News Checkmate A1500 relaunched as crowdfunded PC, Amiga case

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I mean, you say that...


That's pricing for the original Checkmate A1500, from Amiga Computing Issue 31, April 1990 cover date. £199, which corrected for inflation is £430(!).

 

Oh, I come prepared...

 

Unity - my desktop's still on 16.04LTS. I know there was a lot of hoo-ha when Unity launched, but I've kinda grown to like it. I'm hoping by the time I shift beyond it the community-driven Yunit project'll be a fair replacement, but if not I'll just have to jump somewhere else and get used to it - same as I did coming to Unity from Gnome2.

 

Well, there we go - solves that problem for another half-decade, doesn't it!

 

No worries - I was a fan of the original (though never owned one, sadly), so when I saw the reboot I had to cover it!

 

There's an interesting historical wrinkle, there: Amiga-compatible hard drives were always way, way more expensive than their IBM-compatible typically-MFM counterparts. I don't have any UK IBM-compatible-focus magazines from that era, sadly - and if anyone can suggest a source, let me know - but I do have this copy of the US BYTE Magazine from 1991:



In 1991, £1 was equal to $1.96 (or $1 was equal to £0.51, whatever.) 1991 was also the year VAT went up to 17.5% from 15% to cover the Poll Tax cuts. So, taking that into account, the 40MB Seagate ST251-1 would have been (235*0.51=119.85*1.175=) £140.82. Compare that to £499 for the ST506 (which wasn't actually an ST506 at all, 'cos an ST506 is 6MB - it was a drive that used the ST412 interface which people mistakenly called the "ST506 interface").

Yeah, Amiga owners used to get absolutely *rinsed*. Pretty much every other month you'd find someone in the letters page asking whether they could stick an MFM into their Amiga instead and save a fortune...

 

Technically, Apple back then was today's Apple - literally. The Amiga, though, was by and large a victim of circumstance: it could do things IBM compatibles never could, and when it launched its pricing was pretty competitive. Trouble is, open architecture meant the IBM compatibles got faster, and cheaper, and better, and the Amiga... sort of didn't. At first, you didn't mind paying twice as much for your Amiga stuff 'cos it was at least twice as good as the IBM trash - but then the IBMs caught up, and the Amiga pricing didn't change. In fact, as time went on it got worse: the only way to make the Amigas better was to shove high-priced accelerator boards in 'em, and half the time if you were using it for professional work outside video production (fun fact: the computer graphics on both Knightmare and Catchphrase were Amiga-driven!) you had to buy a bridgeboard that cost nearly as much as buying a second-hand IBM compatible in the first place...

Yeah. The Amiga was super-clever at a time when IBM compatibles were super-dumb, but it just never really progressed. As more and more developers shifted focus to IBM compatibles (productivity) and consoles (games), the Amiga had a dwindling market - which meant prices stayed high, because you couldn't make up in volume what you lost in profit. And here we are today: everyone's on x86 and running Windows, which is great for compatibility and making developers' lives easier but rubbish from the perspective of fun (and security - a monoculture's always a bad idea!)