> So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing?
Because cheap commodity harware, a single Intel CPU controlling everything, won out over an expensive custom multi-chip solution.
Every Amiga model was a new model, with large amounts of engineering effort put into it, until eventually the platform just couldn't keep up with how quickly PCs were dropping in cost.
Sure in 1989 an Intel x86 based system was a joke compared to an Amiga, and it was a joke in 1990, and 1991, and 1992, but it was less of a joke every year.
When it all began PC's didn't even have anything that could charitably be called sound capabilities, but year after new cards were released, there was massive competition, at first at the high end, but then sound cards got cheaper and cheaper until one day Microsoft demanded that for a computer to be Windows Certified it had to just include one, and it was up to OEMs to figure out how.
Meanwhile Amiga didn't benefit from that technological explosion.
Same thing happened for graphics.
Same thing happened for networking.
Same thing happened for hard drives, and cd-rom drives, and types of RAM, and literally everything else.
Technology has often been one step back two steps forward, going from mini->micro people complained about the same thing, and going from PCs->Smartphones, it happened again. Remember early smartphones / PDAs? They had a maximum process limit, in the low double digits! Storage that was wiped out if the battery died! Everything ran in the same address space!
And remember the first 5 or so major versions of Android? It wasn't exactly a pleasant system to use.
But it got better.
The thing is, all in one custom hardware solutions will always, at first, beat out general purpose computing. But those custom hardware solutions are expensive, and slow, to engineer. Now if you are Apple and you can manage to find economies of scale to do everything in house, great!
But Amiga didn't have that scale. They had custom in house everything, which, and they were competing against not just Microsoft, but literally every other consumer PC hardware manufacturer on the planet who were in a fight to the death to drop prices on DOS/Windows PCs peripheral by peripheral.