>>IBM did make corporate America at least think about PCs ("Nobody every got fired for buying IBM") but blew in not getting an exclusive on the OS and enabling the clone market, nearly lost the farm on micro channel architecture which was a great technical innovation but a bad business call.
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>>Amiga blew the doors off of everything that was out there and could have easily sidelined Apple - if Steve Jobs had been running Commodore. I was part of a flagship Amiga users group in 87 when the 500 cam out and we couldn't get anyone from Commodore - which was located about 3 miles from where we met - to send anyone over to talk to us. Software developers were pretty much on their own. Europe loved it, but the American marketing and community support was amazingly bad.
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>I favored the Atari ST1040 as the ideal business machine: running DR's GEM OS "the second operating system that runs on everything" (meaning on the Atari ST and the IBM PC). Starting in '86 I ran dBMan on the ST, and then on my first IBM clone.

Yupp, 68000 adressing 1 and then glorious 4 MB of linear memory were wonderful - esp. as disks were much slower and many index tricks not introduced. And that very sharp black on white screen... Had my own overlay system for large data sizes debugged when EMS, extended memory and the 386 were standard enough in PCs to have grown solid libs. Had some bookkeeping prg's, but for my back then tasks dBMan was too slow - but on the PC side fox had hooks for low level routines allowing newer stuff to move into dbf's...