Scali wrote:

NL. […]
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sf78 wrote:

May I ask where you live?

NL.

sf78 wrote:

Absolutely EVERYONE had an A500 back in the day.

Not here.
Before I got my Amiga, I only knew two other people who had one. After I got mine, a few more of my friends got one as well, but most stuck to PCs.

sf78 wrote:

When you look at the demo compos from ASM 92-95 you can see Amiga dominating the field in most categories.

But that is not representative of marketshare (heck, I'm member of DESiRE myself, which is a Dutch Amiga demogroup). As I said, the Amiga was the sweetheart of programmers. Goes both for game programmers and democoders (back then the difference wasn't very large anyway).

Think it also depends where you lived in the Netherlands. i live near nijmegen, and back then it was 50-50 between amiga and pc. Though most people where still using they're c64 or msx computer.
I went to a computerclub and the first years the amiga group used the big room and the pc guys the small hallway. A few years later it was the other way arround.

Most of the tech which has fascinated me over the years DIDN'T flop, so I have little to say on this thread... with ONE exception: 3D Shutter Glasses.

Back in 2001, Mom and I had a computer built under the distinct notion that I would be taking it with me if and when I finally moved out into the world on my own (which I did in mid-2002), so I was picking a lot of components which made the most sense to me. One of the ones I picked for a GPU was a GeForce 2 card that came with 3D shutter glasses, and we had also picked out a 120 Hz 17" flat CRT (though I quickly found out that 120 Hz could only work up to 640x480, then the maximum Hz steadily dropped off down to 60 Hz at 1280x1024). Not only did I find the notion of having shutter glasses cool, but the card was also very decently priced so I figured why not?

As a result of experiencing 3D in gaming so early in life, it came as no surprise to me that the modern 3D gimmick with TVs didn't really catch on. The experience itself is fun, it's just when 3D requires you to do something inconvenient to experience it, it cannot ever leave the realm of gimmicky because it becomes an inconvenience to use the feature, thus people stop using it. Indeed, I ultimately did stop using my shutter glasses when I realized just how hard it made it to see certain things or even just to aim weapons in a game, not to mention having to play at lower resolutions to avoid severe flickering.

I'll still go to see the occasional movie in 3D, but only because I'm with someone else who wants to see it that way, or because the non-3D options are at inconvenient times. It gets worse with 3D TV because the glasses are usually wireless and thus have to be charged when not in use. The 3DS ALMOST managed to bring 3D out of the gimmicky realm, but because you'd have to hold it in a particular way to see the effect, and because it ran the batteries down faster, it again stayed as a gimmick. (And I do mean JUST the 3D effect, not the 3DS as a whole.)

...speaking of, I've still never used a 3DS in person yet... I do intend to get one someday...

realnc wrote:

Because it's 1-way communication. You can only receive and not send. If you fail to receive a few bytes, the data becomes useless. With 2-way communication you can request re-transmission.

Not necessarily - you could put a sim slot in tvs (or have a USB 3g modem or direct internet connection) for a backchannel easily. You could potentially offload things like netflix from the internet entirely.

Except when data over TV was a thing, cell phones were really only for the rich, we definitely weren't to the point of embedding a cellular radio in everything.

Scali wrote:

But that is not representative of marketshare (heck, I'm member of DESiRE myself, which is a Dutch Amiga demogroup). As I said, the Amiga was the sweetheart of programmers. Goes both for game programmers and democoders (back then the difference wasn't very large anyway).

By my calculations every 10th household in Sweden/Finland had Amiga, no PC came even close. Also Germany was big (and UK). That pretty much covers all the major areas with large government support for IT at home, schools and work. Then again, NL was notorious for it's MSX fan base so maybe that explains something. 😁

bhtooefr wrote:

Except when data over TV was a thing, cell phones were really only for the rich, we definitely weren't to the point of embedding a cellular radio in everything.

Modems did exist - it didn't have to be cellular (the dreamcast had a modem inbuilt - and that was 1998, 17 years ago). Packet radio was another option for a backchannel too.

There were a few tech demos on shows like the computer chronicles (might have been satellite based) - plus even some (much older) tv computer shows had bits where you'd manually connect a cassette recorder or special transcoder to download a program.

Even without a backchannel it's possible with CRC error correction and retransmission - a bit like how files on newsgroups work.

The main barrier to datacasting (in Australia) was regulatory - not tech.

sf78 wrote:

By my calculations every 10th household in Sweden/Finland had Amiga, no PC came even close.

Then I think it's a combination of high Amiga rate and low PC rate in Sweden/Finland.
Over here, PC sales were quite big since around 1988 or so.

sf78 wrote:

Then again, NL was notorious for it's MSX fan base so maybe that explains something. 😁

I only knew one person who had an MSX though. So it's very relative I guess.
We may have had a relatively large amount of MSX users (probably because Philips was one of the big MSX brands, and Philips is Dutch), but still they were insignificant.
I know of only two types of computers that most people had (often even when they also had other machines), and that's the C64 and the PC-clones.

Here are mine:

Floptical drives and discs

Minidisc

Amiga computers --- This is sort of a qualified flop: they should have been immensely successful but Commodore's bad decisions did them in, and the PC steamroller didn't help things. They also didn't have the success in the US that they had worldwide. I think I only ever met 2 guys in the US that had Amigas, one I knew in highschool and the other I met in college. The 1980s Amiga was seriously about 10 years ahead of its time.

snorg wrote:

Amiga computers --- This is sort of a qualified flop: they should have been immensely successful but Commodore's bad decisions did them in, and the PC steamroller didn't help things. They also didn't have the success in the US that they had worldwide. I think I only ever met 2 guys in the US that had Amigas, one I knew in highschool and the other I met in college. The 1980s Amiga was seriously about 10 years ahead of its time.

Growing up, I had an Apple IIe while my brother went the Atari 400->800->800XL->ST->Amiga path. So he was the only one I knew that had any of those systems. The people I knew had either Apple II's, or early x86 PCs. I had ONE friend who had a Commodore 64.

We both transitioned from our respective platforms to the PC at close to the same time. My first PC was a Packard Bell 386sx-20 and shortly after he moved to a 486 platform. It was sad to leave our "oddball" platforms behind. I'm especially sad that I donated my Apple IIe to my old elementary school. I doubt they got more than 1-2 years out of it because it was at the end of the Apple II era anyhow. I wish I hung onto it, as that would have been the ultimate retro rig today. 😀

snorg wrote:

Amiga computers --- This is sort of a qualified flop: they should have been immensely successful

So, mostly, people are citing how successful the Amiga could have been rather than how successful it actually was. When you consider the sheer variety of personal computers since their inception, how many make the 'success' list? Because I think all the evidence out there is puts the A500 on it. Ignore the C64 or pretend Commodore didn't make both machines because it can't be said the Amiga was a flop because it didn't outsell it's predecessor. Ask anyone older than 30 and who hasn't been living under a rock if they've heard of the Amiga and they will say yes.

Or read the ars technica article on the history of personal computing:

http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share

The A500 counts as a success with gaming. The PC obviously dominated in the other areas. But for computer games, there were basically two things back then, Amiga and Atari. Or C64 for people with a low budget.

How much support did the Archimedes computer get? THAT was a flop. The Amiga being a flop is simply an insane statement.

realnc wrote:

Or read the ars technica article on the history of personal computing: […]
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Or read the ars technica article on the history of personal computing:

http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share

The A500 counts as a success with gaming. The PC obviously dominated in the other areas. But for computer games, there were basically two things back then, Amiga and Atari. Or C64 for people with a low budget.

How much support did the Archimedes computer get? THAT was a flop. The Amiga being a flop is simply an insane statement.

Perhaps that was a poor choice then, I have a great deal of respect for the Amiga systems and often wish in hindsight that I had bought one instead of trying to make a 286 PC into something with similar capabilities, back in the day.

You have to admit they were rare in North America and particularly the US, though.

Lightscribe.

No DVD9 media and no color held this back, and decent writers supporting it were gradually less available

kreats wrote:

datacasting

The thought of connecting up a PC to an antenna & downloading stuff through via the TV signal is a pretty neat thing even now.

Teletext I suppose was the prototype - but why did we never go further than this?

Well, for a short time one German station broadcasted an MP3 stream in the blanking interval instead of teletext. Obviously you needed a TV card and their software.
IIRC it the streaming broadcast was called Raadio MP3.

realnc wrote:

But for computer games, there were basically two things back then, Amiga and Atari. Or C64 for people with a low budget.

This doesn't include game consoles though, where especially the NES sold much better.
Also, most people were in the 'low budget' category, with C64 eclipsing Amiga and Atari ST easily.
Also, PC was most certainly a third option for games. Sure, technically it was not that advanced, but a lot of people played games on them anyway.

leileilol wrote:

Lightscribe.

No DVD9 media and no color held this back, and decent writers supporting it were gradually less available

That's a good one!

And it's really, really slow.

I've used it for demo CDs for my band. This is actually the reason I have three DVD drives in my main computer - one for burning the CD very slowly, two for the Lightscribe label.

The DVDRW in my Core2 Duo is LightScribe, iirc. I should still have a disc for it, never actually tried 😀

Scali wrote:

Also, PC was most certainly a third option for games. Sure, technically it was not that advanced, but a lot of people played games on them anyway.

Usually low-end PC's without a soundcard cost double that of basic Amiga/Atari models. I'm pretty sure Red Baron and WC1 were the only things PC gamers of the early 90's could really boast about (I know I did). I remember playing mostly CGA/EGA games in early -91 as those were the most common ones around. Amiga games like Persian Gulf Inferno just blew your mind when you first heard the digitized speech/effects with smooth scrolling and animation.

sf78 wrote:

Scali wrote:

Also, PC was most certainly a third option for games. Sure, technically it was not that advanced, but a lot of people played games on them anyway.

Usually low-end PC's without a soundcard cost double that of basic Amiga/Atari models. I'm pretty sure Red Baron and WC1 were the only things PC gamers of the early 90's could really boast about (I know I did). I remember playing mostly CGA/EGA games in early -91 as those were the most common ones around. Amiga games like Persian Gulf Inferno just blew your mind when you first heard the digitized speech/effects with smooth scrolling and animation.

Played persian gulf inferno a lot at my friends place. He had a amiga, i a pc. But for gaming we always played at his place. Great times. I convinced my friend to get his amiga from the loft and now he has put it on the desk and plays it again.

sf78 wrote:

Usually low-end PC's without a soundcard cost double that of basic Amiga/Atari models.

That didn't matter.
Firstly, as I mentioned before, a lot of people could buy their old office PC from work (or even get it for free), when they were replaced with newer PCs.
Secondly, a lot of people wanted a PC at home, so they could also work from home (they needed PC compatibility), and the higher prices was not that much of an issue. In fact, in various cases, part of the machine was paid for by the company or even the state (in NL we had what was known as the "PC-Privé" project).