A special 'limited period' promotion on the Amiga 1000 was announced by Commodore in America this week, which lopped $500 off the RRP and brought it down to $1295 (£900 in those days). The promotion was designed to 'rapidly build the hardware base which will then see more companies write for the machine,' according to Paul Lazovick of Commodore International. In other words, no-one was buying the bloody thing and no-one was releasing software for it.

This 'promotion', which was scheduled to end in May, became permanent (although the UK price of £1500 wasn't revised downwards until much later) and also put the 256k, single floppy drive machine in the same ballpark as Atari's $1000 1040STF, although Lazovick denied this had any bearing on the decision: "I can't say the move is to compete - the Atari is not a strong competitor," he snorted.

Equally scathing about the Atari - and the Amiga - was Apple's chairman John Scully, flushed with the success of seeing his company's profits triple in the previous quarter against the same period in 1985.

With a pomposity worthy of his namesake, Scully predicted that the future of mainstream personal computing lay in two architectures, the IBM PC and the Macintosh. This prophecy was based on his view that many software developers wouldn't bother writing for either the ST or Amiga platform. Well, he was right about the IBM PC bit anyway...