Amiga 1000 - Too Expensive at Introduction or not Priced High Enough?

[zzip]

On 7/24/2022 at 2:22 AM, Keatah said:

Motorola back in the early 68000 days was still dank and brown and reeking from big government contracts. Brown was the company color. Totally unlike Intel's pleasant blue, or Nvidia's happy greenfields green. Or AMD hotfire red. Blech! BROWN! And it showed in their lack of marketing prowess in things 68000. Let alone production. Whooot!

Nvidia wasn't a player then,  AMD was just a boring 'second source' CPU supplier that hadn't bought ATI yet,  and IBM/Microsoft had  dull 'corporate' personas that Apple used to poke fun of in commercials.

 

It wasn't until the mid-90s when these companies marketing tried to be 'cool'.   Intel with the dancing guys in clean room suits and the "Intel Inside" boop-boop boop-boop tones.   Microsoft with the Win95 "Start Me Up" ads, etc.

[MrMaddog]

Getting back on track, to me it seems that Commodore tried to market the A1000 as a high end art workstation, based on the NY Premire Event (with a demostration by Andy Warhol) and that weird ass commercial.  They were going after the same creative types market that the Macintosh was but with color graphics and a relatively lower price.  They also promised PC emulation for practical programs like word processors, but why not just get a clone for that purpose...which Commodore ended up making as well.

 

But the high price, lack of software & non-availablity at computer dealers meant that it lost to the ST on value alone & there's more useful programs on both PC & Mac for those who were willing to spend more money.

 

Good thing for Commordore a couple years later that Thomas Rattigan made both the low end A500 for the games and the A2000 as a high end video graphics workstaiton (aka Video Toaster) which made the Amiga platform more of a success.

 

 

[Keatah]

40 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

Getting back on track, to me it seems that Commodore tried to market the A1000 as a high end art workstation,

And here I found the Amiga to be quite a nice tool. It didn't disappoint and was essentially the only tool in town for under $1000 if you picked the A500. $1500-1800 if you started earlier with the A1000.

 

42 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

They also promised PC emulation for practical programs like word processors, but why not just get a clone for that purpose...which Commodore ended up making as well.

I wanted "The Transformer" to work. It bombed pretty hard. And none of it was polished, certainly not like how one would've expected. Seems caveats and exceptions were everywhere with such early emulation. Why not get a clone indeed!

 

48 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

But the high price, lack of software & non-availablity at computer dealers meant that it lost to the ST on value alone & there's more useful programs on both PC & Mac for those who were willing to spend more money.

Real world availability was becoming important to me. I was able to find some useful tools and things, but actually getting them was a troublesome experience.

 

Late in the life of the Amiga, around 1991, I just got frustrated (not really too angry or disappointed or pissed) just ready to move one. Pricing was suddenly not an issue in my next computer purchase because I said if I have to save up I'll save up. Did it before with Apple II.

 

Technical superiority with graphics or sound was no longer enough. All the Amiga offered were games and demos. Demos are boringly non-interactive. And if I wanted one of those video production machines I'd need to shell out $7,000 easy. A toaster, a flyer, memory, HDD, genlock, accelerator. Oh sure the base A2000 was affordable, but all the other stuff? Not so much. $7,000 might as well have been $37,000.

 

All in all I just wanted out from under the tedium of incompatibility. And to have a real operating system. Since 1985 I had observed the PC expanding and maturing with ever better capabilities. If that kept going it would surely exceed anything Amiga.

[zzip]

The machine came at a weird time.    It wasn't yet obvious that there would be a unified computing standard.   There was an attempt with the Japanese MSX, but it didn't go anywhere.  

 

There was also the idea floating around that gaming consoles were dead, and computers would serve the purpose of home gaming machines.   I believe the Amiga chipset was original conceived to be used in some next-gen console, but given the "consoles are dead" conventional wisdom, it was only natural to put it into a computer.

 

At the time,  PC's were still too expensive for the average consumer,  the clone market hadn't quite taken off yet,  and also at the time, PCs were just not good for gaming.  So it was easy to not think of them as a threat.   Mac was mono-only and expensive so it wasn't going to win over gamers either.

 

So in 85 it seemed obvious that the only two systems competing to be the next C64 were the Amiga and ST,   that's how the press treated them..  they were going to be the next big thing.

 

Problem is both those system had split identities.   They wanted to handle high-end computing applications, but also wanted to be the next mass-market gaming systems.   It meant they could never be priced low enough to be the next C64, and by the time they could, NES had revived the console concept.   Also by then,  the clone PC wars started bringing down PC prices where you could get a clone for around the same money as a similar ST/Amiga system.

 

So ultimately I think the Amiga's problem was just that its window of opportunity was just too short

[Keatah]

I believe it would have been better if C= hadn't made the Amiga so video-centric. And they shouldn't have tried to market it to the average consumer as a video appliance. Never mind any videogames.

 

Everything was built around genlocking and video operations. WTF is that said my late-teen-self! It proved to be so limiting and made expansion of the system as a whole rather difficult and time consuming.

 

Amiga's desktop video came too early in the scheme of things. VCRs will still expensive. And accessories like digitizers and timebase correctors and the Toaster & Flyer even MOAR costly. And HDD storage was still at a premium.

 

Just Digi-View alone cost $199. You needed a videocamera $300, colorwheel filter (free), a lighted copystand $100, a motor to rotate the colorwheel $50, and of course a minimum of 1MB expansion $149. And necessary cables $30. All that was bulky studio-like equipment and $800 costly. Not counting the computer and its monitor. Tedious to operate and not available at your friendly neighborhood cloneshop.

 

It was annoying that they advertised the Amiga as bringing video to everyone. If not directly saying that, creating the impression that that was the deal. A consumer would need at least $3,500 worth of additional stuff just to get into anything "desktop video".

 

AmigaWorld magazine said,

"The Amiga is ushering in a new era of video power and creativity - for professionals and folks like you and us. What desktop publishing is to the printed page, desktop video will be to the audio/visual world."

 

Mmm hmm. Give me some of that stuff! They didn't mention the divide in cost. Desktop Publishing is cheap. Desktop Video? Not so much. DTV on Amiga was as gimmicky as that scratch-n-sniff text adventure.

 

I was doing "desktop publishing" with PrintShop and MagicWindow on the Apple II years prior. And it was practical and doable. All I needed were the wArEz and an Epson MX-80 printer + interface + cable. 3 affordable extras readily available from 3 or 4 shops within a 25 mile radius. Moving up into video? Now that's a whole different story. So much more is required as we shall soon see.

 

Digi-View ads say,

"Simply point the camera and click the mouse. In seconds, whatever the camera sees is painlessly transformed into a computer image that can be printed, stored on disk, or transferred to other programs. Imagine how quickly and easily you can generate stunning video art and animation when you start with high quality digitized photographs or artwork."

 

Yah bullshit! The camera & copystand could take an hour to setup. And "seconds" meant like 300+ seconds. Each RGB color had to be scanned individually, then processed and stacked into a final image. Saving it to and working with floppies added even more delay.

 

A 1MB A500 was hopeless for using anything made by Digi-View in Animation. And you needed to get MOAR software to even imagine doing any of that. Printing? Ha! Color printing? Now we're all comedians!

 

When all is considered, this getting close to that $5,000 PC pricetag. At least the even higher cost of PC kept this stuff firmly in the professional realm and didn't piss off the ordinary consumer wowed by bullshitty adverts.

 

The only real practical affordable art on the Amiga was a paint program package. That added minimal cost to the system. Less than $100. And it was realistic to the end consumer like me.

Edited July 26, 2022 by Keatah

[zzip]

18 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I believe it would have been better if C= hadn't made the Amiga so video-centric. And they shouldn't have tried to market it to the average consumer as a video appliance. Never mind any videogames.

 

Everything was built around genlocking and video operations. WTF is that said my late-teen-self! It proved to be so limiting and made expansion of the system as a whole rather difficult and time consuming.

 

Amiga's desktop video came too early in the scheme of things. VCRs will still expensive. And accessories like digitizers and timebase correctors and the Toaster & Flyer even MOAR costly. And HDD storage was still at a premium.

 

Just Digi-View alone cost $199. You needed a videocamera $300, colorwheel filter (free), a lighted copystand $100, a motor to rotate the colorwheel $50, and of course a minimum of 1MB expansion $149. And necessary cables $30. All that was bulky studio-like equipment and $800 costly. Not counting the computer and its monitor. Tedious to operate and not available at your friendly neighborhood cloneshop.

It was the 80s, all this stuff was novel and we hobbyists ate it up.

 

it seemed like kind of a holy grail to have real audio, real photos, and real video on your computer,  and all these digitizers, weird hand scanners, and what-not started popping up.  I remember the first sound digitizer my friend had.   I think it was the Parrot.   It sounded horribly tinny, but hey, I can play real audio on my computer!    Another friend had the "Computer Eyes" video digitizer,  pictures were not great by today's standards but it was more than we had before

 

But then come the 90s,   sound digitizers are standard part of sound cards and quality is pretty decent.   The local photo processers start giving out floppy discs or CDs with your photo developing order with your pictures pre-digitized, and soon after that digital cameras became commonplace.  It was now easy to digitize your stuff without needing all that expensive and flaky equipment we had been trying to make do with.     But this also meant that having digitized media was now so common that it wasn't novel or interesting anymore.  And 90s computers could show photos in 24-bit true-color, so no more trying to optimize the palette to look good on a screen with only 16 or 32 colors.

 

39 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Mmm hmm. Give me some of that stuff! They didn't mention the divide in cost. Desktop Publishing is cheap. Desktop Video? Not so much. DTV on Amiga was as gimmicky as that scratch-n-sniff text adventure.

It took a long time for computers to handle video really well because of the bandwidth and storage required for it,  not to mention the CPU power needed to compress it.   PCs couldn't even handle video well in the 90s,  it took until around early 2000s when it was practical for the average PC, so a 1985 Amiga?  Nice attempt, but way too early to make desktop video practical.

[Hwlngmad]

On 7/26/2022 at 9:51 AM, zzip said:

The machine came at a weird time.    It wasn't yet obvious that there would be a unified computing standard.   There was an attempt with the Japanese MSX, but it didn't go anywhere.  

 

There was also the idea floating around that gaming consoles were dead, and computers would serve the purpose of home gaming machines.   I believe the Amiga chipset was original conceived to be used in some next-gen console, but given the "consoles are dead" conventional wisdom, it was only natural to put it into a computer.

 

At the time,  PC's were still too expensive for the average consumer,  the clone market hadn't quite taken off yet,  and also at the time, PCs were just not good for gaming.  So it was easy to not think of them as a threat.   Mac was mono-only and expensive so it wasn't going to win over gamers either.

 

So in 85 it seemed obvious that the only two systems competing to be the next C64 were the Amiga and ST,   that's how the press treated them..  they were going to be the next big thing.

 

Problem is both those system had split identities.   They wanted to handle high-end computing applications, but also wanted to be the next mass-market gaming systems.   It meant they could never be priced low enough to be the next C64, and by the time they could, NES had revived the console concept.   Also by then,  the clone PC wars started bringing down PC prices where you could get a clone for around the same money as a similar ST/Amiga system.

 

So ultimately I think the Amiga's problem was just that its window of opportunity was just too short

Very much agree with what you are saying.  It, along with ST, came at a weird time.  The Amiga was a fantastic machine, no doubt.  But, it seemingly had one foot in one area and another foot in the other.  As a result it really didn't fit into a defined area enough unlike the PC, C64, and (I would argue) the Mac.  By the time the 2000 and 500 came out, you could get a very capable PC machine for around the cost of them that had tons of software available for it.  It just didn't take off as much and/or as quickly as what if could have.  Same for the ST, too imo.

[Keatah]

On 7/26/2022 at 2:25 PM, zzip said:

It was the 80s, all this stuff was novel and we hobbyists ate it up.

Of course we did.

 

On 7/26/2022 at 2:25 PM, zzip said:

it seemed like kind of a holy grail to have real audio, real photos, and real video on your computer,  and all these digitizers, weird hand scanners, and what-not started popping up.  I remember the first sound digitizer my friend had.   I think it was the Parrot.   It sounded horribly tinny, but hey, I can play real audio on my computer!    Another friend had the "Computer Eyes" video digitizer,  pictures were not great by today's standards but it was more than we had before

On the Apple II we could plug a microphone into the cassette port and record stuff. It was only a few seconds and it was even screechier than most games. That tiny speaker in the hollow case of the system itself. But it was the coolest thing! Why was it cool? Because it had never been done before. The CassettePort was the CassettePort, not a microphone input! Something was being programmed to be something it was not intended to be.

 

When I got the II I had no expectations. Everything was brand spank'n new. And norms were quickly established. So we were astonished when they were changed up or outright redefined later.

 

We weren't seeing that sort of thing with consoles or other things we'd normally play with. But with computers it was one discovery after the next after the other after the previous one. Same sort of magic ensued with Cat-Clock, using the modem as a timebase for accurate timekeeping while the CPU was busy doing other stuff. It was a step up from a software clock (which would lose time when disk access happened), but a step below a real battery backed-up clock card.

 

And we were on the frontier. The frontier of the information age. No promises were made. Apple even had surveys on their warranty cards asking for ideas. Asking what you were doing. What sort of expansions were you using. That's how new everything was.

 

Problem with the Amiga was all kinds of promises were made. Only later to be broken. Or just not happen. The exception being paint programs, and some animation programs. Though I only played with the paint stuff. I was pleased with the performance of the system, and only found it wanting during disk access. And then more, later, when I wanted to up the resolution. A whole new graphics subsystem would be needed. PC could provide that. Amiga would need a whole redesign from its core on up.

[phoenixdownita]

@Keatah The Amiga chipset was designed for a console and as such it made plenty of sense.

In those days that bundle of capabilities was extremely hard to beat ... granted the A500 (and it's greatly reduced priced compared to the A1000) is where things started to really pick up.

 

Btw you seem to completely bypass/forget about SoundTracker and derivative and the mod scene, Amiga music in that  timeframe was "da bomb".

 

Wrt your analysis of PC expandability and why it "made sense" it seems like you are suffering from "survivor bias" aka rationalizing why the survivor of a pretty intense competition "was obvious" all along. It was not.

I remember having an A500 and going to a friend house as he wanted to show me his PC/8088 ... no contest ... even 286 was still ... meh.

It would not be until 386+ and then SB2.0 (or even SB16) + VGA that really the PC took off big time.

 

Commodore itself had lots of issues, I believe the A1200 (with 2MB fast RAM extra mind you) coming out a couple of years earlier could have helped the Amiga line stay relevant much longer, not sure in the end it would have made a difference, it's not like today where given most of what we do is on the web it matters little what CPU/chipset you really have ... now if you are into gaming it does.

 

In the end though 386/486 were everywhere in the business world and once enough clones were available and prices started to drop (in spite of IBM mind you, not because of it) and capabilities were easily added then the writing was on the wall. I think I remember HDDs doubling in size but not in price almost monthly, and I believe seeing S3 gfx cards coming out every couple of month upping up the game (up until that point OAK, Trident and even the mighty Tseng Labs [the best of the bunch with the ET4000] were ... OK-ish), but for me Cirrus Logic (5424/5426) was the "I want one" moment ... for 64bit prowess an ATI Mach64 then an S3 vision 868 were paradise ... eventually an ET6000 and Voodoo2 ... I then moved countries, jobs, lifestyle etc.. and did not care/did not need to follow anymore (I did play with an NV1 [yeah the first NVidia card] and promptly returned to the store lol). 

 

In my opinion the "expandability" of the PC at that time was actually more expensive than worthy ... in the end I remember I changed so many MotherBoards thinking I'll keep HDD-ctrl, gfx card etc... just to change all of that a few weeks later .... AT-ISA then VL-Bus then PCI were back to back to back ... I think I was updating my rig every 3 or 4 months ... it was exhilarating and dumb at the same time.

 

But for sure the Voodoo1 was something from another planet when it shipped, obviously a dual Voodoo2 SLI maybe 1y/1.5y later was even more impressive/jaw-dropping .... the pace of innovation was incredible at that time ... in a way I miss it, in another I'm more than happy that I can hold onto my rig now for 3 or 4 years (I don't play games on PC so ....) ... I have switched to laptops so long ago and never really looked back, they work well enough for what I need to do, they come with integrated monitor and integrated UPS [by way of battery  ] and I really do not care anymore to stay at the top of perfs but my last 3 laptops in a row have been Alienware ... even if I rarely ever fired up the discrete GPU ... and they have little to no expandability and I'm fine with it.

 

Anyway the Amiga line made sense the way it was ... pity Commodore couldn't evolve it fast enough at the same time it was hardly meant to.

[zzip]

8 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Wrt your analysis of PC expandability and why it "made sense" it seems like you are suffering from "survivor bias" aka rationalizing why the survivor of a pretty intense competition "was obvious" all along. It was not.

I remember having an A500 and going to a friend house as he wanted to show me his PC/8088 ... no contest ... even 286 was still ... meh.

It would not be until 386+ and then SB2.0 (or even SB16) + VGA that really the PC took off big time.

Yeah they were two entirely different worlds at first with a different audience.   In the mid-80s, if you liked graphics, sound, gaming, affordability.   Then it was Amiga (or anything but PC, really).    If you wanted brand name apps, compatibllity with your work computer, and didn't care about graphics/sound or saving money, then PC was for you.

 

There was nothing to suggest that was going to change.   PC's and Macs were very expensive Amiga and ST were battling to be the computer for the rest of us.

 

But then in the late 80s when clones market was exploding and the PC clones reached price-parity with Amiga and ST, and were fast reaching feature parity, then the writing was on the wall for Amiga.

[Krebizfan]

The Tandy 1000 variants met the requirements for cheap color with sound. 

 

Commodore needed to change their pricing scheme for the Amiga. With the 8-bits, Commodore could price barely above break even and rely on sales of very profitable accessories only available from Commodore plus the profits MOS showed on chip sales. The Amiga didn't have the same level of required Commodore only accessories and much of the cost was sent to outside chip suppliers further cutting into the profit margins. Commodore needed to increase prices on the Amiga 1000 especially during the early time frame when Amiga production was limited. Get a hard disk ready, ship the Amiga 1000 as a color image editing system, soak all the advertising companies who absolutely needed such a machine, and then make a lower cost Amiga gaming system as the 68000 prices fell. 

[MrMaddog]

1 hour ago, Krebizfan said:

The Tandy 1000 variants met the requirements for cheap color with sound. 

 

 

The Tandy 1000 was comparable to the ST in terms of sound & graphics (though the pallet is maxed out at 16 colors) plus it had the "all-important" PC compatibility.

 

Quote

Commodore needed to change their pricing scheme for the Amiga. With the 8-bits, Commodore could price barely above break even and rely on sales of very profitable accessories only available from Commodore plus the profits MOS showed on chip sales. The Amiga didn't have the same level of required Commodore only accessories and much of the cost was sent to outside chip suppliers further cutting into the profit margins. Commodore needed to increase prices on the Amiga 1000 especially during the early time frame when Amiga production was limited. Get a hard disk ready, ship the Amiga 1000 as a color image editing system, soak all the advertising companies who absolutely needed such a machine, and then make a lower cost Amiga gaming system as the 68000 prices fell. 

 

Didn't we already agreed that the Amiga was already expensive at it's launch? 

 

Yeah, it would have worked better if it was marketed as a high end art workstation for desktop video production to compete against the Machintosh.  But as it turned out Newtek sold more Amigas than Commdore did when they were Video Toasters.

 

The A500 was more in line with the original vision of the Amiga being a high-end game system that can also be used as a home computer.

 

 

[zzip]

20 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

The Tandy 1000 was comparable to the ST in terms of sound & graphics (though the pallet is maxed out at 16 colors) plus it had the "all-important" PC compatibility.

In theory.   But my friend had a Tandy 1000, and it was rather weak compared to my ST.   In practice it had a lot of compatibility issues.   I remember he'd by software that met the specs, but didn't work.   Then the store didn't want to refund it because it was opened.

[Keatah]

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

@Keatah The Amiga chipset was designed for a console and as such it made plenty of sense.

In those days that bundle of capabilities was extremely hard to beat ... granted the A500 (and it's greatly reduced priced compared to the A1000) is where things started to really pick up.

What were they thinking, making a computer and advertising business capabilities, all built around a gaming chipset. Had I known that very early on I may have personally "positioned" the Amiga completely differently and accepted it for what it was. A game console, not a serious business tool. I hate advertising!! So many lies!!

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Btw you seem to completely bypass/forget about SoundTracker and derivative and the mod scene, Amiga music in that  timeframe was "da bomb".

I was never into the sound aspect much. I made some mixtapes from various demos. But that's about it. Even the much heralded IIgs' Ensoniq was of little interest to me.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Wrt your analysis of PC expandability and why it "made sense" it seems like you are suffering from "survivor bias" aka rationalizing why the survivor of a pretty intense competition "was obvious" all along. It was not.

I believe it was. There were signs and signals the PC was highly upgradable and on a path to do exactly that. I kinda experienced it firsthand when watching the 8088 mature into the 386. It may not have been evident right away, but the platform was going through changes and in the right direction of moar power.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

I remember having an A500 and going to a friend house as he wanted to show me his PC/8088 ... no contest ... even 286 was still ... meh.

It would not be until 386+ and then SB2.0 (or even SB16) + VGA that really the PC took off big time.

Fair enough.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Commodore itself had lots of issues, I believe the A1200 (with 2MB fast RAM extra mind you) coming out a couple of years earlier could have helped the Amiga line stay relevant much longer, not sure in the end it would have made a difference, it's not like today where given most of what we do is on the web it matters little what CPU/chipset you really have ... now if you are into gaming it does.

I argue it doesn't matter what you have as long as it's less than a year old - for AAA gaming. Otherwise we do serious productive work here on a 2004 era Pentium-M with 82855GM chipset & integrated graphics! Love it because it consumes 6-7 watts after it boots and goes into low power mode. Can this machine remain useful and viable into the late 2020's and early 2030's? We shall see!

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

In the end though 386/486 were everywhere in the business world and once enough clones were available and prices started to drop (in spite of IBM mind you, not because of it) and capabilities were easily added then the writing was on the wall.

Well aware that IBM wasn't a driving force in the clone market. It was the progression from 8088 to 486 that said, "this is the platform to watch". Anything in the market that was going to happen would happen here.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

I think I remember HDDs doubling in size but not in price almost monthly, and I believe seeing S3 gfx cards coming out every couple of month upping up the game (up until that point OAK, Trident and even the mighty Tseng Labs [the best of the bunch with the ET4000] were ... OK-ish), but for me Cirrus Logic (5424/5426) was the "I want one" moment ... for 64bit prowess an ATI Mach64 then an S3 vision 868 were paradise ... eventually an ET6000 and Voodoo2 ... I then moved countries, jobs, lifestyle etc.. and did not care/did not need to follow anymore (I did play with an NV1 [yeah the first NVidia card] and promptly returned to the store lol).

I remember "spec'ing" out my first graphics card. I wanted 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, with trillions of colors. I found an affordable (student budget) graphics card. ISA. 1MB. 1MB!! That was what the whole Amiga was. And just for video. It was either $169 or $199. Later I would discover it was an ordinary low-end CirrusLogic CL-GD5422. No matter. I was happy. My paint program activities were greatly expanded. Better than an Amiga on steroids. And it would be upgradable in the future, a 5 minute board swap. No re-engineering of any chipsets. And it was backward and forward compatible. I was giddy at the GIFS I could make!

 

..then that godforsaken 3D craze would start. Along with the cursed dotcom era.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

In my opinion the "expandability" of the PC at that time was actually more expensive than worthy ... in the end I remember I changed so many MotherBoards thinking I'll keep HDD-ctrl, gfx card etc... just to change all of that a few weeks later .... AT-ISA then VL-Bus then PCI were back to back to back ... I think I was updating my rig every 3 or 4 months ... it was exhilarating and dumb at the same time.

Yes those were crazy times.

 

Every month or two I would get some sort upgrade or add-on. Sound, graphics, memory, HDD, something.. A new speed grade. All in pursuit of the latest 3D game technology. A huge waste of time.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

But for sure the Voodoo1 was something from another planet when it shipped, obviously a dual Voodoo2 SLI maybe 1y/1.5y later was even more impressive/jaw-dropping .... the pace of innovation was incredible at that time ... in a way I miss it,

I had the 486 for a couple of years before I got the urge to upgrade for speed. Prior to that it was all about functionality. Printer. Modem. Zip Drive. Snappy. CH specialty joysticks.. useful things. Not faster things.

 

I kind of skipped over the Pentium era because I had sunk quite a bit of money in the  486. And I was still busy being a student. And I didn't really need Pentium-class performance, not that it was significantly faster than a 486. Not like going from an Apple II to a 486, that was huge!.

 

But I got wind of the PentiumPro. And so badly wanted to build up a machine based on it. Again too expensive. So I vicariously enjoyed the machine though the motherboard manual and adverts and spec sheets, and some 20 years later accumulated the parts to make my 1996 DreamMachine. Never assembled it.

 

Thankfully I was forced to wait till the Pentium II came out. It was everything the P-Pro was and then some! Bigger cache, MMX instructions, futuristic SECC packaging. I was not disappointed. I was on my way into the 3D world big-time now. I swear I owned all the 3D cards at one point or another. Starting with the Riva-128 and ending with the GeForce 4600. Had about 15 speed grades of processors, 6 or 7 motherboards, 3 or 4 sound cards. All the bus types. All in pursuit of better and better 3D gamez. That was a very dumb thing to do.

 

It stopped with the Pentium 4. That was the last straw, having built a machine costing nearly $5,000. I immediately decided the 3D industry was not going to get any more of my money. The next graphics card I would buy would be a used 1080GTX in 2019. And my next graphics card will be an RTX 20xx, 2nd hand of course. Simply will not pay more than what it cost when it came out. In fact, because it's used it will have to be significantly cheaper. Ebay and inflation and market demand be damned! None of this sentimental shit or "because xxxx" reasoning will get me to pay top dollah for old hardware. And 2 years is old in PC hardware. Just like e-waste in the dotcom era.

 

But yes. PC upgrading was a fast and expensive time. And interesting time. Going from Doom to Duke3D to Quake to 3D accelerated Quake was very memorable progression.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

in another I'm more than happy that I can hold onto my rig now for 3 or 4 years (I don't play games on PC so ....) ...

They say the average life of a Nehalem through AlderLake, 1st through 12th gen, is 10 years in the business/home environment. Still 6 months in gaming.

 

PC is my 1st choice for gaming. But I do not to current AAA titles. Too much online and DRM nonsense. And

the style of what's available isn't much my gig. Furthermore the system requirements go up every 6 months.

 

AAA PC gaming is infested with scriptokiddies and spoiled brats anyways. I think it's safe to say I've grown beyond all that. Most of us have.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

I have switched to laptops so long ago and never really looked back, they work well enough for what I need to do, they come with integrated monitor and integrated UPS [by way of battery  ] and I really do not care anymore to stay at the top of perfs but my last 3 laptops in a row have been Alienware ... even if I rarely ever fired up the discrete GPU ... and they have little to no expandability and I'm fine with it.

The UPS is a great benefit no one seems to ever mention. Today I use SFF PCs, or laptops or NUCs. I do like a large and expansive monitor most of the times.

 

But the traditional hot and heavy gaming rig in a tower is all but gone from my sphere. No 20+ RGB fans either. No watercooling.

 

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Anyway the Amiga line made sense the way it was ... pity Commodore couldn't evolve it fast enough at the same time it was hardly meant to.

Any single mfg would have a tough time redesigning a system every year or so while maintaining a modicum of forward/backward compatibility. Amigas had too much console heritage in them to suddenly adopt a rapid pace of expansion.

[Keatah]

49 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

Yeah, it would have worked better if it was marketed as a high end art workstation for desktop video production to compete against the Machintosh.  But as it turned out Newtek sold more Amigas than Commdore did when they were Video Toasters.

Pretty sure I bought the Amiga for gaming and a general purpose computer. Since it flopped at both tasks I had no choice but to look toward x86. It was so long ago, there were likely other uses I wanted it for but have long since forgotten.

 

Amiga did serve well as an art station. So I enjoyed it for that. Moving into the professional world was neigh impossible however.

[zzip]

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

What were they thinking, making a computer and advertising business capabilities, all built around a gaming chipset. Had I known that very early on I may have personally "positioned" the Amiga completely differently and accepted it for what it was. A game console, not a serious business tool. I hate advertising!! So many lies!!

I get the impression that the Amiga chipset wasn't cheap to produce.   Given that they had a machine that cost north of $1,000,  I think they had no choice but to position it for productivity work.

 

Atari had first dibs on the Amiga chipset and supposedly they planned to use them in a console?   Not sure how that would have turned out.   The world wasn't quite ready for 16-bit gaming at home, seeing how the 6502-based NES dominated the last half of the 80s.   It wasn't until around 1990 when we started seeing 16-bit consoles that could match Amiga's output.

[phoenixdownita]

On 8/1/2022 at 2:29 PM, Keatah said:

Pretty sure I bought the Amiga for gaming and a general purpose computer. Since it flopped at both tasks I had no choice but to look toward x86. It was so long ago, there were likely other uses I wanted it for but have long since forgotten.

 

Amiga did serve well as an art station. So I enjoyed it for that. Moving into the professional world was neigh impossible however.

No it did not, at least not in the videogame dept.

Not until Wolf3D and Doom were a thing the PC had believable games (that's 1992 for Wolf3d), it had the various (and beautiful) adventures (Sierra but not only ... ) but the rest if memory serves was slim pickings and had always some sort of issue (bad sound, bad gfx, too fast, too slow, no joystick, etc... I mean the SB16 launched in 1992). I think both Atari ST and Amiga were very well placed in the gaming market in the late 80s. I ended up with an Amiga just because the A500 was announced ... a friend of mine had an ST 520 and the first time I saw it my jaw dropped, it was leaps and bounds past any and all 8-bits (I had a C64 and an MSX he just upgraded from an ZX Spectrum). I did not have the money but due to a price drop and a fortunate series of events I found a combo Amiga 500 + Monitor + bunch of software at a very decent price ... had I not I likely would have bought an ST (520 probably).

 

The issue with productivity SW was actually the high cost of Amiga HDDs, with SCSI and all inflated prices, I eventually got a SCSI HDD but if I remember correctly they used to cost about twice a std IDE drive ... even if they were "faster" it was not a good deal for home users (silently acknowledged by Commodore by supporting IDE HDD on A600 and A1200).

 

To be fair interlaced hi-res was not good enough for productivity. I can understand in the USA the market at that time was different but in Europe ST or Amiga were kings, Amiga more than ST at the end of the 80s. Consoles were not a big thing until much later (depending on geography of course).

 

So yeah the original Amiga chipset was meant for a console but Commodore thought that custom-chipset=enhanced-micro (after all that was what happened with the VIC-20 and then C64) and they went that way, the package as presented in the cheap A500 format was a bargain at that time but yeah expandability was not the utmost concern after all the PET was not compatible with the VIC-20 which was not compatible with the C-64 etc... and none of that made those systems a failure.

 

 

[Keatah]

I suppose in early micros compatibility wasn't a big thing. The Trinity and what came before, well, we were lucky to even have a computer. And the amount of data processed by the early machines was easily(relatively) transported to other machines manually through methods like re-typing.

 

Once people wanted to bring work home with them, things started changing. But hobbyists never much cared about interoperability - too busy exploring the one platform they were engaged with. In my geographical area this interchangeability thing started rather early, 1983-1984.

 

1 hour ago, phoenixdownita said:

So yeah the original Amiga chipset was meant for a console but Commodore thought that custom-chipset=enhanced-micro (after all that was what happened with the VIC-20 and then C64) and they went that way, the package as presented in the cheap A500 format was a bargain at that time but yeah expandability was not the utmost concern after all the PET was not compatible with the VIC-20 which was not compatible with the C-64 etc... and none of that made those systems a failure.

Early on it worked. Home micros were new. And data migration not a big deal. None of us had media collections or anything. And the new high-performance of the next generation PET to VIC to C64 to Amiga overshadowed any compatibility issues. We didn't mind resorting to exotic custom or tedious methods for one time. But doing it again and again would get old quite quickly.

 

I personally didn't mind moving one database from Apple II to Amiga PC. But to keep doing it everytime I wanted better hardware wasn't an option. Thankfully that all stopped with PC. 486 - Pentium II - Pentium III - etc. All a matter of import/export to common media.

 

1 hour ago, phoenixdownita said:

The issue with productivity SW was actually the high cost of Amiga HDDs, with SCSI and all inflated prices, I eventually got a SCSI HDD but if I remember correctly they used to cost about twice a std IDE drive ... even if they were "faster" it was not a good deal for home users (silently acknowledged by Commodore by supporting IDE HDD on A600 and A1200).

It's possible I might have stuck with the Amiga platform much longer than 1992/1993 if I was able to afford a hard disk for it. But no cheap options presented themselves to me at the time. In 1992 PC was everywhere, could visit 10 stores in 3 hours time. And they were advertising firesales on 200MB HDD as standard equipment on 486 rigs.

 

I vaguely (accurately?) recall researching and discovering I'd have to pay nearly $500 for an 80MB SCSI drive for the Amiga. And that through mail-order. With no foreknowledge of exactly how compatible it would be with the software I already had. And it would be a sidecar, sitting outside, prone to bumpage and breakage.

 

But, yes, SCSI was not a thing for home users. The performance gain was an advertisers dream. But to little guys like me, loading Windows 3.1 5 seconds faster was utterly irrelevant. Barely enough time to pick'n'flick those boogers! Considering the cost and complexity and interfacing - IDE was the way to go. Though adverts always made me feel what I just got was inferior and 2nd rate and outdated. That would be the bane of learning about PCs through pulp magazines sold at the grocery store. Just as bad early Amiga advertising if not worse. It would take me some 10-12 years to stop relying on such publications for intro to new tech.

 

Early on printed magazines were useful because they introduced new tech. Later they started pushing the same tech to replace what you just spent $$$, just because.

[zzip]

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

To be fair interlaced hi-res was not good enough for productivity. I can understand in the USA the market at that time was different but in Europe ST or Amiga were kings, Amiga more than ST at the end of the 80s. Consoles were not a big thing until much later (depending on geography of course).

Yeah I remember having an Amiga user tell me he envied my ST's high-res monochrome mode.    This confused me.  I said, I thought the Amiga could do the same resolution but in color?    "yeah, but it's interlaced and flickery,  I like how crisp the ST monochrome display is"

 

I did use ST in monochrome for productivity (and color for games), and it served me well.  I had all the apps I needed, and MS-DOS compatible disks made it easy to share documents with my college's PC lab and print them on the laser printers there.

 

So I didn't jump to PC because of the apps,  it was when the new generation of jaw-dropping PC games that came around '93 that made me finally decide to save up and get a PC.

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I had all the apps I needed, and MS-DOS compatible disks made it easy to share documents with my college's PC lab and print them on the laser printers there.

Had I known the ST could do MS-DOS disks I might have gone that was as an interim solution till prices of PCs became affordable for the masses.

 

What was it.. the first 386? or first 486? .. that listed for $20,000! Remember that? And not talking anything super speed or DX2'ed either.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

So I didn't jump to PC because of the apps,  it was when the new generation of jaw-dropping PC games that came around '93 that made me finally decide to save up and get a PC.

It was the evolving sophistication of apps for me, the science and mathematical stuff, the planetarium & word processing stuff I mentioned 1001 times already. A 2nd would be paint programs. But interest in getting PC to replace Amiga for leisure art came about as I was researching pre-purchase prices and specifications. I learned of VGA and SuperVGA and the proverbial lightbulb in my head shone so brightly it nearly exploded. Look at the color palette! Look at the resolutions! In fact I spent more time researching that then I did memory or cpu speeds. Last time I felt so giddy about a computer purchase was wayback when. When I got an Apple II.

 

I guess I kind of assumed (thankfully correctly) the industry would have me covered in those two latter categories. It had already proved itself the speeds were increasing every year. And base memory for the system I was eyeing was already a mind-blowing 4MB! Upgradable to supercomputer class 64MB total with the optional proprietary memory card.

 

Games were NOT on my radar for PC. And they had zero influence on my 1st PC purchase. The gaming explosion that happened in 92-94 was icing on the cake, as was the aftershock of 3D hardware.

 

But games were the driving factor in many of my upgrade purchases. Had I stuck with wordprocessing and the science stuff I could've gotten by with significantly lesser hardware for longer periods of time. But games pushed my sorry sagging fatass to drag itself from 4MB to 8MB, and then eventually 16MB. It was nice in that I didn't have to throw away my original memory SIMMS. Just plug in more. And more. Now, though, if I wanted to beyond 16MB I would need higher density 4MB parts in place of the 1MB parts still in there.

 

Games would eventually force me to cycle through way too many speed grades and graphics cards. Till I seriously got fed up with it and stopped shortly after the Pentium 4.

 

Today I still use a 2003 era machine for daily business and writing. Could go back earlier but that's all sentimental hardware scheduled for occasional maintenance-usage and preservation. Keep the HDDs in shape. Charge that CMOS battery. Exercise the capacitors.

[Krebizfan]

There were ST-412 controllers available for the Amiga 1000. From small independent firms who had to spread their R&D costs between a very small number of units so the controller was about 25% more expensive than with the XT clones. The drive was also at a bit of a premium to account for the need to have an external enclosure. Commodore didn't plan for the rapid transition to hard drives. Adding an empty bay, slot for controller, and support for a ROM on the controller would have added little to the Amiga's cost but made it more enticing to many of the planned customers. 

 

 

[zzip]

13 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Had I known the ST could do MS-DOS disks I might have gone that was as an interim solution till prices of PCs became affordable for the masses.

I can't remember Atari ever advertising this as a feature.    It was something you learned from other users or read about in magazines.   It's something I took for granted, but I suppose if I didn't have it, I'd be a lot more frustrated by the machine- at least getting files on and off it.

 

18 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I learned of VGA and SuperVGA and the proverbial lightbulb in my head shone so brightly it nearly exploded. Look at the color palette! Look at the resolutions! In fact I spent more time researching that then I did memory or cpu speeds. Last time I felt so giddy about a computer purchase was wayback when. When I got an Apple II.

Yeah I was impressed with the VGA spec when released and worried about the ST's obsolescence.   But as someone else pointed out to me-- "Ever see a PC in action?  Screen updates are slow!"  This was in the ISA days,  so yeah you have an 8.133mhz bus at 8 or 16-bits wide, having to share the bus with everything else in the system,  the higher resolutions and screen colors of VGA/Super VGA were slow to update.   So at the time, PC gaming was still not all that impressive.   

But then the Local Bus architectures came and changed things on 486 and up.  VLB was 33mhz @ 32-bits (or could push 8X or more as much data as ISA),  and PCI was even faster.  That allowed more responsive games at a higher framerate.

 

 

[MrMaddog]

On 8/8/2022 at 4:09 PM, zzip said:

I can't remember Atari ever advertising this as a feature.    It was something you learned from other users or read about in magazines.   It's something I took for granted, but I suppose if I didn't have it, I'd be a lot more frustrated by the machine- at least getting files on and off it.

 

Same here...  There was a addium paper that came with my STe about being able to format DOS compatable disks using the GEM Format option since "Rainbow TOS" but I didn't knew enough to understand it.  It was when I got a hold of a Ramdisk accessory that also formatted disks to be read in PC's, including writting in the boot sector for MS-DOS to read, that I understood the implemencations.

 

Spoiler

I remember in my first semester I was trying to transfer the darft papers I wrote on the Mac Performas (can't say that w/o spitting) onto a DOS formatted disk in ASCII format to take home to my ST.  It was impossible for any of the Macs to read PC disks because they ran an early version of System 7 and the IT guy didn't bother to install Apple File Exchange on any of them.  So off I went to use the PC lab that used Word Perfect 5.0 which saved my drafts as text files that I can later work on and print out.

 

Quote

Yeah I was impressed with the VGA spec when released and worried about the ST's obsolescence.   But as someone else pointed out to me-- "Ever see a PC in action?  Screen updates are slow!"  This was in the ISA days,  so yeah you have an 8.133mhz bus at 8 or 16-bits wide, having to share the bus with everything else in the system,  the higher resolutions and screen colors of VGA/Super VGA were slow to update.   So at the time, PC gaming was still not all that impressive.   

But then the Local Bus architectures came and changed things on 486 and up.  VLB was 33mhz @ 32-bits (or could push 8X or more as much data as ISA),  and PCI was even faster.  That allowed more responsive games at a higher framerate.

 

I read an article about that, where running Windows on a 486 was real slow unless you had an expensive Windows graphic excelerator card or had Localbus Video.

 

Don't forget there was also a distinction between regular PC's used for businesses and multimedia PC's made for homes that also played better games...

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

38 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

I read an article about that, where running Windows on a 486 was real slow unless you had an expensive Windows graphic excelerator card or had Localbus Video.

Was my experience, as well.  I was sent out to upgrade some customers to Windows 95 on 486 systems with ISA video cards, and not the high-end stuff.  All of the were ungodly slow.  The VLB video cards made a big difference.  Late-stage 486 motherboards with PCI were on-par for the most part, but I heard that some of the 486-PCI systems gave poor performance compared to VLB.

[zzip]

15 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

Don't forget there was also a distinction between regular PC's used for businesses and multimedia PC's made for homes that also played better games...

A "multimedia PC" was at mimimum just a 386 with VGA 640x480, a 1X CD-ROM and 8-bit sound card and a small hard drive..   Although they did raise the specs of that over time