In 1986 I had an Amiga 1000 in the USA at the University of Missouri Rolla.

I bought the 1020 5.25" Floppy drive and PC-Transformer software to run PC-DOS 2.0 on it for my Turbo Pascal class.

I also bought something called AMax which had a parallel port dongle that contained a Macintosh ROM (Since a lot of Apple Macintosh systems were defective at the time and prone to overheating until the Mac II series fixed that, the market was flooded with Mac parts like motherboards and ROM chips) that allowed the 68000 based Amiga 1000 to boot Macintosh Floppy disks and run the Macintosh System and Mac games and software on it. At first it lacked sound, but after an update it got fixed. Amaz using the Amiga coprocessors was able to run the Macintosh System faster than a real Macintosh. The Atari ST had something just like it called the Magic Sack.

I even had a Commodore 64 and Apple // emulator that could use the 1020 drive to run software for those systems.

The Amiga and Atari ST did a lot of emulation back in the day, because they used the coprocessors to emulate some of the older systems.

Everyone in my fraternity laughed at me for owning a Commodore instead of a real computer like an IBM PC or Macintosh. I told them I could run IBM PC and Macintosh software with my Amiga and it cost half if not three times less than their systems. They still had the image of the old Commodore 64 and the slow 1541 floppy drive. In the USA Commodore was seen as a 'toy computer company' and so was Atari, because they sold their 8 bit computers really cheap in toy stores and department stores instead of computer stores like the PC clones and the Apple computers.

Commodore and Atari did better marketing in Europe but in the USA, not much was done. I do recall they advertised in magazines about the Amiga and Atari ST, but they should have advertised in Byte and PC Magazine and other magazines not about their own computers to reach new markets.

I remember Commodore made PC Clones running MS-DOS called the Commodore Colt series. "It's not a clone, it's a Commodore!" was a bad slogan. Everyone thought it was based on the Commodore 128 or something that had flopped. The Commodore 128 was cool because it had a Z80 coprocessor for CP/M-80 mode, and the 8510 CPU ran faster in 128 mode, but most people used Commodore 64 mode and bought the 128 to replace a broke 64.

Commodore made the Plus4 and Commodore 16 series to compete with the Atari 800XL and ect, but had changed the interface for devices to try and force everyone to buy new ones and so it failed. They dumped the whole lot really cheap in Mexico where it did quite well selling for under $100 in super markets. It was a waste of time, they should have spent that money on making the Amiga series better and making better PC Clones that used the Amiga coprocessors to speed up MS-DOS and Windows programs.

The Amiga 2000/3000/4000 had these Zorro slots that took IBM PC bridgecards that used 8088, 80286, 80386 chips with a PC on a card that ran MS-DOS and Windows in an AmigaOS Window, and the motherboards had ISA slots for the bridgecard to use PC expansion cards and even use them in AmigaOS mode as well.

The Macintosh didn't have a better user experience, instead it had better marketing and a better reputation in the USA than the Amiga and Atari ST. The Macintosh II series competed with Commodore and Atari better, and then IBM made the PS/2 series and OS/2 with Microsoft. The Amiga and Atari ST still ran things faster and were better and did true preemtive mutlitasking which the Macintosh and PC Clones could not even do. Apple tried to kill the Amiga and Atari ST with Copeland but it was vaporware. Microsoft and IBM tried to kill them with OS/2, but Microsoft stabbed IBM in the back and made Windows 95 that stole a lot of business from Apple, Commodore, and Atari. Around that time Linux was just getting popular, and it ran rings around the Amiga and Atari ST, it was free and ran on PC Clones and did true preemptive multitasking even better.

I remember in 1995 putting my Amiga 1000 in a closet while I got a 486DX 50Mhz PC Clone dual booting Windows 95 and Slackware Linux. I really wanted to buy a faster Amiga, but the PC Clones became so cheap it was cheaper to buy a PC clone. My Amiga 1000 had shot craps after Nine years of service some keys didn't work on the keyboard and the floppy drive had malfunctioned. The cost of a new floppy drive and keyboard was too much, I'd rather put the money towards a PC Clone.

I had tried BeOS for Intel as well. I had IBM OS/2 2.0 and when I got OS/2 3.0 Warp my CD-ROM drive wasn't supported so I went back to Windows 95 and Linux that did support my CD-ROM drive.

Haiku is a good operating system, I run it in Virtual Box, you have to enable a serial port or it crashes during boot.

I have to say people who used to love the Commodore Amiga ought to check out AROS instead: http://aros.sourceforge.net/

It might bring back some memories.