Tech Nostalgia: The Great White Whale ⭐

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8

There is no greater "what if" in the history of personal computing than the Commodore Amiga, a platform so sophisticated in its day that it seemed like technology handed to us by an advanced alien race. If anything were fair in this world, the Amiga would have defeated Windows PCs and the Mac, and we'd still be using this platform today. But nothing is fair in this world. And the reasons for the Amiga's defeat and then demise are, as we say, legion.

The early history of the Amiga is well-understood. And if I could boil this down to a Star Wars reference, it's quickly expressed in a simple quote. "Crazy thing is, it's true. Amiga. Multitasking with just a single floppy drive. All of it. It's true."

The list of what Amiga got right could fill a book, and it has, multiple times. But what Amiga got wrong from the beginning--it was originally named Hi-Toro--is tied inexorably to the same decisions that made this platform a giant leap forward in the mid-1980s and gave it advantages that Windows and the Mac wouldn't duplicate or surpass for another decade or decade and a half, respectively.

It's comforting to assign blame. And many, including those who worked at Commodore and helped bring the Amiga to market, point to many internal factors that led to the company's demise. Key among them are the numerous strategic mistakes by Commodore's inept chairman Irving Gould, most notably his firing of founder and CEO Jack Tramiel in early 1984 and his disastrous backing of the idiot Mehdi Ali, who drove Commodore into the ground in the early 1990s. But there were many other problems, so many other problems. Most of which, yes, can be traced back to Gould, a man who had saved Commodore from bankruptcy decades earlier, paving the way for the successes it did see in the late 1970s and 1980s.

But I will offer up a different perspective: The miracle of the Amiga, ultimately, was also its downfall.

The Amiga's makers, most notably chipset architect Jay Miner, had set out to make a next-generation game machine, not a computer. Miner was a genius who had previously created the custom chipset that powered the Atari 2600 and Atari 400 and 800 8-bit home computers alongside their MOS Technologies 6502-based CPUs. Both systems were incredible technical innovations in their day. And the multi-chip architecture of the 8-bit Atari computers pointed the way to what became the Amiga, a 16-bit design based around the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and three custom chips named Agnus, Denise, and Paula.

The Amiga's unique design arrived at a time when 8-bit home computers still dominated the market, though IBM had released its first Personal Computer (PC) powered by an 8/16-bit Intel 8088 chip and Apple was struggling to make the 68000-based Mac, with its tiny black and white graphical display and weak 128 KB of RAM, make any sense at all. The Amiga's custom chips and unique software architecture--a modular design...