by mrandish | 2025-04-11 01:32:26+00:00
Nice to see OG 68k AmigaOS still getting a little love. I'm one of those who used Amigas daily from 1985 to 1995 and loved the platform. I still love it as a venerable retro platform because it was the most unique and interesting of the retro-era computer platforms.

Sadly, I've never been able to muster much interest in the subsequent post-Commodore Power PC or retargetable graphics-based Amiga derivatives. Relative to their post-1995 peer platforms none of those Amiga derivatives were compelling. They had all the downsides of being a low-adoption hobby platform with none of the unique upsides the OG Amiga offered vs its peers between 85 and 95 (better graphics, sound, color, multi-tasking). Post 1995-ish most peer platforms had approximately similar resolution, color depth, graphics speed and processing performance to anything derivative Amiga add-ons or upgrades were offering - and usually with more support and better prices. Worse, they didn't even offer much nostalgic appeal because new apps and OS were required - essentially making it little different than transitioning to an entirely new platform anyway.

As Commodore disappeared into bankruptcy, the era when unique platforms could carve out a market was ending and fundamentally nothing Commodore (or its successors) could do would have done more than further delay the inevitable. Platforms like the Amiga had shown the way to the future but eventually the baseline tide was catching up. The age of CISC CPUs and 15khz displays was at an end. Commodore didn't survive long enough to take a solid swing at a RISC machine with >31khz graphics and none of its descendants had anywhere near the resources to even make a serious attempt at anything which might have been uniquely better than current peers. Frankly, even Commodore didn't have the resources to spin a truly competitive new hardware platform with a bespoke OS ready to exploit it.

Even Intel and Microsoft combined barely managed to eventually make the transition. Maintaining x86 ISA compatibility with microcode translation on top of RISC was an ugly and risky hack that almost didn't work (requiring heroic effort to salvage). After trying to do essentially the same with the 68060, Motorola gave up (perhaps wisely as they didn't even have Intel's process fabrication savvy to help hide the inevitable performance gap of emulating a CISC ISA on a RISC CPU). And on the OS side, it took Microsoft 8 years of iteration to eventually improve Windows to the point where it was really usable as a multi-tasking GUI OS.

There was simply no way a vertically integrated computer company like a Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, etc could compete against a platform made by separate companies each specializing on one aspect: the CPU & chipset, OS, graphics or sound and then assembled by a manufacturing integrator. Leading edge desktop computers had grown incredibly complex and the 90s was peak Moore's Law acceleration, enabling immense gains for those able to move fast enough. No single company could compete. Keeping up required an ecosystem of companies. And if Commodore (or successors) had shifted to outsourcing all the components, they'd just be yet another low margin integrator like an Acer, Dell, Gateway, etc. And to be fair to Commodore, no one else made the transition either. Even giants like IBM, DEC, HP, SGI, Sun, Next all either gave up on desktop PCs or became low margin integrators (usually as a loss leader for their higher end hardware). Apple barely survived (and wouldn't have without acquiring a new OS from Next, Steve Jobs returning, a last minute $400M lifeline loan from Microsoft and quite a bit of luck).