[criddell]

> « he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

> That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari. Their relevance hung on in a couple of niche areas (like Atari with musicians), but outside of hobbyists, neither company mattered much and by 1995 they were both essentially dead from a commercial perspective. The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.

[spankibalt]

> It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari.

I got the same impression from the German trade press in 1991, which emphasized the openness, adaptability and standardization of the whole PC platform. I've learned a long time ago that the way to the truth is the way "through the archives"... anecdotes only go so far, and many markets differed wildly, even locally. In my personal circle in big city East Germany, the PC reigned supreme; Amigas were virtually nonexistant, albeit the machines being a huge hit in Germany, especially in the West. For us Easterners most of that can be traced back to accumulated pre-Wende experience with two main general-purpose computing platforms: Z80- as well as x86-machines (clones).

And I've yet to read a thorough, balanced, and clear-eyed comparative analysis of the Amiga and PC (as well as other) platforms, i. e. one that includes some serious market analysis.

[spankibalt]

> The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.

Bit harsh, lol. And you invited agriculture poetry! Albeit I've heard that many an old school Amiga lifer rejects those "Neomigas" (e. g. the Apollos) for one reason or another. Me, I liken these classics to music instruments, with their own specific capabilities and mythos, etc.

I often pondered about getting one of them, but I've just too much x86 poison in my veins. And putting a Vortex86 board or somesuch into an A600 case is just sacrilege. What would I give for a classy 32- bit x86 keyboard case computer...

[lproven]

> the corpses are kept upright as open source projects

I think you are looking at this not merely wrongly, but in reverse.

Gradually the PC compatible has paved over the entirety of desktop/laptop computing. It's like a farm: ripping out hedgerows, blasting with fertiliser and weedkillers and pesticides, trying to kill those pesky things stealing the land.

Those chemicals have turned the innocent IBM PC, a half-8-bit half-16-bit low-end box, into this vasty computing colossus, a mile across, chewing through kilotons of work and emitting heat and work.

And yet, all over that farm, in the wheel-ruts and in the cracks beside the farm buildings, a few of the weeds just keep on growing.

The men in suits have tried SO very hard to exterminate them and they just will not die.

And yet, if you raise your head and look outside the mega-farm, they are everywhere. Outside the farmland, where it's too steep to farm: vast forests of weird twisty weeds turned into trees.

In people's pockets (phones). By the sofa (tablets). In their cars and cookers and hearing aids and pacemakers. Tiny Archimedes, everywhere: Arm chips, outselling all x86 by hundreds to one.

Weird little CPU architectures, weird RTOSes and router OSes.

They cannot kill those weeds, however hard they try, and despite all their efforts, there will always be more weeds than crops.