Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 23rd Jul 2005 16:52 UTC, submitted by Tyr.
20 years ago on July 23rd the Commodore Amiga was unveiled at the Lincoln Centre in New York. For the launch Commodore had hired Andy Warhol & Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie) to demonstrate the Amiga's graphics capabilities. Despite many dificulties the Amiga is still around today both as a company and as a community.
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Commodore crippled the Amiga from day one by giving it 256K RAM. Then a few years later, when they turned the Amiga into a C64 ("it's so cheap you can't afford NOT to buy one!") with a whopping 512K. By 1992 Commodore got the Amiga up to 1Mb RAM (the A600) which was going to be "the C64 of the 1990s". Shows how clueless Commodore was.
That was the Commodore engineers way of "cost reducing" a system: RAM crippling it. If a program required 1Mb RAM and the Amiga only had 512K, then there was no way you were going to run even that one program, much less take advantage of the multitasking OS.
Whatever the entry level machine is in a product line, that has to be the target system for developers, otherwise they are only aiming at a small subset of the potential market. Commodore essentially planted the seeds of the Amiga's failure from day one. Too bad they used their C64/VIC-20 "8-bit engineers" to work on a machine with a minicomputer OS (tripos) developed by PhD computer scientists. Commodore was totally lost.
If they'd had even one Linus Torvalds in the company to keep the OS alive then there still could be something like the Amiga today. Instead there has only been 15 years of vaporware (Pios, Scala, VisiCorp, etc, etc)
Best description of what Commodore did with the Amiga: "It was not that they were first and took it, but that they were last and no one wanted it."