Steve Jobs also had a massive ego, but somehow managed to use it to bolster Apple in their hour of need.
I also heard that Bobby Kotick of Activision infamy was planning to buy Commodore back in the early 90s, only to be rebuffed by Irving and Co.
Although I'm not a personal fan of Bobby, I'm sure his leadership would have been a sorry sight better than the dumpster fire at Commodore back then.
What all the Commodore CEOs unfortunately failed to do was invest adequately into R&D to keep the Amiga competitive. Instead, they treated the existing lineup as a cash cow for far too long. The new models which hit the market from 1990 onwards were too little too late and couldn't fend off the eventual insolvency...
It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab).
Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal.
It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death.
Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI
The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers.
Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me.
In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story.
I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.
Actually, there is one company still around called Tune Tracker Systems[0]. They make radio-automation software, starting out on BeOS and are now on Haiku.
I had an Amiga 1000 and did hobby programming on it starting in 85. At the time everything friends and I wrote only used the OS to open a custom screen because all the fun was experimenting with graphics. Most of the apps for the first couple years either used the CLI or just put up a window with a few drop downs and otherwise rendered their own UX inside it.
You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for the next decade. The one thing it didn’t have was multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder.
The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather than what ended up being AmigaOS.
What made it nicer was having IDEs with GUI designers. Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.
Huh?
There have been Smalltalk language implementations based on MS Win controls (as-if they were MS VB programs).
http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html
Also Digitalk Smalltalk for MS Win and OS/2. Also IBM Smalltalk.
~
Common-place to copy a Smalltalk app from a Mac to a MS Win PC and switch the emulation from MacOS to MSWin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor probably applies here as well...
I learned how to type there, and the rest was history. I owned a VIC20 already, and Dad purchased peripherals such as the 1541 and the 1701.
It wasn’t until 3-4 years ago when I began to study history, Irish history in particular, and recognized that the model numbers weren’t chosen arbitrarily or accidentally, but indeed they correlated perfectly to the most ignominious dates in the history of the UK, when anti-Catholic laws were passed and the Irish were stomped into submission.
It makes weird sense in retrospect. I mean, nobody ever taught Irish history in school because we are Americans now, and the whole Reformation thing is water under the bridge. And the superior general has a distinctly posh RP accent.
Much like the “bitten apple” and its rainbow colors and the $666 price tag, these signs and symbols were hidden in plain sight, as harbingers and warning signs of future troubles. We were all working for the construction crew on a modern Tower of Babel. Literally.