[dansalvato]

Let's be real, Commodore has no one to blame but themselves for squandering their 5-year lead in hardware and OS. They were carried hard by the passion of their engineers, but irredeemably greedy and soulless at the top. At Microsoft and Apple, engineers were the lifeblood from the very beginning. At Commodore, they were a spreadsheet column.

[skeeter2020]

It's all relative; Commodore sounds like it was nirvana compared to Atari!

[accrual]

Kind of wild to imagine an alternate universe where Commodore and Atari were still big names in computing. Would have loved to see the Amiga continue to grow, it seemed so ahead of its time.

[chuckadams]

Commodore probably got more pleasant after Jack Tramiel left to go run Atari. Unfortunately it got left in the hands of Irving Gould, who treated the company as his personal piggy bank and looted it til there was nothing left.

[panick21_]

Imagine if Commodore had built ARM, or something like it it. A 16 register RISC in the 80s was basically an instant win. They would have been in the CPU lead for a couple of years.

And they had the resources. I mean hell, Acron was a tiny company and they pulled of building an absolutely incredibly machine in the Archimedes.

Its just what you dare to do. If they were as bold as the original Amiga team, with VSLI Technology 2nm CMOS in the late 80s they could have built an incredible machine. I think they held on to long trying to do their own semiconductors.

Acron didn't have the bandwidth to really innovate on the graphics side of things, and because of their problems with OS, they never managed to get enough software on the platform. And they just didn't have the market either.

Commodore on the other hand, actually had a pretty high quality OS with lots of software and users already.