Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 02:21 UTC, submitted by rohan_p
Good interview with Steven Solie - this bit stood out to me: "Although Hyperion has been using serial numbers for copies of AmigaOS since 4.0, it won't reveal sales numbers. Solie's 'personal guess' is that the system has 2000-5000 users. 'If you include all the various Amiga clones and emulators we would probably be talking about around 10000 users [in] total,' he adds, 'it is really difficult to judge because a majority of the users are rather quiet.'" Fascinating number - lower than I anticipated.
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RE[5]: LOWER than you expected?
by zima on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 18:33
in reply to "RE[4]: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2005-07-06
You never experienced 'something' slowing down what you were doing.
Guru Meditations tended to be a bit of a bummer though, really
Overall, let's be honest, there were less practical scenarios for heavy multitasking and the software didn't do that much ...actually, I wonder if this, & generally how Amiga stagnated at some point, wasn't related to lack of memory protection (but also to disjointed stack of libraries from various sources): making ever more complex software difficult to do, prioritizing careful tinkering just so it won't nuke the OS while running.
And anyway, Amigas were usually used as single-tasking game machines...
RE[6]: LOWER than you expected?
by MOS6510 on Sat 2nd Jun 2012 18:52
in reply to "RE[5]: LOWER than you expected?"
Member since:2011-05-12
I think the problem was that the Amiga was far ahead of its time. This caused Commodore to sit back and relax. When the Attack of the PC Clones came it was too late. New Amiga's didn't improve too much over the older models and were still lagging behind PCs specs wise.
The first Babylon 5 season (and maybe 1 or 2 more) were done on Amiga's. They had their use and power in multi media environments.
But yes, most were used as games machines. The Amiga, before it was called Amiga and before Commodore bought it, was meant to be a games console. Also a lot of Amiga users were upgrading Commodore 64 users, who also spend a lot of time gaming. The games went for the Amiga 500 and later the 1200, serious users went for the 2000/3000/4000.
Everybody I knew also did serious stuff with it, but games came first.
(and some serious work was creating databases containing all the owned pirated games)
Mine had a PC board so it could run native MS-DOS, which I used for some serious software and... games!
Features
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2011-05-12
Multitasking on the Amiga was great though, even more if you consider the hardware specifications.
You never experienced 'something' slowing down what you were doing.
Even running on floppies went fine, but if you added a hard disk it was beyond great.