> « he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

> That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari. Their relevance hung on in a couple of niche areas (like Atari with musicians), but outside of hobbyists, neither company mattered much and by 1995 they were both essentially dead from a commercial perspective. The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.

> It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari.

I got the same impression from the German trade press in 1991, which emphasized the openness, adaptability and standardization of the whole PC platform. I've learned a long time ago that the way to the truth is the way "through the archives"... anecdotes only go so far, and many markets differed wildly, even locally. In my personal circle in big city East Germany, the PC reigned supreme; Amigas were virtually nonexistant, albeit the machines being a huge hit in Germany, especially in the West. For us Easterners most of that can be traced back to accumulated pre-Wende experience with two main general-purpose computing platforms: Z80- as well as x86-machines (clones).

And I've yet to read a thorough, balanced, and clear-eyed comparative analysis of the Amiga and PC (as well as other) platforms, i. e. one that includes some serious market analysis.