[bartread]

> Amiga made lots of assumptions about the use that ended up tuning it well to platform games and NTSC video editing, but nothing else.

I think certainly it was used mostly as a games machine by most owners, but then again so was the Atari ST (at least amongst my cohort at school).

As for tuning it well to games and video editing but nothing else... I don't agree.

For a long time an Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM expansion and a 24 pin dot matrix printer was my main and only computer, and I did everything on it: word processing, CAD, music, graphics. It got me through both GCSEs and A-levels: all my coursework was written on it, all my compositions were done with MED and OctaMED, all the code for my maths courseworks was written on it, all the design work for my technology project, every essay, etc., and so it goes on. I was even still using it somewhat at university into the late 1990s as I didn't have the cash for a PC.

You could do a lot with an Amiga, and there was a lot of software available to do all of it, along with plenty of hardware peripherials. The software side of things, well a huge library of applications in every category came within reach for cash strapped users later on when loads of formerly expensive software was being given away on magazine coverdisks. Sadly that also coincided with the decline[0] of the platform.

Of course, I played games as well: who wouldn't?

All of this you could also do on an Atari ST, although I'd argue that the Amiga had the better operating system. Regardless, it was all also basically unthinkable in any really serious sense on (most of) the previous generation of 8-bit machines.

I think people are too quick to write off the 16-bit home machines of the late 80s and early 90s as toys when, in fact, by the standards of the time they were both powerful and affordable general purpose computers.

[0] I won't say death because there's still a hardcore of dedicated users keeping the platform alive, as also for the ST.

[TacticalCoder]

> For a long time an Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM expansion and a 24 pin dot matrix printer was my main and only computer ...

Same, with the dot-matrix printer too. I'd update and print my D&D character page on it. Kickstart 1.2 and 1.3 ROM switch mod. I also had a not-so-common 5"1/4 drive (but not the ultra-rare official Commodore one): just a a 5"1/4 drive used instead of the 3"1/2 stock one. The reasons being: 5"1/4 floppies were so much cheaper than 3"1/2 ones that after something silly like 40 floppies, the drive had paid for itself. And we had many games (sorry, backups). So many backups.

> All of this you could also do on an Atari ST, although I'd argue that the Amiga had the better operating system.

The better OS and the much better co-processors. The ST however had the MIDI port so the cool dudes back then would hook up their MOOG synths to Atari STs, not Amigas.

Also the ST had the game "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy", from FTL (the company that'd then go on and make Dungeon Master). Legends. For whatever reason the Amiga didn't have Sundog: The Frozen Legacy.

I'd do everything on my Amiga except play Sundog (I'd go the neighbors' house for that) and play Ultima IV and Ultima V (the C64 version was much better than the Amiga version, so I had an old C128D to play the Ultimas).

[rbanffy]

The Amiga’s heavy focus on TV-friendly timings went deep into the specialised chips to a point it was difficult to upgrade without losing compatibility. Because of that lack of modularity Commodore had to spend more resources to develop improved machines than its competitors. It was not an obvious mistake then, and it’s not clear now what they could have done to better compete with PCs and Macs.

They could have made much simpler “productivity Amigas” with plain VGA-like graphics to leverage its non gaming software market, at the expense of only having minimal graphics and sound support. There was, IIRC, one, made by a third party that lacked the Amiga chipset, but running the Amiga OS. If they could push something as cheap to make as a Mac LC, they’d have a much more attractive offering for businesses.

[amiga386]

I think you're missing the elephant in the room. The IBM PC existed. That was it, that's all that mattered. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. Every computer for "business" collapsed because the IBM PC was here.

Macs only survived to the 1990s by hiding from the PC in a desktop publishing niche. Amigas and Ataris survived as games machines with multimedia capabilities. An Amiga that could not run Amiga games would basically be a Sun workstation. Businesses wanted IBM PCs.

Also, the "compatibility" was a two-way street. Amiga games banged the hardware directly and did amazing things on hardware of the time because of it, but that meant hardware-level compatibility for anything which came next otherwise it'd be the Amiga that couldn't run Amiga games. MacOS software was told not to touch hardware directly but go through the OS, and they did that, and thus all MacOS software was slow and ugly, and Apple still jettisoned compatibility anyway once they moved into the 1990s and started changing underlying hardware to PowerPC.

There's always the hypothetical that Commodore could have continued, but what really got them was that the nature of games changed. 3D was in, and they were still pushing 1980s arcade machine tricks. They weren't even thinking in that direction when along game Wolfenstein and DOOM pushing chunky pixels to VGA mode X, and the Playstation was just around the corner. I don't think just having a faster CPU, "VGA" and trying to appeal to business would have cut the mustard.

[abanana]

True, but "Amiga made lots of assumptions about the use that ended up..." seemed an odd way to phrase it, given that it was originally designed as a games machine, although the plans were expanded later in development.

As I understand it, its custom chips were a brilliantly clever solution to a problem that existed at the time. It couldn't be called a mistake, because they couldn't see into the future. As a games machine, the Amiga ended up hamstrung by those same custom chips because they weren't the right architecture for Doom and all the 3D games that followed it. That made no difference to its productivity software though, did it?

[rbanffy]

> That made no difference to its productivity software though, did it?

If you build productivity software you’ll prioritise platforms sold for businesses. If most of the units are sold to be used mostly for gaming, your target market gets very small.

[Tommix11]

I began my career as a graphic designer on the Amiga and Deluxe Paint series.