[flomo]

Yeah, I just posted that a lot of that software was amazing and pretty 'feature-complete', all while running on a very limited old personal conmputers.

Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.

[Gormo]

The Amiga had huge success outside of "teenage gamers", even if in niche markets. Amigas were extremely important in TV and video production throughout the 1990s. I remember a local Amiga repair shop in South Florida that stayed in business until about 2007, mainly by servicing Amigas still in service in the local broadcast industry -- all of the local cable providers in particular had loads of them, since they were used for the old Prevue Guide listings, along with lots of other stuff.

[pjmlp]

Goes both ways, Mac was hardly something to write home about outside US, and they did not follow Commodore footsteps into bankruptcy out of sheer luck.

[anthk]

The Mac was just an expensive toy for people working on different media. No one used it at home, even less at school. Ever.

[anthk]

The Mac didn't exist in Europe except for expensive A/V production machines and the printing world (books, artists, movie posters, covers and the like).

If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.

[lproven]

> The Mac didn't exist in Europe

That is absolutely not a valid generalisation.

I worked on Macs from the start of my career in 1988. They were the standard computer for state schools in education here in the Isle of Man in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Isle of Man's national travel company ran on a Mac database, Omnis, and later moved to Windows to keep using Omnis.

It's still around:

https://www.omnis.net/

I supported dozens of Mac-using clients in London through the 1990s and they were the standard platform in some businesses. Windows NT Server had good MacOS support from the very first version, 3.1, and Macs could access Windows NT Server shares over the built-in Appleshare client, and store Mac files complete with their Resource Forks on NTFS volumes. From 1993 onwards this made mixed Mac/PC networks much easier.

I did subcontracted Mac support for a couple of friends of mine's consultancy businesses because they were Windows guys and didn't "speak Mac".

Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.

Macs were always there.

Maybe you didn't notice but they always were. Knowing PC/Mac integration was a key career skill for me, and the rise of OS X made the classic MacOS knowledge segue into more general Unix/Windows integration work.

Some power users defected to Windows NT between 1993 and 2001 but then it reversed and grew much faster: from around 2001, PowerMacs started to become a credible desktop workstation for power users because of OS X. From 2006, Macintel boxes became more viable in general business use because the Intel chips meant you could run Windows in a VM at full speed for one or two essential Windows apps. They ran IE natively and WINE started to make OS X feasible for some apps with no need for a Windows licence.

In other words, the rise of OS X coincided with the rise of Linux as a viable server and GUI workstation.

[pjmlp]

In Portugal there was only one single shop for the whole country, Interlog, located in Lisbon.

Wanted to get a Mac, needed to travel there, or order by catalogue, from magazine ads.

On my university there were about 5 LCs on a single room for students use, while the whole campus was full of PCs, and UNIX green/amber phosphor terminals to DG/UX rooms, on all major buildings.

Besides that single room, there were two more on the IT department, and that was about it.

When Apple was going down, between buying Be or NeXT as last survival decision, the fate of the university keeping those Macs around was being discussed.

[anthk]

>Yes, they were very strong in print, graphics, design, photography, etc. but not only in those markets. Richer types used them as home computers. I also worked on Macs in the music and dance businesses and other places.

So, A/V production, something I said too. My point still stands. Macs in Europe were seen as something fancy for media production people and that's it. Something niche for the arts/press/TV/cinema world.

[lproven]

Nope. Wrong. My own extensive personal experience, travelling and working in multiple countries. Not true, never was.

Like I said, and you missed: but not only there.

People often mistake "Product A dominates in market B" -- meaning A outsells all others in B -- for "A only sells in market B."

Macs were expensive. Clone PCs were cheap. Yeah, cheap products outsell expensive ones. Doesn't mean that the expensive ones are some kind of fancy designer brand only used by the idle rich.

[anthk]

Yes, it was. I'm from Spain. The Macs where for media people, not for the common worker on a boring office, where MS dominated. At home, Macs where a thing maybe for some rounding percent from kids living in a loaded neighbour.

No one got Macs at school either. First DOS, then Windows 95/98. Maybe in some Universities they used Macbooks well into the OSX era, as a reliable Unix machine to compile legacy scientific stuff; and even in those environments GNU/Linux began to work perfectly well recompiling everything from Sparcs and the like with a much cheaper price.

Forget about pre-OSX machines in Spain outside of a newspaper/publishing/AV producing office. Also, by the time XP and 2000 were realiable enough against OSX (w9x was hell) that OS was replaced for much cheaper PC alternatives.

I mean, if w2k/wxp could handle big loads without BSODing every few hours, that was a success. And as the Pentium 4's with SSE2 and Core Duo's happened, suddenly G4's and G'5 weren't that powerful any more.

[lproven]

So, not a conspicuously wealthy country, then?

Whereas I lived (and am back, sadly) in an offshore tax haven.

The rich used Macs. Musicians used Macs. They were not some dedicated tool only found in certain places. Entire industries, big important industries, ran on them.

What killed Commodore and Atari was that in the end although they had niches, they didn't conquer whole sectors.

This is why Sinclair Research tried to push into the business market with the QL. Sir Clive knew that the home/games sector was about thin margins and price battles, while in rich America, you could get fat on it, you can't in Europe.

He carved out an early niche as the cheapest home computers that were good enough and were competitive, but it was low-margin/high-unit-count.

The business market will pay for good tools. Bits of it paid extra for Macs for decades because they were good at some things.

That is a viable long-term market: "the best cheap home computer for the money" is not.

[2000UltraDeluxe]

Amiga was big in Europe. No doubt they were slow though; most computers of the time were.