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Comment by bogantech | Hacker News Reader

As long as you'd never seen a Macintosh or Amiga

Macintosh were still black and white at the time, and really expensive, more so than PCs, a tradition that never changed.

Amiga yes, but it got the fame of only being good for people doing games, thus it had a hard time getting adoption on business offices.

Windows 2 came out in December 1987. The Macintosh II (which introduced "full" palettized 8-bit color) had already come out in March 1987.

While I stand corrected on the year being the same, there is the question of the price, which offered a 16 bit VGA, not 8 bit colour palette as you mentioned, at more affordable price point.

16-color VGA, not 16 bits (which would be 65536 colors).

And you could buy a decent car for the price of the Mac II. Base model was twice the cost of a well specced PC/AT at the time.

In terms of price it was in the same league as Sun and Silicon Graphics workstations, not the PC.

Amiga Workbench had a comically bad interface, though?

I don't see why it would be called "comically bad" compared to its contemporaries. The 1.x series was a bit spartan, sure. But the UI itself afforded several unique features that weren't found anywhere else. The ability to have multiple "screens" or viewports with independent resolutions and color depths and drag them down to navigate between them seamlessly was quite useful, as was the ability to move windows on top/bottom of the stack without focusing the window (which is largely a forgotten paradigm, outside of forced "always on top" windows which is just a bandage over the lack of decoupled focus and window depth). AmigaOS certainly got better for the most part with the 2.x and 3.x series. Commodore's mismanagement is largely what did the Amiga in, not any technical aspects.

I was talking about the looks of the version 1. Technical side of things seems quite solid, and things have clearly improved by 2.x.

I only became an Amiga owner in the 21st century, when it was all over bar the shouting, but friends owned them at the time and loved them. (I had an Acorn Archimedes with RISC OS 2.)

As I understand it, the weird colours of AmigaDOS 1.x (blue, white, black and orange) were chosen to deliver usable contrast on an analogue TV set. This not only means a blurry CRT, but also that, given where the Amiga was designed and made, it was an NTSC TV.

http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1.html

I've never watched NTSC TV in my life but I remember the 1980s joke definition: "Never Twice the Same Colour".

They have a good excuse for it. They designed everything to look readable/usable on average home TV. Add the loss of quality in RF modulator and you figure the crazy colour scheme with ultra simple icons.

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