Well, not all "winmodems" (I prefer the term "softmodem") were bad. It depended on the quality of the implementation. These were more like software modem emulators rather than real modems, and as such how well they worked depended on how well written the emulation was. I had a bunch of such modems, and some of them were crap, while a few were actually very solid and never caused any issues.

sf78 wrote:

Yeah, I know. My mom got a "free" IBM 386sx from her work place to use at home and they paid the whole damn thing. It came with […]
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Scali wrote:

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 […]
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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).

Yeah, I know. My mom got a "free" IBM 386sx from her work place to use at home and they paid the whole damn thing. It came with DOS 3.3, WP 5.1, Win 3.1 etc. The thing is, you could've had 3 Amigas for the cost of this one computer that wasn't good at gaming (no sound card), or much of anything really, except some light office work. People that went with Amiga/Atari got a computer that was ready (out of the box) to play games, make music, draw etc. without any extra effort.

I can't complain though, I had both A500 and (my moms) PC to play with, but there was no question Amiga was superior in all but the most demanding simulators when you compared it to you average PC. Not to mention numerous Demo's that where the shit back then! MOD music, Deluxe Paint....things that PC gamers could only dream about. Using a home computer back then was so much more than just showing of your latest hardware. If you DIDN'T own an A500 in the early 90's you were nothing, a sad PC speaker listening loser still playing Alley Cat. Even up to '94 it was still the best platform for music and demo's. as was painfully clear at ASM'94 when it came down to seeing if a Doom crunching 486's could spin a donut. 😘

I'm sure there were many countries where Amiga wasn't a huge success, but calling it a flop is just plain nuts.

Hey man, I'll have you know I was listening to tunes via my 8 bit soundblaster
in the 90s 😉. I did wish after seeing my friend's Amiga 500 that I had spent
my $500 on an Amiga instead of a barebones 286, though. Even after
upgrading to VGA it was a bit "meh". Going from Tandy 16 color to CGA was
a real step back for sure.

Amiga was very well known back in its Amiga 500 days. Everyone I knew, knew what an Amiga 500 was. To me they seemed a similar flop compared to 3DFX (and the question is, how 'floppy' are they?).

kreats wrote:

2.88mb floppies - wouldn't call it fascination tho

To me they always were from the moment I first learned about them and it was a real pain finding the actual hardware, even back in the days the systems these were supposedly most frequently used in, were being disposed and noone cared about old computers in those days.

So even though the circumstances were much more favorable at finding these drives for a good price, I'd roughly guess that there was a 2.88MB PC floppy drive for 1000 of any of the other floppy drives. The vast majority of 2.88 floppy drives I did find, were the IBM ones (with those oversized blue eject buttons 😜). Even many of the sellers selling either new hardware or old hardware (or even both) had never even heard of 2.88 floppy drives and the ones that did, thought they were a purely IBM-hardware thingy.

Anyway, LS-120 also fascinated me, but it was really very slow 🤣! ZIP of course also fascinated me and was by far the easiest to find (followed by a distance by Superdisk, the others were virtually impossible to find), though many of the old drives were already clocked to death (I skipped buying all drives which had their read-write heads in odd angles, I checked with a bicyclelight 😜).

Minidisk also fascinated me, but I always wanted a data variant, but when that one finally came, I was hardly as interested in those anymore as I had much better alternatives by that time.

I kinda liked those 3.5in CDROM/DVD disks, always had wanted a 3.5in optical drive to be made, though I know there's not really any good economical reason to actually have build such drives.

There's probably more that I forgot about 😁

Tetrium wrote:

Amiga was very well known back in its Amiga 500 days. Everyone I knew, knew what an Amiga 500 was. To me they seemed a similar flop compared to 3DFX (and the question is, how 'floppy' are they?).

I would disagree.
3DFX was the absolute market leader at some point, and it destroyed most competitors almost overnight. WD/Paradise, Tseng Labs, Trident etc... They were wiped out almost immediately for not being able to keep up. Only ATi, Matrox and newcomer nVidia managed to survive the impact of 3DFX. The irony is that newcomer nVidia wiped out newcomer 3DFX only a few years later in almost exactly the same way as 3DFX did. So early models of VooDoo, great. Last models, flop (generally you speak of products anyway, not companies, when you talk about flops. Most successful companies still have had their share of flopped products. You can't win them all).

My point is that although the Amiga was known and loved by 'connoisseurs' for its capabilities, it never dominated the market of home/personal computers, and eventually Commodore went out of business, because of their products being a commercial (not technical) failure.

Scali wrote:

My point is that although the Amiga was known and loved by 'connoisseurs' for its capabilities, it never dominated the market of home/personal computers, and eventually Commodore went out of business, because of their products being a commercial (not technical) failure.

If you're talking about the global market, then you might have a point. Then again, when Amiga started to gain momentum in 89/90 the home computer market had already peaked. So it would be better to say Amiga dominated what was left of the market before PC took over. I mean, there really weren't many options in the early 90's if you wanted to play the best games as cheaply as possible. Atari had a much smaller following after game companies switched to Amiga so that option was also gone by -91.

sf78 wrote:

If you're talking about the global market, then you might have a point. Then again, when Amiga started to gain momentum in 89/90 the home computer market had already peaked.

The Amiga was not just a home computer though. The Amiga 500 was a home computer. But the Amiga platform/technology went above and beyond there. Amiga 1000 and 2000 were business machines, and also offered PC compatibility. Hard to argue that they weren't aiming at the same market as other PC clones.
The Amiga platform was supposed to be a single solution for everything, much like what the PC eventually became, once it caught up with graphics and audio.

sf78 wrote:

So it would be better to say Amiga dominated what was left of the market before PC took over.

The fact that the PC took over means that all home computers around that time flopped. It's the same market: computers aimed at consumers.
PC wasn't even designed to be a home/game computer, wasn't priced to be a home/game computer, but apparently, it managed to make all home/game computers go out of business.

Scali wrote:

The fact that the PC took over means that all home computers around that time flopped. It's the same market: computers aimed at consumers.
PC wasn't even designed to be a home/game computer, wasn't priced to be a home/game computer, but apparently, it managed to make all home/game computers go out of business.

I would rephrase it as "The home computer market came to an end because the more powerul and cheaper IBM PC clones took over". It was just an end of an era. The whole 16-bit home computer was a pretty short lived thing. I wouldn't mix the A500 to A2000 as the first one was a consumer model and the later was aimed at a higher segment (ie. editing graphics/video, publishing etc.) closer to Apple computers. PC did have many advantages that explains the final victory. You could easily move data from home to work (and vice versa) and still use your home PC for gaming and what not. It combined both the business world and leisure activities like nothing before it.

sf78 wrote:

I would rephrase it as "The home computer market came to an end because the more powerul and cheaper IBM PC clones took over".

I don't. I think the home computer market is still a different market from the professional market, and requires different products (even today, you have home/consumer-oriented computers, then (semi-)professional ones, and finally workstation-class).

sf78 wrote:

I wouldn't mix the A500 to A2000

But we were talking about the Amiga platform as a whole. None of them survived.

sf78 wrote:

PC did have many advantages that explains the final victory. You could easily move data from home to work (and vice versa) and still use your home PC for gaming and what not.

This would never have happened if the Amiga was a success.
The Macintosh managed to cut out a niche for itself, even though it was released after the PC was, only shortly before the Amiga.
If the Amiga was more of a success, more people would also use it at work, and the argument of moving data would be moot, as it is with the Mac.

sf78 wrote:

It combined both the business world and leisure activities like nothing before it.

No it didn't.
When the Mac and Amiga were introduced, PC was completely hopeless for 'leisure activities'. Mac and Amiga could do business tasks as well or better than PCs (having a GUI, Amiga even having multitasking).
The problem was that especially the Amiga was lacking in software. Mac managed to cut out its own niches in tasks like DTP, Photoshop and even DAW for some time.

The PC as a machine had no advantages whatsoever, it only had disadvantages.
It's the ecosystem built by IBM, MS and others that eventually made it indispensable. Commodore should have done the same, but didn't (Apple did, they went to application developers, including Microsoft, to develop applications for their new Mac, even before the Mac was on the market). They were more like "If you build it, they will come". Pretty much what AMD is doing now. That obviously does not work.

I don't know if Acorn systems have been mentioned yet. I'm too lazy to look. Their systems incorporated a few nice features and early on in the piece pushed for risc systems for consumers, something there is an abundance of these days.

The Amiga A600( I have 2 of theses beasties) keyboard should've had a a proper numeric key pad.

Personally I had a lot of fun till the wee hours playing games on my 286/16(VGA, 4megs of ram, 210meg hdd along with the original 40meg one, thunder board sound card with speakers, joystick and mouse)so it wasn't all work and no play by any stretch of the imagination. From around 1991 onward there was a vast selection of games to choose from. Nice thing about it was the ease of upgrading if I wanted to.

My current 286/12 seems to be able to follow suite despite it's slimline form factor:

Scali wrote:

I would disagree. 3DFX was the absolute market leader at some point, and it destroyed most competitors almost overnight. WD/Para […]
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Tetrium wrote:

Amiga was very well known back in its Amiga 500 days. Everyone I knew, knew what an Amiga 500 was. To me they seemed a similar flop compared to 3DFX (and the question is, how 'floppy' are they?).

I would disagree.
3DFX was the absolute market leader at some point, and it destroyed most competitors almost overnight. WD/Paradise, Tseng Labs, Trident etc... They were wiped out almost immediately for not being able to keep up. Only ATi, Matrox and newcomer nVidia managed to survive the impact of 3DFX. The irony is that newcomer nVidia wiped out newcomer 3DFX only a few years later in almost exactly the same way as 3DFX did. So early models of VooDoo, great. Last models, flop (generally you speak of products anyway, not companies, when you talk about flops. Most successful companies still have had their share of flopped products. You can't win them all).

My point is that although the Amiga was known and loved by 'connoisseurs' for its capabilities, it never dominated the market of home/personal computers, and eventually Commodore went out of business, because of their products being a commercial (not technical) failure.

Nvm, I mixed up Amiga 500 and Amiga 600 😊