People on here have provided good reasons to why the Amiga failed, and I don't really dispute any of them, but it still makes me very sad.
I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up.
That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.
The engineers knew what they had. Marketing failed to market it properly because they didn't understand what they had. Management, as you said, also didn't understand what they had. Thomas Rattigan understood and started the A500 and A2000 projects. Then, head of the board, Irving Gould, fired him.
The root of Commodore' demise goes back to the 1960's when Jack Tramiel let Irving Gould invest to keep Commodore from going bankrupt after Jack made some bad business deals. Without that mistake, Irving Gould wouldn't have caused Jack to leave by preventing Jack's sons from entering management, and wouldn't have pushed out Rattigan or cut R&D which prevented the Amiga chipset from keeping ahead of the industry.
I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition.
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
I think this Amiga version of history ignores what Apple was good at by the late 80s: DTP. We collectively seem to have forgotten what a huge deal this was, laser printing, postscript etc. It genuinely overhauled the entire publishing industry, not entirely for the better either.
By the mid 90s Microsoft were persuading a lot of people WinNT would displace Apple in publishing, but that never quite worked out how they intended either. (This is one of the reasons Xara was developed on the PC and not the Mac, which with hindsight was a big mistake).
The Amiga was dead before a Wolfenstein 3D came out on the PC. A lot of Amiga users failed to recognize it at the time but commodore surely and truly killed that thing off by his horrible mismanagement. When Wolfenstein 3D came around it was really just shifted from keeping it on life support hoping it would awake from its coma to palliative care.
My parents called this before Wolfenstein even came out, though they did it with the Commodore 64 and 128. I really wanted a 128, and they insisted on an IBM compatible instead.
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree.
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
For PC games Commander Keen running on an EGA display was already enough for PC gaming to be good enough for me.
I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.
It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
As someone who followed the development of the Amiga and then bought the Amiga 1000 (plus everything else I could afford with my paper route earnings) the first day it was available -- I do NOT yearn to relive those days. I loved it then and as documented everywhere, it was a head of its time. However, the instability of software and how much Commodore didn't iterate on the technology -- that's what killed the Amiga. I still have PTSD from all the insane amount of crashing and rebooting my setup did.
Indeed, AmigaOS despite being ahead of its time in the '80s, was doomed to lose by the end of the '90s.
The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation.
In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.
I'd also add 3DStudio to the list of assassins. It was not even close to LightWave 3D, but it did not require a Video Toaster card and it ran on commodity PC hardware. Amiga never got software package that could outcompete Apple in the graphics, DTP departments either. Add to that the dead-end that was AmigaOS as well.
I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.
It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective.
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
Over half of the Amigas sold worldwide were the 500 model and, in Europe, most people with an Amiga had the 500 or 1200 at home for gaming so you would see it when you visited.
The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
At least from my standpoint, this is completely true. I was hardcore Amiga (AmigaOS and Amiga MINIX) up until 1992 and then Wolfenstein 3D came out and it got me to buy a PC. The OS experience was comparatively terrible, but that game was so good in its day.
I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.
I was a kid back then but as far as I understood the waves of computing DOS and Windows 3.0 was dominant in office settings at least a couple of years before Wolfenstein 3D was released, and such machines trickled into people's homes over those years and became part-time gaming stations and created pretty solid expectations in adults about how a computer should work and what to buy for their kids.
It wasn't entirely incompetence. Commodore marketing was incompetent but the bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
For me it was Comanche ('92) that spelt out the demise of my beloved Amiga. I had a floppy disk demo that I played on my father's crappy, crappy PC at work and it completely destroyed anything you could achieve on the Amiga.
I think that a good part of that killed Amiga and Atari was the fact that IBM PC were the "serious" computers, the one you bought for work, and the Amiga and Atari were less considered. I know that they had some success in their niche like music and publishing for Atari, and graphism and design for amiga, I even saw Atari on a warship. But at the end most of the money at the time was made in a professional setting, and neither Atari or Amiga managed to get a sizable part of it.
I regret it because passing from GEM to DOS really felt a step backward
There were two reasons the IBM PC clones became dominant. The smaller reason is because IBM created it. The bigger reason is because everything but the BIOS was off-the-shelf parts and easy to copy. Apple had the same problem with Apple II clones where only a couple of companies managed to not lose when sued by Apple. IBM couldn't sue Compaq and others for their clean room BIOS replacements.
If the IBM PC had custom chips, it would not have been easy, or even possible, to clone and would have remained an IBM-only product. If that had been the case, I suspect CP/M and GEM would have won out and Microsoft would be much smaller and still producing language compilers today. The only question is, which version of CP/M would have won out? I think Motorola's 68K series would have won over Intel's x86 series.
I remember reading magazines when the Amiga 1000 was introduced, and even then the general conclusion was: amazing hardware, but doesn’t run PC software.
The home-computer wars of the 1990s have always confused me. There's seems to be a kind of tribal-allegiance that computer-buyers participated in when they became computer-owners. I've never understood why it had to be PC vs Amiga or Nintendo vs Sega or whatever.
My best guess is that a lot of the buyers were young kids who did'nt have the maturity yet to see the world in a more flexible way. I was certainly guilty of that back when I was a teen.
It was because there was a lot of difference between the systems then, unlike today where they are all the same technology with a different sticker on the front of the case.
If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business.
In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites.
In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.
Many things were platform specific at that time. You didn't have major game titles or business applications widely available across platforms. Folks who used PCs/Apple/etc at work/school were more likely to buy similar for the family at home etc.
In my family I get the impression we chose our home computers based on merit/value. That meant starting with the commodore 128 in the mid 80s and led to my brother buying an Amiga 1000 [with his hard earned teenage burger king min wage $] in 1987.
In the 90s the advent of Windows 3.1 running on cheap PC clones left Commodore in the dust. The value for the money shifted to PC, even if it was inferior at first.
It was really sad that Amiga did not continue to innovate - the hardware was astonishing which can be seen by looking at the demo scene output and games front he time relative to what was possible on other platforms.
I think it was mostly because $1000 items were a bit harder to come by back then so kids would do a lot of reading and day dreaming before getting enough cash to pull the trigger. By the time they could actually afford a computer/monitor/printer/software they had talked themselves into how great the product was.
I owned an Amiga 4k/040 (after an A500, later with a Retina Z3) at the time and was blown away by Wolfenstein that I played on the 386 (?) of the dad of a friend.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because the Amiga was an architectural nightmare but everyone pretends to love it.
There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues.
When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps.
How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course!
I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes.
The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed.
But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out.
edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.
You are not taking crazy pills. You just had a bad experience because you bought a low quality accelerator and video card for your Amiga.
The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast.
By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems.
If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator.
I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses.
It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.
Here we go again. Someone flagging a post they don't like without rhyme or reason. A post that the community is obviously passionate about and enjoying to share their experiences and recollections. How annoying.
Another thing that killed the amiga was it's lack of hackability and approachability. On the C64 you could start writing code right away, and instantly go into assembly with an extension
What extension are you referring to? It wasn't anything that came with the computer.
The Amiga, and none of the other 16-bit systems had an assembler built in either. They had interpreted BASICs just like the 8-bit systems, except on disk instead of in ROM.
[+] [-] tombert|1 year ago|reply
I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up.
That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
The root of Commodore' demise goes back to the 1960's when Jack Tramiel let Irving Gould invest to keep Commodore from going bankrupt after Jack made some bad business deals. Without that mistake, Irving Gould wouldn't have caused Jack to leave by preventing Jack's sons from entering management, and wouldn't have pushed out Rattigan or cut R&D which prevented the Amiga chipset from keeping ahead of the industry.
[+] [-] amiga061347|1 year ago|reply
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
[+] [-] fidotron|1 year ago|reply
By the mid 90s Microsoft were persuading a lot of people WinNT would displace Apple in publishing, but that never quite worked out how they intended either. (This is one of the reasons Xara was developed on the PC and not the Mac, which with hindsight was a big mistake).
[+] [-] api|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] elmerfud|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|1 year ago|reply
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
[+] [-] idkdotcom|1 year ago|reply
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
[+] [-] karmakaze|1 year ago|reply
I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.
It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
[+] [-] eurekin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cowmix|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pornel|1 year ago|reply
The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation.
In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] surfingdino|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mattgrice|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ZFH|1 year ago|reply
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
[+] [-] runjake|1 year ago|reply
I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.
[+] [-] cess11|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Grustaf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] detritus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] poulpy123|1 year ago|reply
I regret it because passing from GEM to DOS really felt a step backward
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
If the IBM PC had custom chips, it would not have been easy, or even possible, to clone and would have remained an IBM-only product. If that had been the case, I suspect CP/M and GEM would have won out and Microsoft would be much smaller and still producing language compilers today. The only question is, which version of CP/M would have won out? I think Motorola's 68K series would have won over Intel's x86 series.
[+] [-] tverbeure|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JanSolo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business.
In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites.
In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.
[+] [-] jeffnappi|1 year ago|reply
In my family I get the impression we chose our home computers based on merit/value. That meant starting with the commodore 128 in the mid 80s and led to my brother buying an Amiga 1000 [with his hard earned teenage burger king min wage $] in 1987.
In the 90s the advent of Windows 3.1 running on cheap PC clones left Commodore in the dust. The value for the money shifted to PC, even if it was inferior at first.
It was really sad that Amiga did not continue to innovate - the hardware was astonishing which can be seen by looking at the demo scene output and games front he time relative to what was possible on other platforms.
[+] [-] mmcgaha|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] weaksauce|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] idkdotcom|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|1 year ago|reply
How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timcobb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] snakeyjake|1 year ago|reply
There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues.
When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps.
How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course!
I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes.
The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed.
But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out.
edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast.
By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems.
If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator.
I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses.
It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.
[+] [-] erickhill|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aixpert|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
The Amiga, and none of the other 16-bit systems had an assembler built in either. They had interpreted BASICs just like the 8-bit systems, except on disk instead of in ROM.