The Amiga and Atari ST were considered extreme competitors in the mid
to late 80's. In fact, Jack Tramiel, founder and president of
Commodore actually left Commodore to work for Atari to build/promote
the Atari ST, right before the Amiga was pushed in the market.

Between company founders and users, there was a sort of "religious
war" between the Amiga and Atari ST, with users of one bashing the
other. After all, egos had to be justified due to the prices people
paid for the things.

They both had their advantages and disadvantages, and they were
incompatible with each other (except maybe for a joystick or
something). Many people thought about what they wanted to do with a 16
bit, high graphic machine before they plunked down the money. They
both supported 4096 colors, just not all at once. The Amiga was better
at producing 4096 colors at once, especially when it came to images,
using its HAM rendering mode. The GEM based operating system on the ST
had some familiarity for those who used GEM before on older, erstwhile
systems.

At first, the Amiga and ST had, in retrospect, very cheesy looking
operating systems. But, to those who in the past saw them as new, they
were great to work with. With the introduction of Workbench 2.0 for
the Amiga, the ST stood little chance against someone who wanted an
attractive looking GUI.

Windowing was able to be done on both. The Amiga hardware was designed
for true multitasking. Where they both were able to run multiple
programs in separate movable windows on the operating system main
screen, the Amiga could multitask on several screens at once. A
feature demonstrated quite often by being able to grab the title bar
of the operating system desktop and "drag" it down to reveal another
program's screen and that application working in the background. It
was not unusual for some people to have several programs running on
their own screens like this.

They were both strong as multimedia resources. The Atari ST had
built-in MIDI capability. It was a great computer for those who wanted
to use it as a music sequencer. The Amiga was geared for graphics and
video, due to it's inherent NTSC (or PAL) video architecture. That's
why products like genlocks and the Video Toaster became popular.
People were producing their own movies and animations. They were even
able to create their own titles and graphic overlays for their home
movies. Remember, this was possible in the mid 80's on the Amiga when
only TV studios could do this kind of stuff with expensive hardware.

Gaming.... What can I say, Amiga all the way. Although the ST did
well, I just was never fully impressed with ST gaming. The hardware
design of the Amiga made it very useful for game programmers to create
impressive feats within their games as far as presentation and
playability.

When the Amiga 2000 (and higher) models came out, you now had internal
expansion capabilities. This means you could throw in hard drives,
processor accelerators, networking cards, etc. inside a single case,
like the PC. The ST didn't have those advantages. Everything needed to
be tethered to the base system, even though solutions did eventually
come out for the ST to compensate, in much the same way as they did
for the Amiga 500/600/1200.

The Amiga did have a minor drawback that was known between the two.
The Amiga floppy disk access was slow compared to the ST. The ST had
what I think was the Twister format that allowed it to read/write
floppies at extreme speeds (for the time).

However, I believe the Amiga had a greater market share, probably due
to the European influence. The Amiga was a big hit in Europe. That's
probably the reason why Broderbund decided NOT to make Print Shop for
the ST. They assumed there were not enough potential consumers using
Atari ST to give them a return on their investment.

-----

Now, to take care of some of your questions...

Hooking the 1581 to the Amiga can be done with a special adapter. The
only one I know of is this:

http://sta.c64.org/frodoiec.html

You'll need special software to use it though. The question becomes,
why do you want to do this? You won't be able to read Amiga disks with
it. The adapter is primarily used to help archive Commodore software
using an Amiga, instead of a similar cable for use on a PC.

--- In classiccommodore@yahoogroups.com, "Bro. Luby D. Jackson"
<ldjackson@...> wrote:
>
> I realize this list is for the Commodore. Thank you all for helping me
> to understand more about the Amiga and it's place in the computer world.