| Why should I care? I wasn't interested in drawing pictures or playing games. I was interested in exploring programming on something that wasn't as horribly constrained as my previous machines -- 3 different Z80 powered boxes. (Sinclair Spectrum, SAM Coupé, Amstrad PCW 9512). I had a choice of editors. I had BBC BASIC and a compiler. I had Obey scripts to explore OS scripting. I also could get hold of C, Pascal, and a few other compilers, but most of them were too expensive. I could declare arrays that took a meg of RAM. Or, declare a RAMdisk and then put frames of short videos in it, then experiment with compressing and decompressing them, and later save the results to HDD or floppy. I didn't want a gaming machine with some graphics apps, even if it could emulate a different 68K box that was so expensive that its apps cost as much as the entire computer I was sitting in front of. I am not saying your use case was not valid for you, but it wasn't even something of interest for me to explore. I didn't, and still don't, care about drawing pictures. I'm quite interested in learning how to generate pictures, though. You're presenting these things as drawbacks for the Archie and advantages for the Miggy. They're not. Those are absolutes. The stuff you describe are selling points for particular target markets... and some of the Archie's tools in related, overlapping markets were highly competitive. Impression and Ovation for DTP, Sibelius for musical notation. An offshoot of ArtWorks was sold by Corel for a while and it's still on sale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Designer_Pro%2B It is very much not fair to make out the Archie platform had no apps. It did, and some of the biggest names made it onto other platforms. Some are still on sale today. https://www.xara.com/ https://www.avid.com/sibelius But I didn't care about them on RISC OS myself then and I don't now because that's not an area of interest for me. Still, they exist, and they are competitive. |