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by WalterBright 3671 days ago
The clone business began in 1983 and was well established by 1985. The DEC Rainbow was introduced in 1982, and it failed largely because it required special floppy disks that were deliberately different from MS-DOS disks in order to force people to pay a premium for the disks. The Rainbow was literally laughed at by DEC junkies that I knew.

I was using clones at the time I bought an Amiga, using commodity hardware, and nothing would interoperate with the Amiga.

I bought the Amiga intending to invest a lot of time and effort developing compilers for it. After I discovered its compatibility problems, I knew it would never succeed and was not going to invest in it. If DEC couldn't succeed with its pointlessly incompatible Rainbow, how could Amiga?

DEC did eventually fix the Rainbow, but by then its bad reputation was irretrievably lost. The DEC aficionados who had been holding out for a DEC PC had thrown in the towel and given up on DEC.
2 comments
gherkin0 3670 days ago
The IBM clone business existed by 1985, but not "commodity hardware" in the modern sense.

Like someone else said, the Macintosh was released at about the same time, was both IBM-incompatible and Apple II-incompatible, and it managed to succeed. The Amiga wasn't doomed because it did not use IBM-style keyboards or IBM-formatted disks or whatever.

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brudgers 3671 days ago
The Apple product line had many of the same attributes as the Amiga.
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WalterBright 3671 days ago
Apple predated the IBM PC revolution. And as I mentioned before, Microsoft did Apple a huge favor by making the Z80 Softcard.
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brudgers 3671 days ago
The Amiga 1000 had the sidecar and the 2000 had the bridgeboard. Each had multiple ISA slots. The first time I saw Windows, it was Version 2.0 on an A2000.

To me, that seems like more hardware compatibility than a Mac or II.

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WalterBright 3671 days ago
Wikipedia suggests the sidecar didn't do well because it was bulky and expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Sidecar

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brudgers 3671 days ago
It was also fairly rare. Not all that surprising since Amiga 1000's were never abundant in the wild, at least for a consumer/hobbyist targeted system. Appeal depended on a mullet like "business in the front, party in the back" intersection. Such were those days.
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