The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

> the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time

At the time. A brief moment in time, and then they had no path forward and were rapidly steamrolled. Nothing was "chosen wrong" in this aspect.

Well, wait, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking way before Apple or Windows got it, like the mid 80s. I don't think Windows got it until Windows NT, and it didn't become mainstream until Windows 95. Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking that would freeze if you just thought it about it funny [1] all the way until OS X.

There's other stuff too; they had better color graphics in the 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware. Even by 1990, the video toaster was released, well before it got any port to DOS.

[1] I'm sure it got better, my first exposure to it was System 7 and that thing was an unholy mess. I didn't touch macOS again until OS X.

Long before Windows 95 there was DOOM and DOOM would not run on an Amiga.

> 80s while DOS was still dealing with CGA and EGA, and decent sound hardware.

And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting?

> Even by 1990, the video toaster was released,

And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform.

Also, I don't buy into the idea that just because a company had something "superior" for a short period of time with no further company direction that they didn't lose fair and square. That Amiga had something cool in the 80s but didn't or couldn't evolve isn't because the market "chose wrong". Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run. Suffering a few more years with the occasional bomb on System 7 was not a market failure.

> Macs had bizarre cooperative multitasking

What was bizarre about it, compared to any other cooperative multitasking system of the time? Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

> Long before Windows 95 there was DOOM and DOOM would not run on an Amiga.

Yeah fair. I do wonder if a port like the SNES version would have been possible if id would have greenlit it, but that's a "what if" universe. Alien Breed 3D would run on a 1200, but IIRC it ran pretty poorly on that.

> And then the 80s ended. What point did I make that you are contradicting?

I mean, yes, VGA cards and Soundblaster cards were around in 1990, but they weren't really standard for several years later.

> And if you wanted to do CAD? Would you use an Amiga? Probably not. What about desktop publishing? Pointing out that Amiga had carved out a niche (in video editing) when that was the norm back in those days doesn't make any strong comment about the long term superiority or viability of the platform.

Also fair. I'll acknowledge my view is a bit myopic, since I don't really do CAD or desktop publishing, but I do some occasional video editing, and I do think Amigas were quite impressive on that front. You're right in saying it was a "niche" though.

> Commodore as a company was such a piece of shit it made Apple of the 80s look well run.

No argument here. Still think that the hardware was pretty cool though.

> What was bizarre about it

I guess "bizarre" was the wrong word. It was just really really unstable, and System 7 would constantly freeze for seemingly no reason and I hated it.

> Also you seem to be fixated on preemptive multitasking to the neglect of things like memory protection.

I feel like if Commodore had been competently run, they could have done work to get proper protected memory support, but again that's of course a "what if" universe that we can't really know for sure.

I guess what frustrates me is that it did genuinely feel like Commodore was really ahead of the curve. I think the fact that they had something pretty advanced like preemptive multitasking (edit: fixed typo) in the mid 80s was a solid core to build on, and I do kind of wish it had caught on and iterated. I see no reason why the Amiga couldn't have eventually gotten decent CAD and Desktop publishing software. I think Commodore didn't think they had to keep growing.

> they had no path forward

This is I think the premise that you and people like me who think Amiga could have gone on to do great things disagree on, I think. Most Amiga fans would say that it totally had a path forward, or at least there is no evidence that it didn't, and the failure to follow that path therefore it wasn't an inherent technical problem, but a problem of politics and management. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

Commodore's story is more about achieving the impossible with 1-2 engineers building each computer. Commodore was a company built around Jack Tramiel who wanted his widgets to ship in volumes to "the masses, not classes". When he left then it was a lifestyle sucking cash machine for Irving Gould who appointed incompetent CEO after incompetent CEO after Tramiel. The miracle is it staggered on ten years post-Jack.

But the reality is the Commodore 64 kept Commodore going during most of that period rather than Amiga sales. It's similar to Apple where the Apple 2 kept Apple afloat during the 80s and 90s until Steve returned.

Times changed though, too, and Tramiel couldn't replicate his success w the C64 at Atari Corp, despite bringing the same philosophy (and many key engineers) over there.

By the late 80s the "microcomputer" hobby/games market was dead and systems like the ST and Amiga (or Acorn Archimedes, etc.) were anachronisms. You had to be a PC-compat or a Mac or a Unix workstation or you were dead. Commodore and Atari both tried to push themselves into that workstation tier by selling cheaper 68030 machines than Sun, etc, but without success.

The Amiga OS was designed in a way that protected memory support was basically impossible. Message passing was used everywhere. How did it work? One process ("task", technically) sent a pointer to another, a small header with arbitrary data, which could contain anything, including other pointers. Processes would literally read and write each other's memory.