I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game.

The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much.

The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”).

The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ?

What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.

The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas.

In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.

That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were.

In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.

> The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K

Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!

The first 386 PC didn't arrive until September 1986. It wasn't until like 1991 that sales of 386/486 PCs went above 50%.

Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best.

DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.

I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine.

Different times...