Eich is Catholic, his faith does not believe in gay marriage. He donated to a charity that was against gay marriage on the ballots. Because of that he was forced to resign.
He donated to a charity that worked to take away my "god given" (I didn't choose to be born gay, I just was) rights. He absolutely should have been forced to resign and I'm glad he did. You're also a real asshole if you think that donating to an anti-gay charity is right.
In some schools they require an iPad for the ebook app that schools use for books and other things. It does not run on the PC. So Apple has a lock-in there.
People are stopping buying PCs for mobile devices like smart phones and tablets.
Atari like Commodore didn't market their new systems that much. It was mostly magazines and word of mouth. At least in the USA it was that way. Still they both controlled the home computer market in the 8 bit areas.
Atari's dominance is a major factor of the video game crisis in the 80s. The home console industry almost collapsed because all the consoles were licensing without quality control. Games would be broken or just badly designed for full price.
It's archaic now, but when the NES came that golden "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality" saved the industry. Amazingly, the Nintendo CEO who was granting this seal did not play video games. He would have an employee play the game in front of him and he would decide whether it was a good game or not.
It's also worth noting that this crash was largely North American, as the European gaming market was dominated by home computers.
If you have any experience with home computer games of that era, you'll know that the quality control wasn't actually better, it's just that games came on cassette tapes and floppies, and so were vastly cheaper mistakes when you bought one (plus you could fix the bugs yourself on the ones written in BASIC, fun!!).
I had an Atari Lynx and about 30 games. I had a carrying case and wall adapter as well because it ate batteries like crazy. I gave it to a friend who had a computer museum.
We used to have a turntable stereo that was mono with one speaker built into a console that had a wooden lid on it on top so it could be closed and we used it as a computer monitor holder. My nephews stole my vinyl records inside of it. It was damaged in a flood and we never replaced it.
Turntables these days are expensive, but worth it for the vinyl experience.
The Amiga had emulators to run DOS and Mac software. Sort of the OS/2 effect where they ran DOS and 16 bit Windows apps so there was no need for native OS/2 apps.
Commodore had a nickle and dime marketing plan and made PC clones as well. The Commodore 65 was going to be the next 8 bit C64 type computer after the C128. But it never got out of prototype.
Mac and DOS/PC tech caught up to the Amiga around 1987-1992 and Amiga could not make a newer chipset in time to compete with them.
The Amiga was like the Mac but with true preemptive multitasking and 1/3rd the cost of a similar powered Mac. Amiga didn't earn a lot of money with the Amiga because they lowballed the price and Apple won because they highballed the price until Steve Jobs could come back to fix the company. Amiga had no Steve Jobs savior and went out of business because the DOS/PC cut into their sales too.
You are not wrong, but of what you mentioned only "nickle and dime" and "could not make a newer chipset" is very relevant. They never invested back their gains into Amiga R&D.
What they should have done:
kept Amiga extensible - kept the external bus when cost optimizing the A500 into the A600. (Instead the A600 was a crippled, slightly incompatible A500 that split the market and made it slightly less interesting to game developers.)
The chipset in A1200 and A4000 was too little, much too late. The A1200 was a case study in cheapskating and crippling an already anemic CPU. (It came with a disabled L1 cache. If it had only had 64 kilobytes of more RAM, they could have enabled the L1 cache.)
Should have partnered with SUN and made SunOS (Solaris-to-be) for high end Amigas, more powerful than what they ever produced. (They basically said "fuck you" to SUN.)
Etc etc.
It could also have helped to buy fewer business jets for the CEO, but I think that was more of a symptom of what was wrong. If they had done fewer completely idiotic moves, they could have afforded a few jets easily.
Right on the money. The platform became too expensive for the home market and too cheap for the pro market, with ridiculously low (and expensive) expandability. There were distribution and manufacturing issues, and they treated their R&D in such a shocking way that inevitably pipeline and products suffered badly. Managers were old-world two-bit sharks who treated the company like a cash machine. It was tragic and completely avoidable, and had absolutely nothing to do with piracy. If anything, piracy kept alive an ecosystem that had no business existing, there and now.
AmigaDOS was developed on SunOS Workstations that were modified.
I don't think the Zorro bus was as good as ISA or PCI and the A600 was like you said it was. The Amiga needed a networking adapter to work with networks and Apple Macs later had them as default or via a NuBus slot.
Plus most of the software for the Amiga was video games which limited the system to video games it needed more business software.
Zorro-2 was superior to ISA in pretty much all ways that count. It had auto configuration and just worked in general.
PCI is vastly superior to Zorro-3 though, in both features and performance. Z3 never achieved the performance given in the specs and had quite some problems. IIRC Dave Haynie said that he would have used PCI instead of developing Z3 if it had been out at the time.
There's no need to "think" about it. Even old 16-bit Zorro had DMA and plug-and-play, which actually worked. ISA was a shit-show and often 8-bit wide, too. All PCs at the time needed networking adapter for Ethernet and the Mac network was dog slow. (I won't go into the software side, I don't have time right now.)
Google makes money off the activity and behavior of people using their free products. They sell the data to the highest bidder. If it wasn't free nobody would use them. This is to serve them advertising and sell info to spammers and marketers than will send them email.
Just a quick correction, Google doesn't sell your data. They sell targetted ads, that is, they promise advertisers that their ads will reach whoever they require targetting.
Try this archive: https://archive.is/XYUqg