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.

▲

rwmj 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.

	▲	pjmlp 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And a great BASIC with inline Assembly.

▲

UncleSlacky 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The UK also had the Sinclair QL (68008-based) in 1984 for £399, famously owned by Linus Torvalds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL#Linux

▲

smallstepforman 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.

▲

doener 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected

This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.

▲

mmustapic 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.

▲

tialaramex 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga.

One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.

	▲	vidarh 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In all the years I used an Amiga, I don't think I ever had the machine crash because they used Forbid(). I'm not saying it never happened to people - I'm sure there were badly misbehaving programs in use -, but using Forbid()/Permit() outside of very tight sections was very firmly frowned on, and Forbid was overall relatively uncommon apart from games which took over the system on purpose.

▲

thijson an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.

Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.

▲

jorisw 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Probably Windows NT rather, which turned into Windows 2000 (and then XP)