Windows killed off the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. It almost killed off Apple until Apple bought out NexT to make MacOSX and bring back Steve Jobs.
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No. It was Microsoft buying 10% of Apple to keep it afloat. Otherwise they would have quite literally run out of money in about 90 days. They brought jobs back and took Microsoft money in August 1997 as a desperate effort after 18 months of consecutive losses and their lowest stock price ever in July. I bought stock when Jobs came back in 1997, one of my first investments. Sold it in 2000, and yeah I'm still lousy at this.
Microsoft was their "lender" of last resort https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/84258/date-1997-microsof...
Commodore management killed Amiga, Microsoft didn't need to do much effort trying it.
It was DOOM actually beside Commodore management.
It showed that software rendering on increasing faster Intel CPU's could outmatch the Amiga chipset which stagnated because
a) The original chip/OS architects left Commodore b) It was too closely tied to the Motorola 68000 timing/bus architecture which did not match Intel.
I dont think it was Doom. The IBM and clones ran Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. Wordperfect replaced a lot of expensive word processing systems. Lotus had no real competitors on mini or mainframe computers. Lotus was a true killer app that upended office work completely.
Once you had those and a serial terminal program for your legacy system there was no way the 8 bit inspired computers like amiga would ever compete again. Macs were a distant but respectable competitor but only in niche markets. Then networking shut the door completely. If you system couldn't do ethernet you were boned.
The workstation vendors had a brief period where they had a shot but the PC market caught up too fast.
Doom was fun but by 1993 when it was released the PC had already dominated the market for over a decade.
>Then networking shut the door completely. If you system couldn't do ethernet you were boned.
I did ARCnet for quite a long time before 10base2 and eventually 10 Base-T took off.
If you were really poor, you could use "The $25 network" from Information Modes and serial ports.
Back in that era in Australia, offices all seemed to either be strung together with a spiderweb of coax for 10-base-2 or some variant of AppleTalk/PhoneNet. Can't say I ever saw anything of ARCnet except in magazines. Latticenet killed it all in an incredibly short period of time, seemed like a matter of months back then where piles of coax could be found in the skips at the back of buildings and contracters were literally everywhere putting in twisted pair. Crazy times.
What were you using ARCnet for?
If I recall correctly, we booted MS-DOS via LAN, and used NetBUI to access server shares. Sometimes we had workstations linked into MultiLink which allowed multiple users under MS-DOS.