[iPod Shuffle]

In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.

[spower]

I owned an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 2000. Awesome machines. They were used to create Max Headroom for crying out loud!

[CaptRon]

Second computer I ever owned (first being a Timex Sinclair) and I loved it. You had to make some accomodations but that was part of it's charm.

[TChris]

In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.

I was completely amazed at the Amiga's power even up until 1990 or so. It could do more with less CPU horsepower than any other PC before or since. One wonders what their engineers could have done with a 64-bit Opteron, 1 GHz Hypertransport and 16 gigabytes of DDR RAM. :-)~

It just proves again what Microsoft and Intel have continued to prove repeatedly:

Better marketing beats better technology.

[birbear]

In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.

you nailed the answer to your own question. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time.

The Edsel is a classic of something being ahead of its time.

And Commodore never learned to market itself. Great tech that nobody knows about is useless.

[supercat]

In 1985, the Amiga was the best personal computer on the market. Period. Best graphics, sound, OS, could multi-task. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology. Still amazed that it never really took off.

First of all, it took a long time for the Amiga to get a useful but affordable hard drive, and even longer for it to get a useful operating system. Having one shared memory pool for all applications with no means of reclaiming memory when a program quits is incredibly bad design. Further, the Amiga's video memory bandwidth took way too long to grow beyond 3.58 megawords/second. This was adequate for 320x200 graphics, but limited the usability of 640x200 graphics.

[Semi Civil Servant]

I remember the first time I fired up Cinemaware's Wings on my Amiga. I couldn't believe the graphics of that opening sequence. I didn't see anything that good on a PC for a decade.

[dr_who_2]

According to a lot of journalists, it didn't take off because a lot of dumb decisions by Commodore. Nowadays, I don't see what a company called "Commodore" (the real one went bankrupt less than a decade ago) has to offer.