Windows is 40 years old

[Charlie Bonesx]

Amiga 500 was way cheaper than a mac.

C64 was even cheaper, had GEOS, and could plug in to any tv or monitor you had around

No amiga to be sure, but the point is more at the previous poster marvelling about “colour”

 

[MagicHAM]

Eww the amiga was terrible, don't even mention that thing.

 

[throAU]

Eww the amiga was terrible, don't even mention that thing.

Stereo sound, 12 bit colour, hardware sprites, pre-emptive multitasking, flat memory model in 1985.

Emulated a mac faster than a mac so long as you had enough RAM- even with the base 68000 CPU.

 

[maflynn]

Eww the amiga was terrible, don't even mention that thing.

Wow, you're the first person in the 41 years since the Amiga was announced that said something like that.

Lets set the stage, in 1985, we had the IBM PC and AT, commodore c64, apple II and a little computer called Macintosh .
When the Amiga was announced it had dedicated graphic chips that could handle 4096 colors, where as the ibm pc with a CGA card could handle 4, the EGA card 64. dedicated co-processors to offload the work that the cpu had to do (I think 3 separate co-processors for I/O, graphics and display. It also had stereo sound. Its hardware was revolutionary, not evolutionary.

The OS had preemptive multitasking, multiple windows, background tasks, dynamic memory allocation. No other consumer machine on the market had those features.

So tell me again why was it terrible?

 

[romanof]

Amiga 500 was way cheaper than a mac.

Apple wasn't even a thing to me (or us, in the informal nerdy club) back then. I was doing nothing but 8080/5 assembler long before the Mac came out. C was still in the future as far as a hobbyist was concerned and the only other language we had access to was interpretive Basic (Barfo!) and since the Mac used a 68000 it would have required learning another completely different assembler language. Homebuilt S-100 Micros were as cheap as a hobby system could get and matched my very thin wallet much better.

Of course, if I could have afforded an Amiga, (or a Mac) then I would have had to make the change. And probably would have done so.