familiar?
edit: oh wow! such packaging
http://appletothecore.me/files/through_the_looking_glass.php
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Everything finds a niche. For the Atari ST, it was music production because they happened to throw a MIDI port in it.
My point was about why the Amiga was not the commercial success all its fans believed it deserved to be.
We used to talk about the Home Computer Wars, back in the day. Long before anyone argued about iPhone vs, Android. Sometimes people now like to argue about who won. Some say Commodore won because the C-64 sold the most units. Some say Apple because it’s the only one that still exists making home computers. Some say Wintel because it became the standard despite not being one company.
In those debates, I always take cat-like joy in declaring Acorn won. There are billions of ARM devices in the world, and nearly every computing device any of us use all day every day is ARM or ARM-derived. 
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Go back and read my comment: I specified it was the Mac 512K that was hobbled.
Pretty good on low-end PCs with 4M ram that were starting to struggle with Windows. It’s a shame that they didn’t open it up sooner for 3rd party developers.
GeoWorks attempted to get third-party developers but was unable to get much support due to expense of the developer kit, which cost $1,000 for the manuals only, and the difficult programming environment, which required a second PC networked via serial port to run the debugger.
Well, there’s their problem.
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What the hell were they thinking-- releasing a computer without transform and lighting in 1984?
Yeah, they did a lot of work to make it better than the Xerox thing. But the Lisa was closer to the Alto than my Nixie watch design is to the one I stole the idea from. I remember seeing a Xerox CAD system at a trade show, around the time of the Lisa introduction. You would have had to look closely to tell them apart.
The Amiga was a machine let down by the earlier actions of Commodore that had destroyed the dealer network in favour of selling to the likes of Sears and Kmart. Without them, there was nowhere for people to go to learn about the machine from experienced enthusiasts.
But I am surprised that Jobs didn’t see the potential in the Amiga’s chips for making the original Mac a better machine. A blitter would have greatly improved the performance of the GUI over using the CPU alone; and the Amiga’s sound was lightyears ahead of the Lisa or the Mac’s.
Mind you, Jobs might just have recoiled after seeing Workbench 1.0 - quite possibly the ugliest GUI ever created - blue, orange, white and black! I prayed for a decent monochrome version of Workbench after first seeing that atrocity.
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The Digital Antiquarian blog is here to help:
https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macware/
(Warning - dangerously addictive time sink approaching).
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It’s hard to say for sure why Jobs rejected them. Maybe their timing was bad- maybe it was too late in the development to pivot. Just as likely is that Jobs just didn’t like Jay Miner. Jobs was, of course, a notorious dick and tended to think anyone he didn’t like was stupid and incompetent. There may have also been resistance from the engineers, though. The Amiga chipset, while great, does require a very specific architecture that may not be what the Mac team’s vision was. Every hardware engineer has a vision for the architecture, and Not Invented Here syndrome is very strong. They may have simply wanted the Mac to be all their ideas.
The dealer network and advertising was definitely a lot of the issue for the Amiga. Tramiel was not the right guy to sell a computer like that. He was always going to be obsessed with selling bargain basement machines (“for the masses, not the classes”) and undercutting the Japanese due to his obsession with them stealing his calculator business.
I do think the Amiga was a hard sell though, even to respectable dealers and users. People just didn’t get it. It was about 15 years before its time. The Mac was a hard sell too. People didn’t grok GUIs for a long long time. The Mac only succeeded because sales of the Apple II were so strong (it was produced until 1993) that it floated the company long enough for them to figure out how to sell Macs and for customers to catch on to what the future of computing was.
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Good points. Thanks for sharing.
IIRC in its first year the Mac tanked and Apple was pretty much kept going by sales of the Apple II. The Laserwriter saved it and opened up that incredibly profitable niche of desktop publishing.
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Yep. The Mac was very expensive, wasn’t IBM-compatible, and had a GUI that nobody understood. Jobs’ plan to sell it to businesses didn’t work because all they wanted was to run Wordstar on their amber-screen Hercules displays. You didn’t need a $5000 Mac to do that.
Desktop publishing was the thing that both saved the Mac and made the wider public realize computers were maybe gonna be good for stuff that “normal” people wanted to do.
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Cool, but I still am hoping Apple will release the Apple II ROM’s and make emulators legal.
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Don’t hold your breath.
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It is immensely frustrating that they continue to refuse to do this. On their side, I’m sure their lawyers see no upside to it. They might someday gain something from having it, and throwing it away now gains them nothing (as they see it).
So annoying to us retrocomputing enthusiasts.
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Not to mention liability. Could there be something in there that might expose them to patent shenanigans or that could be used as evidence of theft of trade secrets? I doubt anything is actionable after all this time, but it’s certainly easier to do nothing than to answer that question definitively.
ETA: I’m embarrassed. I read your and @fnordius’s posts and was thinking source, not ROMs. Yeah, I agree that I can’t think of any reason not to release the ROMs with a permissive license off the top of my head
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At this date, no one is going to do a full clean room reverse engineering, like was done with the IBM PC roms. Plus, I wonder how possible it would be. It didn’t exactly have only a few defined entry points that no one ever bypassed into the middle of the code.
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Well, technically Apple stole it from Xerox, but…
