GarryB wrote:In 1988 I was using an Amiga 500 computer with a motorola chip and it was better than any of the 286 or 386 or 486 alternatives for about the next five years.
What the Amiga lacked was a hard drive, but they did have one... I never saw one in the shop I used to frequent.
The floppy disks weren't terrible, the OS for the Amiga came on two disks basically, which were 880K capacity double density double sided disks, not the 720K DD DS IBM disks, or the 1.44MB high density double sided disks.
The main problem was the IBMs kept getting upgrades and improvements with new chips and new mother boards while the hardware on the Amigas... like the hardware on the Apples is largely fixed... so like a laptop every 5 years you threw out your old computer and bought a new one.
I bought my first PC in 1997 and I still use it... new CPU and motherboard, new power supply, new RAM and new HDD so essentially it is a new computer... it started with standard on board graphics... something like 2MB, but I then upgraded it with two Voodoo 2 cards linked together which then worked great for the next half decade or so... the point is that there was enormous growth potential but you had to know what you were doing.
IBM messed up the PC market for the 1980s and well into the 1990s. The deliberately chose the crappiest hardware and software options for
their first PC and subsequent XT and AT offerings. IBM made both Microsoft and Intel into the giants that have controlled the PC market for the last
30+ years.
Better options were available in the 1980s for IBM to truly launch the PC revolution:
1) Superior CPUs like the 68000 and RISC variants from National Semiconductor and AMD. Instead IBM chose the crappy version
of the crappy 8086, the 8088. This POS and the 640 Kb RAM limit became a yoke around everyone's neck for years. The 80386
finally broke the segmentation barrier and had an MMU that could allow software to use lots of RAM properly. The 680XX variants
always had a linear address space and would never have given us the 640 Kb limit. Only the physical RAM on the motherboard
would matter. If Motorola was chosen instead of Intel, we would have had all of the Intel innovations including super-scalar
(multi-pipeline) variants and so on. But since the herd was herded with Intel shite Motorola withered away and never got the
cash flow to advance.
2) Superior OS: a reasonable Unix variant would have given us a long lasting, flexible OS that could be upgraded easily to GUI.
In fact, IBM could have leveraged Xerox PARC innovations which what Apple did with the Macintosh in 1984. So the point and
click (mouse) GUI would have been there from the beginning.
But IBM's geriatric management didn't even understand the future of PCs. It was still thinking that big iron servers were
the center of creation. Then around 1990 IBM tried to pull the proprietary card with the PS/2 computers and OS/2.
It flopped because they were a day late and dollar short. They should have released the PS/2 originally. Instead,
they tried to appeal to consumers with the POS PC Jr. PS/2 prices were insane.
The Amiga would have had a future if MicroSh*t was not a monopoly that dominated the market. Not everybody was
into graphics and music, in fact most of the market was business apps during the 1980s and 1990s. If the Amiga had
all the software that MS boxes did, it would have lasted. The history of the PC demonstrates that there is no optimization
of product characteristics in the "free market". Instead you have monopolies and oligopolies feeding you second rate
crap.
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