The Final Showdown! (Please keep model comparisons to appropriate generation, for example don't compare an Amiga 500 to a TT030, or an 520ST to an Amiga 1200.
. But what to do? There have been no matching Amiga. Linux and FreeBSD (I didn't knew yet) were in their very baby steps, and nothing for my situation back then anyway. And Unix machines were simply by far unaffordable for a student.
At some point I had a choice, spend ~ fl. 3000,- on an accelerator card for a platform that's been effectively dead for a couple of years, or spend that money on a PC build. Spent it on a PC, a Pentium II - 350MHz, with a much, much faster and better graphics card. That was the system I installed FreeBSD on
) which had exit to X.25, then hop to the X.25/IP gateway, there typed IP of some Canadian university and log in into SunOS (again, don't ask where I got this acc)
AFAIK, Atari had lent $500K to the Amiga Corporation, but that was before Tramiel was ousted from Commodore and bought Atari. His son found out about that debt which was due at the end of June '84, and they tried to buy Amiga, but Commodore wanted to "stick it" to Tramiel for taking bunch of Commodore engineers with him to Atari and bought Amiga in August for $27M, including paying off the loan from Atari. As they say, the rest is history.
Near the end I started looking for alternatives and had found NetBSD. Unfortunately my 4000/030 has a 68EC030, which lacked the MMU required to run NetBSD
Have looked at it a couple of times over the years but never actually installed it on anything. Nowadays I mostly get my Amiga kicks from emulators/fs-uae and Cloanto's Amiga Forever.
The Amiga 500 was clearly the superior machine; better graphics which was obvious when a game was compared to the same game on the ST, Deluxe Paint, and true multitasking as already mentioned somewhere in this thread. It also had an early virus which was harmless and simply displayed a message saying something like "Something wonderful has happened, your Amiga has been infected with a virus!" It would also attempt to replicate itself on any diskette that was inserted. Its presence was easily detected (at least in 68000 assembler) by checking if any memory had been occupied when a diskette was inserted after a clean boot.
AmigaOS had pre-emptive multitasking 10 years before Windows got it.
Had plenty of not-so-harmless viruses too. At some point I got so fed up with it I wrote my own virusscanner that was able to detect and remove 5 different viruses. A few I still remember "Lamer Exterminator" (survived a reset and 'encrypted' its payload, it randomly overwrote sectors with "Lamer Exterminator" repeatedly), "Byte Bandit", and one that hooked into the Amiga's disk.library (that one was a pain).
The Amiga had Video Toaster and could edit video in real time. The A3000UX ran SysV. Now let's compare that to the NES. It ran games that were much less graphically advanced compared to the A500, and that's all it did.
That's true, but only if we are talking about consumer versions of Windows. Windows NT 3.1 was released in mid '93, so that's 8 years, and if consider other PC OSes, OS2/ in '87 so only two years later and Concurrent DOS in '84 so a whole year before Amiga.
It's just an example. Why are you so angry about this? Are you envious of 4096-color Amiga OCS HAM because you only have 4-color CGA? Boohoo.
IDK about US, but in European markets number of professional ST users (mostly musicians and DTP) was much, much higher than pro Amiga users. True, Amiga had superior color graphics, but that was important only to gamers (and that only after A500). Only pro Amiga users over here (that I know of) were Toaster folks, but there was not so many of them. So, from the ROI POV, ST was much better choice.
Intended use of A4000: Workstation
