3 Jan
2012
3 Jan
'12
2:11 a.m.
On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
While I'd heard of the Archimedes in the mid-1980s, I didn't know a
place to see one, but there were a couple of places close to home that
sold Amigas. I didn't know a single Archimedes owner on this side of
the pond.
The Archimedes didn't sound like a terrible platform, but it just
didn't have that much presence here (less than the BBC Micro, which I
_did_ see here, including working at a place that wrote software for
it).
-ethan
Yes indeed. The company spent lots of effort on
improving its hardware
and almost none on improving its software, which seemed foolish - but
on the other hand, didn't do it any harm in the 8-bit days.
I'm sure it was a cost-based decision, and since they sold over 17
million C-64s, from a business standpoint, not a terrible one. Sure,
it wasn't easy to program sound and graphics from BASIC, but I think
if you analyze the customer base, far more purchasers were more
interested in purchasing high-quality games written by professionals
than writing their own code. Commodore owned their own fab line, so
they leveraged that which they were good at - selling large quantities
of hardware with a high profit margin (when the C-64 was retailing for
$99 USD, manufacturing costs were running around $14 per unit).
That's not
a C21 issue... look back 20+ years and build something
graphical on Amiga's Intuition API or for X.
True! Mind you, there were platforms that were more accessible than
the Miggy. E.g. the Archimedes. :?)