[trm42]

It feels that Apple gathered around the creative professionals needing computers and Commodore 64 and Amigas gathered all the future creative professionals that affected game and software for long time. So even when the prices were less than others and Commodore was dead before mid-90s, its (low price:) impact can be still felt within the industry.

And it's so amazing that both C64 and Amigas are still kept alive by new and old skoolers.

[pjmlp]

In those years, there was no Apple in Europe, only ZX Spectrums dominating in Portugal, Spain and UK, with Commodore taking the rest of the continent, followed by Amiga and Atari, then PC took it all during the mid-1990's.

The first time I saw a Macintosh for real, it was when I got into the university, where there was a tiny department with a couple of LC models, and our department had a few additional ones. However they also had enough money to buy a couple of NeXT Cubes.

Outside the university there was no one with them, and until the raise from the ashes, the only place you could get them was at one single store in Lisbon that served the whole country.

[thorin]

Yes, I never saw any Apple in Europe either (specifically UK). On the educational side BBC was king in the UK, so parents who were teachers would prefer the BBC, which had a great version of Elite too and a lot of the text adventures, but not so many action games.

From my memory of getting a Vic 20 then a ZX Spectrum +3 there was a pretty even split of Commodore and Spectrum machines among my friends. There were LOTS of other machines too, Atari, Oric, Amstrad, Tandy (Radio Shack) in the early days.

Although I had a mouse and a drawing program for the Spectrum the computers for creatives in the UK didn't really take off until the Amiga and Atari ST with their awesome sound and graphics packages.

[trm42]

There were Macintoshes here and there at least in Finland where I live. Saw first Mac in 1989 or 90 and did see them here and there but they were not common household items.

C64 was kind of a national computer for the 80s but there were others as well and Macs were used in the DTP and graphics circles a lot and sometimes one could find them in schools as well but as I said, they were quite high end and adult/work oriented compared to the inexpensive home computers like Commodores, Ataris and sometimes even PCs.

Funnily in Finland there were home computer magazines which basically ignored the existence of Macs for most of the time except there was one, seprate Mac magazine. Probably because the advertising segment was targeted to DTP professionals etc.

[pjmlp]

Computer Shopper alternative platforms section was my only way to get to know Archimedes, pity I never got to actually use one.

[zwieback]

My dad bought an Apple ][ in Germany around 83, they were spendy but readily available and there was a huge fanbase. C64s were more popular with gamers and considered the high end of the toy range, inexplicably, since the HW was ahead of the Apple in a lot of ways.

[SavantIdiot]

Amigas were the go-to machine for electronic arts majors / digital MFAs in the late 1980's. Amiga had some crazy video editing software that blew everything else away. The dedicated hardware and HAM palettes were already 4096 colors @ NTSC and anti aliasing when PCs were still struggling with VGA at 320x200x8.

[LocalH]

PCs eventually outstripped the Amiga, sadly. The major benefit of standard VGA was the 256 color LUT in use and the chunky addressing - while the Amiga caught up in terms of color count with AGA (which also extended HAM to HAM8, maxing out at 262,144 colors), it was still a planar video memory architecture, requiring up to 8 separate writes to change the same pixel that the PC could do with one write. This greatly impacted the Amiga's ability to run software "3D" engines like the ones you'd find in Wolf 3D or later Doom, which were all the rage back then. Even adding a chunky-to-planar chip in the CD32 didn't help as much as they'd hoped.

I say this as a massive Amiga fan, so I'm not shitting on the platform, just recognizing its shortfalls.

[DerekL]

Commodore should have been updating their custom chips at a much faster rate. The AGA should have been ready in 1988 or 1989, and the blitter should have been four times faster instead of twice as fast. I don't know if the problem was lack of investment, or what.

[eggy]

Video Toaster - a great piece of hardware/software! I had a Vic-20, C64, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and an Amiga 2000 with the Toaster. They were fun times indeed! I had friends doing commercial video work with them, and others doing "multi-media" art with that setup.

[soylentcola]

Yep, and the same company makes TriCasters now (one of which we have in our little university video production studio).