Modern Amiga

[Harrison]

If Commodore hadn't made such bad marketing and business decissions and were still going today developing and manufacturing the Amiga, what shape and form do you think it would currently take?

Would it still be ahead of the competition (PC, Mac) in terms of technology and innovation, or would it have had to take the back seat to the PC as an alternative choice, much like the Mac has for many years now.

How would Workbench (Amiga OS) have evolved had full development continued on it? It would definitely be far in advance of OS4 that is for sure.

And finally, would the Amiga have continued to help shape computer development, game and productive software ideas? Or would it have continued as it did in the WB3 days where we started to see the software playing catchup to the PC market instead of being the first of its kind.

[Agram]

It would of been interesting to see how software would have shaped up. As currently, on the PC, everything seems so bloated and storage space dependant.

When you consider what was achieved with floppy disk sized storage, and now what takes up gigabytes of hard disk space on a PC.

Don't know if this is down to coding sloppiness, the tools and programming languages available, the commercial need to fuel advancement to new hardware/software (need more powerful of one to take advantage of the other). Or just the way things have progressed now everything is corporate business.

[Harrison]

The greatest thing about the Amiga was definitely how small the OS was in terms of both the disk space it needed and the memory resources it required. Obviously it wasn't as advanced as current OS's with many things such as memory management missing, but it was still fairly advanced in its day. Even when OS3.1 was still new the much more limited Windows 3 came on a huge number of install disks and required a lot more system space and resources to run.

Amiga software always seemed to need less drive space and resources compared to similar products on other platforms, especially the PC. It definitely would have been very interesting to see if Amiga software had continued to require a lot less system resources compared to similar products on the market today for the PC.