I think that would be a nice summary.
;-)
People this side of the Atlantic will also mention BBC, Spectrum and Amstrad.
Oh. Oric, Dragon, and a few others as well.
I was surprised when I learned the Apple II+ couldn't do lowercase when my very first II+ clone could.
I was even more surprised when I figured out a clone I owned was so close to the original II+ that it also couldn't do lowercase.
M.U.L.E. is best on the Ataris.
What hurt Commodore was technologically clueless management. Just one example - they didnt update Audio/Floppy controller chip for 9 years because original designer Glenn Keller left (maybe even fired, you never know with Commodore) in 1988, nobody else knew how to and Commodore didnt want to hire/pay competent people. As a result Commodore was shipping computers with 720KB drives all the way to 1994 while on PC 1.44MB was standard since 1988.
> What hurt Commodore was technologically clueless management.
That, too, but all the bus timings on the Amigas tied to NTSC (it sprung out of a gaming console, after all), the complexity of the custom chips (they'd all need to be iterated to keep up with new Motorola processors AND what was being offered in PC clones), resulting in multiple buses, fast/chip RAM, and so on. The Amigas were incredibly capable for their time, but were not elegant computers and did not evolve, in part, because it'd be too costly for Commodore to do so. A lot of the features of the Amiga made sense in games (planar graphics), but made none for a general purpose computer. What's obvious now (hindsight is always 20-20) is that they should have segmented the line, have a gaming platform at the low end, and a general purpose computer, running the same OS but with things like VGA ports and preemptive multitasking with memory protection and virtual memory. And they SHOULD have taken the Sun proposal of selling 3000's as low-end UNIX machines seriously.
As for the floppy, I have no idea why they didn't just adopt a market standard FDC and let the original's floppy side rot. The audio part was quite impressive but I doubt anyone was using the FDC side without the OS in the middle.
Another thing that always surprises me is that both made PCs with little or no commonality with their "proprietary" lines. Using the same chassis for Amigas, STs and their PCs would save money, as well as putting Amiga and ST keyboards on PCs (this was all before the PC-101 layout).
Atari made moves in 90, 91 to get more serious about their OS development, hiring Eric Smith fulltime to work on MultiTOS, etc. Smart move, but too late.
The low-end Unix workstation thing was a meme that just didn't work out in practice. Both Atari (with the TT running SysV) and Commodore tried at this market and failed. There was no buyer for it. I still remember the snarky little headline on a snippet in UnixWorld about Atari's TT & Unix: "Up from toyland."
The comparison point for the ST should be the IBM PC or the Apple Mac, not the Amiga. Productivity computers that were many multiples the cost. In 1985, 1986 there was nowhere else where you were going to get that much memory and clock rate for the price Atari was charging.
That plus the crisp paper white monochrome monitor (no dubious interlaced flicker), the Mac-like UI, PC compatible floppies. They had potential for a real winner, but he problem is that Atari failed to effectively iterate. At least not until it was too late. The Falcon was a great machine.
The inverse color scheme? Not so great... which people are finally admitting 40 years later.
The 2600 though, I just could never be excited by. I feel it could only be truly appreciated by someone in the actual late 70s, before anything better had ever been experienced. Once that ship sailed, with the NES especially, it could never really go back. But I'm sure people with fond memories of those days would disagree with me! (And youths these days will probably call NES and SNES barbaric and no fun!)