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by ZFH
871 days ago
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Those prices are not what I remember from back then, at least in Europe. Comparable 386 and 486 PCs cost way, way more than an Amiga 500 or later 1200 respectively. The filfre.net Digital Antiquarian articles on the Commodore/Amiga history are incredibly well researched, and paint a more comprehensive, nuanced version of the usual 'mismanaged to death' narrative. There is a very cogent insight that I first read there, that roughly goes as this: the Amiga architecture of a 2D oriented console-style custom chipset was badly suited for the gradual transition from coding to the bare metal to having an OS managing the hardware, accessed through APIs. Keeping up would've meant a complete reinvention of the platform and its ethos, with a much bigger push on OS development, not only the next hot chipset. Commodity, standardized hardware running Windows ultimately got good enough and won. And as someone else remarked, +1 on Wing Commander, and later the golden era Lucasarts adventures, being the actual beginning of the end. |
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You most likely remember bare Amiga 500 price versus loaded brand name system. Here a comparison from 1994: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851056 :
>Commodore didnt bother to build fast ram memory controller into the thing. You couldnt just slap some simms or ram chips on a card, you needed additional logic. Cheapest contemporary Fast Ram cards were ~100 pounds + ~30 pounds a meg, half the cost of 270 pound Amiga A1200 in 1994.
>A1200 bare system £276 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo...
>4-8MB fast ram £200-400 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n49/mo...
>340MB £380 pounds https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n28/mo...
>14 multisync monitor ~£320 https://archive.org/details/cuamiga-magazine-050/page/n52/mo...
>~£1200-1400. 1994 £/$ exchange rate 1.55 = $1860-2170.
>Now compare to 1994 PC https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/7235w0/the_sp...
>486dx2-66mhz, 256KB cache, 8MB, 1.44MB fdd, 350MB HDD, SVGA monitor/card, keyboard/mouse. $1840