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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Amiga probably had a higher proportion of hobby programmers than any other platform at the time.

I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my recollection was that even by the time of the introduction of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000) Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms of users by the mid-to-late 80s.

It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab).

Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal.

It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death.

Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI

The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers.

Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me.

In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story.

I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.

> EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.

Actually, there is one company still around called Tune Tracker Systems[0]. They make radio-automation software, starting out on BeOS and are now on Haiku.

[0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com

3-7 million is somewhat proportional to the # of TI 99/4a (my first computer) which sold 2.5Million or so, but many of those were probably on the fire sale, and at least some of them probably went to backup parts for people that already had it. While the 99/4a is remembered somewhat fondly by those who had it (speech synthesizer, expansion modules for p-code, forth and others), it wasn't a system that had a huge amount of development done for it, and died a pretty quick death.

"In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story."

Not really I was in the army back then stationed in Germany and had a buddy that was clinically insane over his Amiga's. Yes I agree the graphics was forking amazing at least a decade maybe two ahead of it's time but you couldn't play Warlord or Wizardry on it so he used my beige PC clone running Dr. Doss

They had the same problem in Europe not enough sales but the owners was bat-shit crazy and wrote a lot of crazy little programs to make them semi-functional.

Amiga died When Commodore bought it for the Lorraine/Sage IV code base.

Coding GUI apps was a nightmare.

Sure but at least it shipped with an OS that had a GUI and multitasking in an era when the vast majority of personal computers had neither. Let's not forget how early this was. Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented. Everyone was still figuring out what a GUI OS should be. It wasn't until years later when Unix-based workstation OSes migrated down to consumer desktops that things started stabilizing. Before that we were pioneers roughing it on the frontier.

I had an Amiga 1000 and did hobby programming on it starting in 85. At the time everything friends and I wrote only used the OS to open a custom screen because all the fun was experimenting with graphics. Most of the apps for the first couple years either used the CLI or just put up a window with a few drop downs and otherwise rendered their own UX inside it.

I think I would have been better off with a PC, Turbo Pascal, and no GUI programming to distract me from more interesting hobby coding.

> Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented

You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for the next decade. The one thing it didn’t have was multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder.

The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather than what ended up being AmigaOS.

Writing GUI apps on using base OS interfaces on anything was a nightmare. Still is.

What made it nicer was having IDEs with GUI designers. Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.

> Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.

Huh?

There have been Smalltalk language implementations based on MS Win controls (as-if they were MS VB programs).

http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html

Also Digitalk Smalltalk for MS Win and OS/2. Also IBM Smalltalk.

There have been Smalltalk language implementations that emulated native widget Look & Feel (various MS Win, OS/2, Motif/CDE, MacOS). Obviously putting a lot of effort into providing "native-looking" applications.

Common-place to copy a Smalltalk app from a Mac to a MS Win PC and switch the emulation from MacOS to MSWin.

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