The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?

[The Amiga: Why did it fail so hard in the United States?]

On 1/27/2017 at 1:55 PM, Keatah said:

 

That was precisely my problem. During the weeks and months leading up to me getting the Amiga I rambled on about the processing power, the multi-chip custom chipset, the GUI, the whole package. I would have been THE perfect sale rep.

 

And then the bomb dropped. I bought the machine home, and tried desperately to impress my friends and even myself. I had like 1 or 2 commercial games, Marble Madness, and F/A 18 or something. And a couple of lame arcade game ports. I swear these ports could be written pixel for pixel, in BASIC, on a previous 8-bit machine. That bad. OR, perhaps, totally wasting what potential there was in the Amiga hardware.

 

I felt like a stage performer who had forgotten half the routine and was making stuff up impromptu. Nobody was laughing. And all I could do was push crap around on the desktop, show some hi-res pictures, and play some demoscene demos. Basically useless stuff. I was beginning to feel like I had been had.

 

And to make matters worse, my real work on the Apple II never transitioned smoothly to the new platform. And when it did, I couldn't find any application suitable for me. Word processing was actually smoother and faster on the II than this new state-of-the-art 16-bit rig.

 

The Amiga, unfortunately, didn't inspire my imagination with visions of science experiments and space travel. No space colonies, no fantasy lunar lander adventures. No astronomy or deep space adventures. Not like the Apple II and Atari 400/800 did.

 

I felt the Amiga had a lot of internal complexity and it was getting in the way of "pure processing". Simply too much excess baggage. And while a few years later I got an immensely more complex (by transistor count) 486 PC. I felt the PC was freewheeling. The processor power could be felt as 50MHz of number crunching force plowed through anything and everything. Fucking custom chipsets be damned. Do it in generic logic and software!

 

This is not a hate post. It is a post telling exactly how I recall and experienced the Amiga back in the day. If my experience was any different I would say so. The Amiga was good for one thing, for me, however. And that was the early paint programs in conjunction with digi-view digitizer. Not a game, not a wow! application. But quite intriguing to me at the time.

Late to the party, but true story here.  When I was a visual simulator engineer at the Johnson Space Center, I was asked to produce an icon tool bar to overlay at the top of the space shuttle (simulator) robotic control video monitors. So, the astronauts could view the (computer simulated) robotic arm through the monitors as they controlled the “arm” with a joy stick and selected operational functions from icons superimposed by the Amiga. Yup, around 1992, Amigas were part of the space shuttle simulator visual systems.  The package and support from Amiga (Commodore) were impressive. They provided C++ object libraries speeding the development of sprites and visual objects and the little computers were reliable.  Helping out the task of the object overlays was the availability of a side-car circuit board that provided a “green screen” effect; such that the Amiga would overlay visual objects over the shuttle simulator cargo bay video. This all worked really well. I don’t think Amiga marketing capitalized on this deployment one bit though