Haven’t computers come a long way since the 1980s!
Look at this:
http://www.ccworld.co.uk/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=67_134&products_id=1854
It cost $4,999.00 with 20mb hard drive. $5,799.00 with 40mb hard drive, back in 1987.
They’ve certainly got cheaper … but are they really more capable ?
I’d be hard pushed to find much a modern desktop can do that say an Amiga couldn’t
…wat.
How about this - Web 2.0?!
Or, render anything to the screen at 720p?
Or, play a DVD?
Add in a better graphics card to a big box Amiga and you can easily render to 720p (see below) … your other 2 examples are purely a lack of software development for AmigaOS (as it came preinstalled), not a hardware “capability” problem.
Now show me a “PC” that can have it’s whole architecture changed by simply adding a PowerPC accelerator board
I’m pretty sure AmigaOS 4.1 is capable of both playback of CSS scrambled commercial DVD’s and has a modern web browser … and all this 20 YEARS after it’s ‘supposed’ to be dead, and on a CPU your router would probably laugh at :o
Amiga A4000 running AmigaOS4.1 (198Mhz Cyberstorm PPC board)
Odyssey web browser playing Youtube videos on AmigaOS 4
Amiga A4000 running at 1280x1024 (and mention of it running 1600x1200) … see around 17:20
DVPlayer running on AmigaOS4.1 (The Amiga is perfectly capable of having a DVD drive attached)
http://www.amigaos.net/software/71/dvplayer
Can’t view them at work, but will try to look later today - very interesting!
My netbook wouldn’t run YouTube properly, and that had a 1.6GHz Atom!
As i said … price aside, have we really come a long way, or have more powerful PC’s just lead to bloated and badly written code that doesn’t make the best use of available resources forcing you to keep buying more powerful hardware ?
Heck the Amigas Zorro II / Zorro III expansion slots even had auto-config way before PCI with “plug-n-play” 
I guess we’ll never know as they are mutally exclusive events. I mean, if the x86 architecture never took off, who’s to know what PowerPC would have achieved and how software would have moved on. There has been (and still is, to a degree) a constant drive by hardware manufacturers like Intel to drive potential performance on, and it has led to laziness from a coding perspective. I remember reading a forum post by someone doing a computer science degree, that they had an assignment where they had to code in assembly for an embedded device, and couldn’t believe the memory restrictions. I’m old enough to remember tweaking my config.sys & autoexec.bat files to eek out a few more kilobytes of conventional memory just so I could run my game! I’m pretty sure conventional memory doesn’t even exist now in today’s modern kernels.
So, if hardware capacity hadn’t moved on at the rate it has (driven by a genuine need from developers, like it used to be in the 80s/early 90s, rather than by “we can, so we will” attitude that Intel has), maybe we would still see the tight coding that was needed back then just to get programs to run on the hardware of the day. I remember seeing on Steam recently, there’s a game, can’t remember what it’s called, but the minimum requirement is 8Gb of RAM, with 16Gb recommended! I can’t get my head round what it’s using all that RAM for, I really can’t. Video RAM yeah, it could have big textures or something, but what is the game doing that games 10 years ago weren’t doing, from a RAM perspective? Surely it’s gotta be just bloated out, loading loads of unnecessary stuff into RAM (maybe it creates a RAMdisk and just loads the iso into it, lol)
I don’t know much about coding (correction I don’t know anything about coding) but I have 3 old Xboxes running XBMC and what these guys have managed to squeeze out of 64mb of ram is amazing
Graeme
64MB of RAM was mainframe supercomputer spec back in the 80s/90’s … and never in a million years would that ever be necessary for a ‘home’ computer :o
I remember a 4MB EDO SIMM costing more than a brand new Amiga A1200 and was considered a HUGE amount at the time (and the A1200 wasn’t cheap)
(that’s 4 megabytes not gigabytes … the A1200 came with 2MB and was considered a fast home PC at the time capable of top end gaming and the A4000 again with 2MB out of the box was considered a high end professional workstation capable of TV quality video work)
My point is - have we ‘really’ moved on AT ALL, PC’s have become ever more powerful, but not necessarily more capable.
As I said, I’m hard pushed to think of anything a modern PC can do that a 90’s computer couldn’t … indeed at a lot of tasks they now seem slower (no doubt down to badly written software, but still…) :o
AmigaOS/Workbench was a fully pre-emptive multitasking OS which used to run from an 880k floppy disk and be more responsive on a 25Mhz CPU than modern Windows (and in a lot of cases Linux), yet was “pretty much” as capable of an OS/DE albeit with a slightly uglier UI (more a limitation of the hardware costs of the time than “pretty” not being possible).
Just seems to me that 95% of hardware advances have been squandered on crappily written software (including the OS).
Think about it … a modern PC should (as far as I’m concerned) boot in the blink of an eye … instead they boot no faster than an Amiga of the 80’s/90’s booting from a floppy disk (stick an HDD in an Amiga and it’d boot faster than an i7 with an SSD)
They should fire up an office suite more quickly, and that office site should run in minimal RAM leaving plenty for other tasks … instead office fires up no quicker than Wordsworth, hasn’t that many more useful additional feature, comes on a DVD rather than a floppy, and eats memory orders of magnitude more than the entire RAM of an 80’s Cray supercomputer.
Notice anything wrong here…
Think about it .. a modern PC should (as far as I'm concerned) boot in the blink of an eye .. instead they boot no faster than an Amiga of the 80's/90's booting from a floppy disk (stick an HDD in an Amiga and it'd boot faster than an i7 with an SSD) They should fire up an office suite more quickly, and that office site should run in minimal RAM leaving plenty for other tasks .. instead office fires up no quicker than Wordsworth, hasn't that many more useful additional feature, comes on a DVD rather than a floppy, and eats memory orders of magnitude more than the entire RAM of an 80's Cray supercomputer.Notice anything wrong here…
I had to read these posts quite slowly to get a general understanding of what you all were saying ( hardware/systems not my strongpoint lol). But yes you have some pertinent points here Mark!
Did you ever own an Amiga?
I wonder if one could work well with a Linux distro!
Yeah I’ve owned a few Amigas (A500, A600, and A1200), though never a “big box” Amiga like the A4000
There used to be a Debian port for the Amigas Motorola 680x0 processor, though I never tried it and it’s a dead project now (and I don’t own an Amiga any more 
) … there are PowerPC ports but I don’t know how well (or if) they’d run on an Amiga with a PowerPC expansion board.
My guess would be that Linux wouldn’t work very well as I doubt if it’d make good use of the Amigas custom chip sets (OCS, ECS, and AGA)
[EDIT]
Apparently there’s an effort to bring back the Debian m68k port:
https://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/
That would make the Atari STE a SUPER computer, as they used to wipe the floor with Amiga’s. :
Oh go away with your Atari rubbish … everyone knows the ST/STE was a mistake purchase where the idiots that bought them then felt the need to defend the mistake :
Hey it’s like being back at school again
Say what you want about your Atari’s and Amiga’s, I still love my BBC B+.
I still run an emulator on the Linux box, play around with basic and still play games on it.
OK who’s gonna come on touting the ZX Spectrum :o
Sure, why not - I’d love it if I could set up my laptop to play the tape loading sound from BIOS to logon screen 
+1 for Speccy.
I loved the little printer that burned to a ticker tape roll covered in a metal coat.
Sure, a few seconds of it would be novel … 15mins of it, then another 15mins when the load fails, then another 15mins just to confirm the tape was screwed, not so much
OK who's gonna come on touting the ZX Spectrum
That was my first computer and the only computer I managed to write a program on if I remember right it used a language called BBC Basic, wish I still had it, they’re collectors items now and worth a bit of money I believe
Another collectors item worth a bit of cash I wish I still had is my old Sony Betamax video recorder, I just paid £150 for one off of ebay just so i can get some footage I have of my daughters when they were children
Graeme