pixel ratios of 1:2 or 2:1, preferring instead perfectly SQUARE pixels. Rather baffling, really.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Yeeeeessssss, I've heard of this weird anomaly with PC owners and their graphics, like they DESPISE pixel ratios of 1:2 or 2:1, preferring instead perfectly SQUARE pixels. Rather baffling, really.

They maybe never had a 8-bit machine then, because on those rectangular pixels for multicolor were quite common
or maybe they HAD an 8-bit machine and thought square pixel were "more professional"?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

I agree with your dad...

The Macintosh 128K had a resolution of 512×342 and the Amiga main resolution was 320×200 (60 Hz, NTSC), or 320×256 (50 Hz, PAL). It' very lower.

Not true. The Amiga's 'main' (Workbench) resolution was 640x200 or 640x256 in 4 colors. You could have more colors (8 or 16), and up to 720 x 288 with overscan (though you might have adjust your monitor to see all the pixels). But you could also have up to 384 x 288 in 32 colours on another screen that existed at the same time, and you could have combinations with part of the screen hires and part lores, each with its own color depth and palette. Meanwhile the Mac was stuck in 2 colours and a non-standard scan rate that required a special monitor.

And if you had an Amiga you wanted to use this resolution because you wanted all the colours.

Nope. My A1200 can do 256 colours but I usually only use 8 colours on Workbench, 4 colours in my text editor and 2 colors in the debugger - because that's all I need. I often have several editor screens and the debugger as well as the program I am debugging and Workbench all open at the same time, and sometimes a paint program and/or web browser also in their own screens. Try that on a Mac! Even my PC has trouble managing that amount of activity, since they all have to share the same screen.

And there is this: "The Mac had specifically square pixels, and small. That monitor was supposed to be a big deal, with pixels exactly 1 point wide and 1 point tall."

In PAL the Amiga has square pixels in lores and hires interlace, and exactly doubled vertically in hires non-interlace (which is optimum for text because characters are generally about twice as tall as they are wide).

However in NTSC the pixels are stretched a bit vertically, which may be why Americans are less satisfied with the Amiga's resolutions. Unfortunately that's the way it has to be for compatibility with TVs - and it was the same for PCs with CGA and other cards when run at resolutions like 320x200 or 640x400.

Apple produced a machine with its own built-in monitor so they could control the aspect ratio, and they made the screen small and only black and white so it looked sharper! Along with their drawing routines and fonts system this made the Mac attractive for desktop publishing.

However I can say from experience that an Amiga with flicker fixer (A2000 or A3000) also did an excellent job. We used Gold Disk's Professional Page to produce our program box artwork, CD inlays and manuals - all of which were printed from Postscript files on a commercial printing press. The OCS chipset is pretty fast in 2 colors, and the ECS chipset can even do it without a flicker fixer with a suitable monitor.

So the real reason the Mac has a better reputation in this department was that it was the first popular desktop computer with a DTP oriented screen 'out of the box', which attracted more software and users.

The other point which did not suit for a professional environment is the flashy look of the workbench at the time and the free size of icons which can rapidly lead to a merry chaos.

That is complete nonsense. The standard icons were all discretely sized and the look wasn't as flashy as Microsoft Windows, or even the Mac if you think (as I do) that 'zooming' windows is pointless. Users could create larger icons if they wanted and freely arrange them how they wanted, which hardly indicates a lack of professionalism.

What wasn't professional?

PCs trying to run a windowing environment with a serial port mouse that sucked up all the CPU time when you moved it, and a pointer that flickered and sometimes left 'mouse droppings' when the old position wasn't properly erased.

Windows that can go completely off the screen and can't be moved back with the mouse.

Windows that automatically come to front when you click in them even when you don't want that.

Icons that don't represent files and can't be placed where you want them.

Having to use an awkward 'file manager', only 8 letters permitted in a file name, file type identified purely by a 3 letter extension, etc., etc.

Console roots, yes. The colours was choosed to operate on a TV.

Even more nonsense. The A1000 was usually sold with an RGB monitor, and the colors were chosen for a 'fresh' look with high contrast and low eye strain. On TV this tends to ghost a bit, and the orange bleeds badly. But the user could always change the colors to match their tastes, unlike other systems which either locked you into 16 garish primary colors (PC) or black and white only with no choice at all (Mac).

Strong colors don't work well on TV due to the low chrominance bandwidth, which is why most home computers tried to avoid them. The C64 is the most notorious example; light blue on dark blue was chosen to lessen banding caused by interfering signals inside the video chip. Many home computers generated colours directly in NTSC or PAL by varying the chrominance phase, which resulted in some peculiar 'pastel' shades compared to the bright colors available in RGB. The Amiga's palette of 4096 colors allowed practically any color to be chosen, which was unheard of when it came out in 1985.

However Commodore had a card to play in the artistic field I think. They did not push it.

Actually they did push it in the 'artistic' field, at least initially. At the A1000's launch they got famous artist Andy Warhol and singer Debbie Harry to demonstrate how the Amiga could be used to capture an image, colorize it and create artistic effects in real time. Before the Amiga that was the realm of dedicated workstations that cost $20,000 or more.

Warhol and the Amiga

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

In reality businesses went for IBM because aside from being a well known brand, their PC computers had some very strong qualities, such as being truly modular or having killer apps such as 1-2-3.

True. The PC was always business oriented - in price (out of the range of most home users), in 'modularity' (a box that could be customized for niche markets) and in 'killer' business apps. But this was the same market previously occupied by the Apple II and CP/M machines. What really made it take off was IBM's reputation.

The near instaneous appearance of the clones unified under the "IBM-compatible" banner also hinted at the incoming future with many manufacturers (ergo cheaper prices) but one standard - something which is a huge boon for both business and home users.

Clones appeared instantaneously because IBM stupidly didn't patent any part of the PC hardware, while Apple was fighting cloning of their machines with proprietary chips that the cloners couldn't duplicate. Clone manufacturers switched to IBM because they could steal their IP and undercut them on price.

Having one 'standard' was great for lazy users who didn't want to be bothered learning anything technical, but in reality it wasn't true. The flexibility of the PC combined with no real standards meant that you never knew if a PC program would work on your 'PC' or not. I bought a ridiculously expensive serial mouse for my IBM JX and it wouldn't work because the idiot who wrote the driver assumed all PCs have the same baud rate generator frequency. If only they had gone through the BIOS to set the baud rate it would have worked fine, but the state of PC 'standards' at the time was such that you couldn't rely on a clone BIOS being fully compatible.

The other thing is that in 1983 alone "50-70% units sold went to households". It was a home computer from the get go, not just a business machine.

'Went to households' is not the same as being a 'home computer'. The majority of those machines were used primarily for home office use. IBM discovered this after they produced the PCJr, a 'home' computer that was a complete flop.

The funny thing is that the openness and standards which IBM has introduced, and which eventually swept away everything else, also did it for the IBM itself. Once they realized it and tried to put the genie back in the bottle, it was way too late.

That's what happens when you let people steal your design. Apple had the same problem, but quickly learned from it. That's one reason why Apple products are still 'locked up' today, and how they continue to make money. It's also why genuine Apple products are so much better than clones and wannabes.

The R&D everybody could contribute to was was there from the get go, because of the open standard, and the huge market share is partially the function of that, not the other way around.

This was primarily a result of market size. Most clone manufacturers did very little of their own research, and a lot of that was just reverse-engineering or tweaking existing designs.

Personally, I'm quite happy with how things have turned out in general. The home computer sphere has some dominant players and problems...

So, I'm quite happy to have the memories of being a part of these brilliant Amiga times back then, and the fact it still lives on as a hobbyist scene. I'd much rather have that, than it taking over the world and falling on its own sword in the process.

I am also quite happy with how it's turned out, now (a few years ago I wasn't, but that was before the resurgence of interest in the Amiga). And I too would rather not have Amiga trying to take over the World and fail. But there's no chance of that now, so why can't we drop the 'Amiga was never any good PCs (or anything else) were always the best' nonsense and all just get along?

The great thing about the home computer scene was that every machine had its likes and dislikes, and no one platform dominated to make other users feel somehow inferior. We now have an opportunity to continue that inclusiveness, as people come to realize that you can have just as much fun (or even more fun) on a machine that isn't the 'latest and greatest' technology.

All this talk about the PC being better 'in every way that matters' brings back memories of what it was like for Amiga owners in a the 80's and 90's. Well here we are in 2021 still enjoying our 'worthless' Amigas, still browsing the web and downloading new stuff from Aminet, still buying exciting new hardware for our machines, still developing new games that push the Amiga's custom chips even harder, even getting updates to the OS. Good times!

[Foebane]

Yes, that's right, there's footage of Warhol demonstrating the Amiga's graphical abilities, although there was a tense moment when he uses a buggy flood fill routine to colour Debbie Harry's hair in the image he's working on, and the Amiga people are worried that the Amiga's about to guru on them and a few thousand witnesses in the audience... but luckily, it worked out fine.

Ironically, his subsequent works on the Amiga were thought lost or unrecoverable for decades until the delicate, ageing disks were read:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27141201

[Tigerskunk]

I just remember that I could literally not understand why anyone would buy a PC when I saw one in the late 80ies in the shops I visited.

Almost everything I saw on them looked bad, and certainly worse than on an Amiga.

Garish colours on EGA, slow graphics, PC beepers, having to use DOS to get anything useful done, etc, and those things cost like 5 times what an Amiga cost.

Things changed with VGA cards, hard disks and the raw power of the 386 CPUs. Suddenly games started to look better on PC.

The whole handling of the machine was still a lot worse than on the Amiga, and it felt like going back a decade when using one in the early nineties.

[d4rk3lf]

I am just an average user, but I think your father brings out a very interesting points.
Kudos for him remembering stuff after all this years, and still keeping his Amiga 1000.

Indeed, when typing text in Amiga, something felt different, then on other computers. This sounds stupid, I know, but it really is different feel. And yeah, text wasn't clear as on the ugly PC monitors, but if you plugged Amiga to monitor (rather then TV, that had that sort of "hardware blur"), then I guess it would be clear.

However, I do again see Commodore's fault, because I think Amiga, even before 1987, could had some killer business app, like Corel for PC in the early nineties.
Now imagine a BIG presentation, where Amiga is connected with color printer, and shown how easily you can format text, and just drag various images on the screen with mouse, and just print that out.
I also remember some app on my Amiga, where you could easily draw 2 vector images, and it automatically creates morphing animation between them. That was amazing, and never saw anything similar on PC back then. Now, that's not very useful for the "business computer", but vectors itself, is useful for million things.

I am still, a little bit confused, why Amiga did THAT BAD in the US, if not as a working machine, why did it bad as a gaming machine? Was there no single commercial on TV in the US? Was it because of NTSC? Here in Europe, Amiga was "computer from the future".

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Frogs

He's not misremembering.

I've shown twice that he misremembered. WordPerfect, 80 columns, he had it. The Amiga had the capability to let him word process on his futuristic Amiga.

That refuted, you shift to make it about resolution instead of 80 columns. If resolution was a problem, he could buy a graphics card, just like he did for his PC. These were for displaying graphs at the time, they could not handle a full-blown GUI.

The thread title is a lie because sales stats show it thrived. Obviously fans of Amiga hoped it to win the personal computer race, but it was a decade ahead of everything else. A few users in the rest of the world, and many users in the US, didn't know that this was what they wanted. Remember that GUIs were new and the Mac wasn't a success either. US users were stuck in the old, and only later did they know GUIs were the future. Xerox management made the same mistake. They just didn't understand enough (translation: dumb mistake). I think USA not embracing Amiga was a dumb mistake.

Among all the computer brands, the only one that clearly showed it could do more than others and was worth switching to, was the Amiga. Previously, for workers, a purchase may have depended on a killer app, but the first Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and IBM PCs weren't bought for a killer app. They had to wait for those.

To me it just sounds like your dad didn't have the patience to wait for software. And early adopters never buy a computer for those.

So, long story short: the main reason why your argument (no 80 columns=low sales) is wrong is because it doesn't address the early adopters. And the points in your argument that are technical have been shown false.

(Changing the title to add "in the US" is not recommended, as all current posts will address the original and read as strange replies if the context is pulled out from under them.)

[Foebane]

What about those here on EAB who said that the Amiga FAILED because it hasn't survived to the present day in some modern incarnation?

I'm not kidding, they said the Amiga failed. I reject that claim outright. Would it be a failure even if it sold millions? Or maybe they were talking about the (oh so important(!)) US market?

[LocalH]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Ironically, his subsequent works on the Amiga were thought lost or unrecoverable for decades until the delicate, ageing disks were read:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27141201

They're still lost as far as I'm concerned, unless they make unaltered ADFs available. I haven't even seen bit-perfect representations of the works, every copy I've seen has been unevenly scaled with linear interpolation and it's a very sad representation of the work. You'd think they'd want it to be more visible in it's original form on a CRT, to be the most authentic.