The Amiga Turns 25

retsamxaw reminds us that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. "[The Amiga] debuted to rave reviews and great expectations — heck, InfoWorld said it might be the 'third milestone' in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC. ... Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit, but it splurged on the Amiga's introduction. The highlight of that Lincoln Center product launch was a demo in which pop art legend Andy Warhol used an Amiga to 'paint' Blondie's Debbie Harry. The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command, but it was heady stuff... Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux... But Amiga nuts of the 1980s and early 1990s... remain the ultimate fanboys, even though it hadn't yet occurred to anyone to hurl that word at computer users."

Comments

IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas

[blind biker]

The big, not-often-told truth is that IBM PCs sucked donkey ass, compared to the Amigas. I remember the huge hype that surrounded the IBM PC, so I wanted to have a look. I was spoiled on Amiga's full-fledged GUI (G for Graphical!) that permeated all the applications present on the Amiga. When I saw the apps on the IBM PC, I couldn't believe my eyes - in the most negative way possible: the poor ASCII graphics sported by the apps present on the IBM PC were a colossal turn-off. And the computers were considerably more expensive than the Amigas, even without soundcard and color graphics. And "colour" on the IBM PC meant 4 colours (CGA)! Of course, CGA cost you an arm and a leg.

I mean, c'mon! IBM PCs and Amigas? No comparison. The only thing the IBM PC had going for it were the three magic letters.