Ask HN: Could a less ambitious Amiga have saved Commodore from bankruptcy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017247

by amichail • 2 years ago

2 10 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In particular, an Amiga with capabilities similar to a 1984 Mac but with color would have been cheaper and easier to program for.

Maybe such a machine could have even been aimed at the education market.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

Didn't Motorola give up on the 68k?

Every other vendor that made 68k based machines (Apple, Sun Microsystems, Atari, ...) either switched to another architecture or went out of business. Treading water might have been good enough to survive if a platform shift wasn't necessary but it was.

I remember the Macintosh 2 machines having a color GUI that was head and shoulders refined over competitors but they were crazy expensive. Amiga had much better game and multimedia capability but not as refined desktop at a much lower price.

amichail5• 2 years ago

The Amiga was a terrible machine for hobby programmers. It was way too complicated.

Making programming easier would have also resulted in more commercial software for it.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

It wasn't easy to program the 68k mac either. I don't think there was a really easy-to-use system for GUI programming until Microsoft's Visual Basic.

Would you have preferred something like Plan 9 or a Smalltalk workstation?

ilkke• 2 years ago

Sorry, I am not really answering the question, but just my 2 cents on the topic. Who cares about saving Commodore? The best thing about the Amiga was that it was years ahead of its time. It played a big part in shaping things to come, especially in Europe, particularly in game development, music, graphic design, and what I'll just call the culture of sharing. Personally I can't imagine who I would be without having the Amiga in my youth - what I would like, how I would perceive the world. As heartbreaking as it was to see it die with a whimper, I wouldn't trade that just to see a Commodore logo on a PC equivalent today. [edit: typo]

amichail5• 2 years ago

It wasn't easy to program though. It wasn't good for hobby programmers.

bitwize• 2 years ago

Uh, like, the entire demoscene is mashing X to doubt there, bud. The Amiga had one of the most beautiful interfaces to its hardware and OS of its day. Plus, beginner-friendly languages like AMOS Basic were available.

Ask HN: Could a less ambitious Amiga have saved Commodore from bankruptcy?

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