Anonymous Coward wrote:

If they had chosen Amiga rather than PC we'd probably be living in the future depicted in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Because they chose PCs the future we got looks more like the one depicted in Robocop.

The TNG production work was done on Macs. 😀

NJRoadfan wrote:

(Tandys were popular and in the same price range and market as the Amiga, plus ran "work" programs)

Yup I had a Tandy 1000TX which is a sort of XT with nifty audio/video capabilities. Priced around $1400 IIRC.

Everyone I knew at the time (including myself) jumped from the C64/C128 directly to x86 PCs. The Amiga wasn't popular because they were pricey when they first came out (for home use) and lacked apps (for business use). You also have the fact that while they were groundbreaking when introduced they pretty much never evolved like the Mac and PC did (no money for R&D).

Speaking as someone from Europe I can say that the Amiga probably hitched along with the succes of the C64 but even then I only knew about 1 kid in my class where they had an Amiga at home. But yeah it was the machine to have during the late 80's.

1) The Amiga was more expensive compared to it's primary rival, the Atari ST.
2) The PC was becoming the dominant platform around the time of the Amiga release or not long after
3) The Mac was grabbing all the attention of the artsy-fartsy crowd.
4) Apple II was still dominating the education market
5) Commodore 64 was still dominating the home market

The industry in the 80's was really cutthroat with multiple companies one-upping each other every year until IBM started licensing their architecture to other OEM's and that was really the game changer. It pretty much killed off all other proprietary systems or relegated them to tiny niche markets except for the Mac (which still stubbornly resists all efforts at killing it off) and made PC the industry standard.

Were artsy-fartsy people really into the macs at an early stage? I know for publishing, yes. But the original line of Macs only did black and white. The Mac II (which came out 18 months after the Amiga) was horribly expensive...as in $5,500. I wonder if that even included the expensive trinitron monitor. I seem to recall that the artsy fartsy and video editing type were all about the Amiga. I'm surprised TNG was done on a Mac. A lot of stuff in the 80s was done on Amiga. An A500 in 1987 on the other hand cost $700 bucks for the base unit. I saw a lot of you guys claim Amiga was too expensive...but even in 1985 the A1000 was only $1300. A hell of a bargain in my opinion.

I don't know exactly why Amiga failed. Probably a big conspiracy. As you can probably tell, I'm really bitter about the whole debacle. If I could go back in time and fix one thing, I'd make sure Amiga won the computer wars.

The mac was a big player in video editing (one area I collect) early on after the Mac II line with Nubus came out. Sure it was expensive for a home computer but cheap as hell compared to what was the norm at the time (the original video editing systems were $100K+ and a pain to use).

The Amiga was great for video overlays (thanks to the NTSC chip design) and was popular for early graphics rendering but sucked for video editing which is why few used it for such things. Graphics work ended up going to the Mac before the Amiga was dead (mostly because of multi monitors and add-on cards the Amiga lacked plus a large amount of industry software and support).

I love my Amigas (500, 1200, 2000, 3000, 4000 models) but I am glad they lost the computer wars, their design stagnated badly.

I am not really sure. Here in Slovakia (and the postcommunist world in general) it was a popular 90s computer because it was priced far lower than the PC. There is a webpage with lots of Czech and Slovak gaming magazines from the 1990s and pretty much every gaming magazine had an AMIGA section until 1998. On the other hand, a lot of stuff that was obscure in the US appeared here more, in those magazine scans I saw things like the 3DO or Atari Jaguar being sold cheaper than PSX (although that one was already from 1996 or so).

same here, the amiga was cheaper than a pc

Here the Amiga was as rare as hen's teeth. I know only 3 people who had one, meself included. And I got my first, an A500, after year 2k.
Few had C64, fewer had Atari 8bit, Atari 16bit were used by some musicians, CPC's were also rare.
For us, in the 80's were only ZX Spectrum clones, and after 90 mostly ZX clones and originals, the Amstrad/Atari/Commodore I mentioned before, and then a total domination of PCs.

It depends on the country I guess. Unlike USA, Amiga in Slovakia and Czech republic was a 1990s thing. PCs here were generally underpowered 386s as late as 1996, so Amiga was a popular choice for gaming. We had a 386 with late 80s games as late as 1999 and I am amazed to see how much better those games were on the Amiga. I was a little kid in that age, but I've asked a lot of older gamers and the magazines of that era would not be half Amiga reviews if it was not popular, the fact it could be connected to a TV certainly helped.

A bit offtopic, I am always annoyed when people in reviews of oldschool games state things like "anyone born before 1985 remembers this game...". Most people outside Western Europe and USA were not able to buy top line hardware so for example nearly every "1990s kid" here had a Famiclone and played most of the 1980s games, I was born in 1993 yet I spent half my childhood playing DOS EGA games, hell, I know a 11 years old kid who knows Crash Bandicoot quite well. I hate some patronizing attitude on some other sites where they are basically like "well, you kids played only Halo 3 right?".

To be quite honest, I feel a bit lucky to be born in a country where most people did not have "up to date" computers/consoles, I think it would suck ass to have your first game played to be some GTA:3 or Halo, kids should play Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Prehistorik 2 (and those games are still awesome for adults as well).

m1so wrote:

It depends on the country I guess. Unlike USA, Amiga in Slovakia and Czech republic was a 1990s thing. PCs here were generally underpowered 386s as late as 1996, so Amiga was a popular choice for gaming. We had a 386 with late 80s games as late as 1999 and I am amazed to see how much better those games were on the Amiga. I was a little kid in that age, but I've asked a lot of older gamers and the magazines of that era would not be half Amiga reviews if it was not popular, the fact it could be connected to a TV certainly helped.

A bit offtopic, I am always annoyed when people in reviews of oldschool games state things like "anyone born before 1985 remembers this game...". Most people outside Western Europe and USA were not able to buy top line hardware so for example nearly every "1990s kid" here had a Famiclone and played most of the 1980s games, I was born in 1993 yet I spent half my childhood playing DOS EGA games, hell, I know a 11 years old kid who knows Crash Bandicoot quite well. I hate some patronizing attitude on some other sites where they are basically like "well, you kids played only Halo 3 right?".

To be quite honest, I feel a bit lucky to be born in a country where most people did not have "up to date" computers/consoles, I think it would suck ass to have your first game played to be some GTA:3 or Halo, kids should play Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Prehistorik 2 (and those games are still awesome for adults as well).

A lot of people in wealthier countries didn't always have top of the line hardware, either. The best bang for the buck for a particular hardware generation was usually well behind the bleeding edge and a helluva lot cheaper. For a lot of people, buying used top of the line hardware from a previous generation was also a good way to save some money and still have a system that wasn't so far behind as to be immediately obsolete. I've never owned a bleeding edge system but still managed to have plenty of fun playing games using combinations of new and used parts as they came down in price.

@m1so
I know the feeling, neighbor. Back in 91-95 I was playing ZX Spectrum games. Because that was the machine I had back then (a clone, actually). Saboteur, Chuckie Egg, River raid, Dan Dare 1, 2 and 3, Nether Earth, Rainbow Islands, many others whom I forgot the names, and the one and only Elite.

swaaye wrote:

The TNG production work was done on Macs. 😀

Almost all early CGI was done in Lightwave 3D, which originally ran on the Amiga as part of the Video Toaster system. It was later ported to Windows.

sliderider wrote:

The industry in the 80's was really cutthroat with multiple companies one-upping each other every year until IBM started licensing their architecture to other OEM's and that was really the game changer.

IBM never licensed any part of the PC in the early years. They gave all the bus specs away originally and the BIOS was clean room reverse engineered with the rest of the machine being made from off the shelf parts. The clones paid nothing to IBM. They tried to get into the licensing game with the Microchannel bus and you saw the industry backlash.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

As to why it wasn't as popular in North America as it was in Europe...I personally blame Americans. They always have to choose stupid bullshit standards like 115V 60Hz, CDMA and the Imperial system to name a few.

115VAC is because we were the first to have electrical infrastructure. The rest of the world learned from our mistakes. CDMA (IS-95/2000) was actually superior to GSM being a later developed technology, a perk of not forcing a standard on people in the early 90s. Today's modern cell technology (LTE, HSPA) is based on it as a result. The imperial system is plain lack of interest, there is no push to switch over for everyday use here in the US.

NJRoadfan wrote:

115VAC is because we were the first to have electrical infrastructure. The rest of the world learned from our mistakes.

What makes you think 110-120VAC is a mistake and not 220-240V?

And since you don't seem to know, electricity is transmitted at 220-240V in the US but stepped down when it enters your house so you can use 110-120V appliances. Electric stoves and clothes dryers use 220-240V so the outlets that are installed for those aren't stepped down. Stepping down the voltage before it enters your home is also safer than allowing 220-240V at the outlet. You know, like in case your toddler jams a metal object into the outlet so he doesn't instantly die or when some idiot tries pulling a piece of burnt toast out of the toaster with a butter knife and accidentally touches the heating elements. I've been zapped with 110-120V three times in my life in industrial accidents and that is unpleasant enough, 220-240V is considerably worse. I have an uncle who nearly died after being hit with it.

sliderider wrote:

What makes you think 110-120VAC is a mistake and not 220-240V?

And since you don't seem to know, electricity is transmitted at 220-240V in the US but stepped down when it enters your house so you can use 110-120V appliances. Electric stoves and clothes dryers use 220-240V so the outlets that are installed for those aren't stepped down. Stepping down the voltage before it enters your home is also safer than allowing 220-240V at the outlet. You know, like in case your toddler jams a metal object into the outlet so he doesn't instantly die or when some idiot tries pulling a piece of burnt toast out of the toaster with a butter knife and accidentally touches the heating elements. I've been zapped with 110-120V three times in my life in industrial accidents and that is unpleasant enough, 220-240V is considerably worse. I have an uncle who nearly died after being hit with it.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1033 … st-of-the-world

I'm well aware of the fact that this house is fed with 240v, otherwise my dryer or air conditioning wouldn't work. I still wonder whose bright idea it was to originally wire 35 and 50amp 240v outlets without an earthed ground though (I'm aware the NEMA now specifies it). Despite the danger, the rest of the world seems to have no problem with 240v outlets. The UK goes a step further with safety and has outlets with shutters.

Getting back on topic, the voltage situation makes importing PAL Amigas and Atari STs a bit of a pain due to the different electrical requirements. Ironic that both machines come from US companies and are scarce in the USA!

I've always been under the impression that 115 and 230V are equally dangerous. It's the current and AC frequency that make them dangerous.
My main gripe with 115V is that basically the whole bloody world uses 220/230/240V. From a manufacturing point of view, it's pretty annoying having to deal with North American customers, especially when designs use imperial units.

Is CDMA really better than GSM? Providers liked it because it forced customers to use their crappy overpriced and locked down handsets. The only advantage of CDMA that I am aware of was the ability to take an "unlimited" number of users. However, for every additional handset added to the network the signal quality degraded. I always heard the line "CMDA is better because it's based on technology developed by the US military". But I always had better quality and fewer dropped calls on the GSM networks (I used both)....plus I had freedom to choose any handset I wanted.

It's been a long time since I have been interested in cell phone technology, so I am somewhat out the loop. Is it correct to assume that basically all cell phone service providers now use LTE? LTE is based on GSM technology, not CDMA...however it does allow providers to convert their old CDMA towers to work with LTE networks. There was supposed to be a competitor to LTE that was CDMA based but I don't believe it ever went anywhere.

On a related topic, what happens if you try running a PAL game on an NTSC Amiga? Do the games simply run too fast because of the 50/60hz difference? Does the resolution go out of whack? Does anything else happen?

@mr_bigmouth_502
First of all, the screen would be black&white (if you use RF or composite video). Then it is possible that the game would run too fast; same thing happens with console games. Then, PAL Amigas had higher vertical resolution. I don't know if I remember correctly, but I believe a NTSC one had 320x200, and PAL 320x256.
@sliderider
I've been zapped myself. @220 V, several times. Not that bad, but the tingling feeling in the fingers lasted for at least half an hour. Was worse @3-phased 380 V. So when my power supply went kaput during a spring thunderstorm and spread 100 V in all that was metallic in my computer, it was only a mild shock (wink wink). It did not felt as strong as 220, so I got the multimeter and measured it.

I think US, while it has 110 V, has a higher current so it is not really much less dangerous than 220-240 V.

Anyways, I cannot really believe USA people did not buy Amigas because of the price. Even the Amiga 1000 in 1985 costed 1295 dollars (granted, that was the 256 KB RAM version, but I think even with 1 MB RAM it would have still costed much less than PC AT).

IBM PC AT, on the other hand, costed around 6000 dollars. Yes, 6000 dollars.

And Amiga is not a gaming console. It was far more powerful than most super expensive "business" computers and its GUI operating system could have advanced productivity applications by a decade. Were the business people at the time so insane to shell out 5000 more dollars for a shittier computer because they thought multimedia capability made a computer "toy like"?

Sure, it lacked a "real" text mode. Which is irrelevant as the CGA/monochrome green screen monitors of the IBM PCs made reading text literally painful. Amiga was capable of high resolution modes and well readable text.

At that time, Amiga was even superior in raw power. Even the 7.09 Mhz 68k was faster than the 6 Mhz 286 in the super-expensive AT and definitely faster than the crippled 4.77 Mhz 8088.

m1so wrote:

I think US, while it has 110 V, has a higher current so it is not really much less dangerous than 220-240 V.

That's not how it works.

The resistance determines how much current flows at a given voltage.

Current = Voltage / Resistance.

So if the resistance is the same (fillosaurus in both tests 😀, then the current would be half as strong with 110V compared to 220V.