Re: In an alternate reality somewhere
The Macintosh had lots of advantages over Amiga, but the design of the system software and the all-in-one form factor were the biggest ones. Amiga was a spectacular home computer, and it started the whole category of “multi-media”, but it really wasn't good for productivity software once you moved away from video graphics - there wasn't any word processor as easy-to-use as MacWrite, or a spreadsheet as easy to use as Excel (the original version of Excel was developed for Mac; there was never a DOS version).
The question of whether Macintosh was worth the crazy price Apple charged is a different one, and the answer to that is probably “no” for people like you or me who come from a technology background and know how this stuff works, but for many buyers, the price was definitely worth the savings they gained in being able to use a computer to write their documents without having to memorize arcane command sequences.
The consistency of the Macintosh, even when you went from one vendor’s software package to another’s was completely revolutionary: Apple was the first computer maker to take this idea seriously, and so the developer documentation didn’t just tell you what the libraries could do, it also told you how you were supposed to present these functions to the user. (This was a key concept in Macintosh from its beginnings as a text-based system under Jef Raskin’s direction, long before Jobs arrived and turned it into a GUI system to undermine the Lisa project that he’d just been booted off)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
