The reason the Amiga failed.

[Guest LiqMat]

Failure or not. Amiga had the most rabid fanbase of any platform that I experienced. More so than even the Apple cult. Some of my fondest childhood memories were at my local Amiga user group meetings. They were a blast in the mid 80s.

[JamesD]

Just so you can see my point on speed, have a look at machines by date.
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second

It's in MIPS which may or may not be a good comparison of speed depending on how it was measured.
The important thing to take away from this is how fast PC speeds ramped up after 1990.
It doesn't show all speed increments of various CPUs but it's the best info I could find.

If Amiga releases faster 68030s or 68040s they do ok up until the Pentium is released.
A 50MHz 68040 is similar speed to a 486DX2 at 66MHz.
After that, even the 50MHz 68060 is just behind a Pentium 66 in 1993... and the 68060 wasn't even released until 1994.
By 1996 the Pentium has had it's clock ramped up to 133MHz, the 68K has lost the processor war, and intel also introduced dual CPU systems that year.
Amiga has to migrated from 68K to another CPU or they are eventually done, but if the Amiga supports multiple CPUs, it might stay competitive until the migration is complete.

[high voltage]

Just so you can see my point on speed, have a look at machines by date.

http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second

 

 

Wow, website missing some more ads......

[JamesD]

Wow, website missing some more ads......

Sorry about that, it's pretty ugly without an adblocker. Popups, opening new windows, ads, ads, ads...

 

[Tonyvdb]

Failure or not. Amiga had the most rabid fanbase of any platform that I experienced. More so than even the Apple cult. Some of my fondest childhood memories were at my local Amiga user group meetings. They were a blast in the mid 80s.

That is still the case today, we have several Amiga user groups in operation in my area. And I had to really dig hard to find an active Apple II user forum. Amiga forums are still all busy with plenty of active users world wide.

[Bill Loguidice]

While I think the Amiga has a fantastic community, it's no more rabid than many others, including for the aforementioned Apple II. A lot of the communities for these popular platforms have incredibly active and thriving communities. The Amiga is definitely not above and beyond these others.

[BillyHW]

I don't recall any "failure" of the Amiga over here in the Uk, it was everywhere, it sold well, software and hardware availability was extremely mainstream and Commodre UK pushed the promotion of the machine at every possibility.

 

Lucky you guys.

[Guest LiqMat]

While I think the Amiga has a fantastic community, it's no more rabid than many others, including for the aforementioned Apple II. A lot of the communities for these popular platforms have incredibly active and thriving communities. The Amiga is definitely not above and beyond these others.

 

Your entitled to your opinion because that is all it is. The fact Amiga was not only a complete game changer in the mid 80s in graphics and sound, which it was, it also was a game changer in the video editing and 3D rendering community as well. No other platform at that time touched so many areas in such a dramatic way especially at that price point. You come off a little arrogant Bill and I completely disagree with you. The Amiga platform was definitely above and beyond the other platforms of the time. It took a few years for other platforms to play catch-up.

[Bill Loguidice]

Your entitled to your opinion because that is all it is. The fact Amiga was not only a complete game changer in the mid 80s in graphics and sound, which it was, it also was a game changer in the video editing and 3D rendering community as well. No other platform at that time touched so many areas in such a dramatic way especially at that price point. You come off a little arrogant Bill and I completely disagree with you. The Amiga platform was definitely above and beyond the other platforms of the time. It took a few years for other platforms to play catch-up.

Yes, I'm the arrogant one for stating that despite personally having a tremendous fondness for the Amiga, I don't believe its community is above and beyond all others. I think instead that perhaps your exposure to other communities is limited.

[carlsson]

Dunno about rabidness, but the die hard "Amigos" are no strangers to sinking lots of money into modern hardware that runs AmigaOS. Sometimes they even make Macintosh geeks look like cheapskates.

[Keatah]

To be completely truthful I did enjoy Photon Paint and Digi-View. In that respect the Amiga was a replacement for the Apple II. And it would be a year or three before the PC gained those capabilities at reasonable cost.

[Tonyvdb]

Fan or not, the Amiga did not sink because of Commodore's fans lack of loyalty it was due to crummy marketing and customer service as I said before.

If you have ever used the Video Toaster Flyer you will understand how great a machine it is/was. I used mine weekly for more than 15 years and it still works flawlessly today. Ligtwave although slow worked perfectly on the Amiga and would run circles around any other computer platform out there until there were cost effective PC based video editing available in around 2008

 

I looked for days trying to find an active Apple II forum settling here only after trying several dedicated forums only to see no activity for more than a year on those. Atari seems to be popular and so does the older Mac forums but not even close to the Amiga forums (I know of 3 that are very active)

Edited March 7, 2016 by Tonyvdb

[Guest LiqMat]

Yes, I'm the arrogant one for stating that despite personally having a tremendous fondness for the Amiga, I don't believe its community is above and beyond all others. I think instead that perhaps your exposure to other communities is limited.

 

You should never assume Bill. I happened to be very active in the Atari and Commodore communities in my local area back in the 80s and early 90s. I produced all my music back then with Amiga (drum tracks only) and Ensoniq (EPS and later ASR-10) gear. I also happened to be friends with the dev who developed the Atari ST version of "Music Construction Set". He developed that in Southwest Florida where I lived at the time. So my "exposure" was a just a tiny bit more than "limited" Bill.

[Keatah]

After listening to some podcasts I found that a common theme for early "computer fails" was because a company DID NOT want their next upcoming product to infringe upon the sales their earlier products established. They didn't want to destroy their ecosystem. And therefore they purposely made the successors not compatible - equally both in hardware and software.

 

Apple II and Apple III had this problem. IIgs and Mac..

So did the TRS-80 Model I and Model II.

And of course there are various examples with Atari VCS, 7800, 5200, and home computers.

 

IBM didn't really take that route. Neither did Amiga, within technical limitations.

 

Another reason was closed software ecosystem. When 3rd party hardware/software was discouraged you automatically had a death sentence.

Edited March 19, 2016 by Keatah

[Willsy]

By what measure did it fail? The Amiga sold by the millions in Europe, especially the 500 and 600. Commodore may have failed, but the Amiga was a success.