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That, and the fact that Commodore didn't have a clue how to market it. Outside of gaming and video production, it was very much an unknown product. For somebody interested in powerful operating systems due to exposure to Unix, it was a great system. It was small, cheap and fast, but had a powerful GUI combined with pre-emptive multitasking. AmigaDOS was a little arcane due to its roots, but people ported Korn shell clones and other Unix commands in fairly short order.
It wasn't until Mac OS X that there was a replacement that had a useful Unix-like shell, pre-emptive multitasking and a sophisticated but simple GUI. Still, even with Mac OS X, there's more than a couple of things that could be learned from the Amiga, and I still laugh when I see how much memory this all takes. Carl Sassenrath and his engineers were smart buggers and I wonder if Carl's work at Apple would have got us here sooner and more elegantly had Apple's political culture been better back in the late 80s.
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DrGoon
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