Commodore International Historical Society Link below )
Gail Wellington: far more than just a herder of CATS and ... https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f...
Looks to be an excellent page, excellent information about Commodore computer history too.
It was a 1985 computer selling $300 retail in 1991 packaged with $300 retail CD-ROM. Commodore got the crazy idea to try and sell this "the whole is less than the sum of its parts" at $1000 because black case and remote control! Nobody got fooled. Zero effort went into trying to cost optimize it, or even make it a desirable product. It was as ridiculous as Philips mega flop CD-I shipping similarly bad internals at same price point.
And AGA was a mixed bag. The extra bitplanes were really welcome, but not having chunky (1 byte per pixel) mode when all the 3d coming out really required it, and having to do an expensive operation to go from chunky to planar, did really hurt efficiency.
It was a great addition that extended the existing idea of bitplanes, which was a really good one in lots of ways though.
Basically, Commodore should've skipped ECS entirely. ECS was essentially useless to most consumers.
CDTV was simply a bit early (hence the price) and a bit confused about what it wanted to be. It cost like a development machine but it was a fundamentally end-user one; it provided continuity for Amiga developers but only a hard reset for Amiga users. It also debuted in harsh economic times.
Playstation was a $350/$299 toy with a computing power delivering 3D experience only available in top end Arcades a year prior (Namco System 22). 60fps 3D gaming plus 320x240@30Hz ~MJPEG video playback. You couldnt buy anything with similar 3d power for a couple of years, closest would be $3000 top of the line 1997 PC (P200, dx5/glide).
Unfortunately the 64, like all those 8-bit machines, was a technical dead end, and by the time the Amiga got momentum PC clones were eating the entire industry. PC clones killed everything but Apple, which barely clung to life through the 90s, and some Unix workstations in the high end market. It just wasn’t possible to compete with the price cuts and CPU performance gains that came with volume and scaling.
(I remember in the early 90s a lot of doubts about whether x86 could be made as fast as Sparc or Alpha or other things, but Intel and later AMD did it… especially when it came to price/performance.)
In retrospect Amiga might have competed there had it gone higher end and been a Unix-like OS underneath.
And now Apple is in the process of beating x86 to a pulp with ARM.
peterburkimsher•3d ago
sgt•5h ago