A history of the Amiga, part 10: The downfall of Commodore

https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/01/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-10-the-downfall-of-commodore/

by msh • 9 years ago

61 23 9 years ago

jonSson99• 9 years ago

great Amiga movie out, didn't know about the Euro demo scene. I didn't get one until the Video Toaster. https://fmovies.se/film/from-bedrooms-to-billions-the-amiga-...

rullgrus• 9 years ago

Thanks for the documentary link!

eriknstr• 9 years ago

Tried to download it using youtube-dl, their server returned a funny message.

HTTP Error 503: Have you the ability to read quickly as the light?

PS: The video is actually hosted on Google Video. Copying the relevant Google Video URL from devtools network monitor allows youtube-dl to fetch the video correctly.

prefect42• 9 years ago

Bad link, goes right to some Android virus or scareware page.

Zardoz84• 9 years ago

I had the luck of buying an A1200 a few years ago. Really impressive machine for 1992. Compared against my PC on the early 90s... well Can't run DooM, but have a lot of nice games. The majority of the games that I played from 1990 to 1995 was 2d games. Games that could have ran on these A1200 without any issue.

squarefoot• 9 years ago

Watch also the "Deathbed Vigil" video by Dave Haynie, an interesting and moving account of what was happening during the last days of C=. I would recommend to watch it especially if you never touched an Amiga and always wondered why those nerds adored it so much.

setpatchaddress• 9 years ago

I don't think it's aged well. I tried watching it recently and couldn't get past the first five minutes.

orionblastar• 9 years ago

Kim Justice has another series of videos on Youtube about Commodore, Atari, and Amiga. She did a lot of research on them.

Commodore did not market the Amiga in the USA, and the PC Clones caught up in 1987 with VGA and Sound Cards. When Windows was preloaded with a mouse on PC Clones nobody needed the Amiga. The Amiga was cheaper than the Macintosh, but PC clones were cheaper than the Amiga.

Amiga had mostly video games, and Commodore could not get business apps written for it to compete with PC Clones nor get many computer dealers to carry them as Jack Tramel burned computer dealers by putting the Vic-20 and C64 in toy stores and discount stores.

toyg• 9 years ago

We complain about today's management class, but in the '80s scumbaggery and general thievery really were at Far-West levels.

The Amiga was a fabulous game machine and a great computer.

bleair• 9 years ago

Rather amazing how inept management was. The amiga was way ahead of its time (the software architecture and design choices) and thus it might never have succeeded, but the management actively did things to increase cost of production (the a600, the various tower versions of the 2000 and 3000) and harm its own sales.

pmoriarty3• 9 years ago

I fell in love with the Amiga ever since I saw an Amiga 1000 in the first issue of Amiga World.

Amigas were clearly light years ahead of virtually all other personal computers at the time -- with the arguable exception of the Atari ST, which had the reputation of being better for music. But the Amiga was better for games and had better graphics. As a hardcore gamer, I knew instantly that the Amiga was what I wanted. Somehow I convinced my parents to get me an Amiga 500, as my second computer (after the TI99/4A) and spent a lot of time collecting games and demos, and connecting to BBS'.

Somehow the rest of the world didn't really see the clear superiority of the Amiga, and stuck with their boring IBM PC's and Macintoshes. Commodore collapsed, and virtually every other personal computer became extinct, as most people just wanted to buy whatever they had used at work (IBM PC) or school (Apple). This was an early lesson for me that superior technology does not always win. In fact, it's often the inferior technologies that win, for a variety of reasons -- especially marketing.

I kept my Amiga for a long time, but eventually migrated to Unix (SunOS, Irix, Dec Alpha's OSF/1, and Solaris), and eventually to Linux on a PC. It had become increasingly clear that newer tech had left the Amiga in the dust. Some people still stuck with the Amiga long after I stopped using it, but I donated mine long ago. Sometimes I wish I'd kept it, so I could bring it out for nostalgia's sake every now and then, but it's a lot of equipment to lug around.

I often wonder how the personal computer landscape would have changed had the Amiga won. Back then, it seemed like Microsoft, the IBM PC, and Apple have kept us back 10 or 20 years with their dominance.

BjoernKW• 9 years ago

it seemed like Microsoft, the IBM PC, and Apple have kept us back 10 or 20 years with their dominance.

I used to think so, too. However, the Amiga might've just been a fluke. The very architecture that made it unique and so far ahead of its time also was its limitation in terms of technology. There wasn't really a way forward beyond the AAA chipset, which never even made it into production. Hombre, the proposed next generation of the Amiga, was supposed to be very different from and mostly incompatible with previous Amiga computers.

The software had serious limitations from today's point of view, too. There was no memory protection and no multi-user capability. Adapting Amiga OS accordingly would have taken serious effort, perhaps to the point it wouldn't have been recognisable anymore.

So maybe, while a truly awesome machine the Amiga sadly enough was just an outlier of computing technology that was the right thing at the right time but wasn't viable in the long run.

flohofwoe• 9 years ago

I've been recently thinking about this a lot. I think the critical year was 92/93 between the release of Wolfenstein3D and Doom. These were the PC's killer apps that showed everyone that a powerful generic hardware can be better than a highly specialised "hardware game engine" like the 8-bit homecomputers and later the Amiga and ST. But at this time the Amiga's architecture was already 8 years old and pretty much unchanged apart from the incremental 1200 update (just imagine what happened in the same time span after '93 on the PC!).

I have to disagree about the OS being limited, even by today's standard. It was sort of cobbled together under the hood, but the end result was unbelievable when you put it next to a PC or even Mac of the mid 80's to early 90's.

Even in 1990, when I was finally able to buy my own Amiga it was like alien technology (even compared to a Mac Plus, which was completely unaffordable).

digi_owl4• 9 years ago

The problem of the Amiga was basically that it was clock cycle linked. To really get things going with the platform you had to count cycles so neither the CPU not the chipset got hung up waiting for the other.

This made the platform frozen from the moment it shipped.

In contrast the PC was less rigid, and only really had the x86 ISA and the BIOS memory map in common (and even the latter is falling by the wayside in recent years).

There was also the whole clone aspect. The Amiga stood and fell with its parent company, Commodore. Once Compaq and the others cloned the BIOS chip, IBM could belly up and the PC platform would barely blink.

pjmlp4• 9 years ago

I like to think its architecture is what gave rise to the idea of having dedicated sound and graphics cards on all computers and game consoles.

I followed another path, settling on Windows, after a decade of UNIX.

The UNIX culture never seemed to be much welcoming to the demoscene culture, which had more points of contact with the gaming culture on Windows.

For a while in the late 90's there was a website that tried to be Poet for GNU/Linux. They never managed to have more than a few demos there.

pmoriarty3• 9 years ago

"The UNIX culture never seemed to be much welcoming to the demoscene culture"

I'm not so sure it's that so much as the demoscene is not interested in Linux. I've tried to drum up interest on pouet in creating demos for Linux, and no one seemed interested, and some were even hostile to the idea.

digi_owl4• 9 years ago

Not sure i follow, as the trend had been ongoing ever since the C64 (if not before).

As for the whole demoscene thing, i am not surprised given that it grew out of the cracking scene on micros. By being more elaborate versions of the intros cracking groups added to games (and those seems have made something of a comeback as cracking groups have to provide their own installers because games rarely ship as complete ISOs these days).

That said, i never got the impression that the demoscene was much interested in the PC platform once it started sprouting soundcards and graphics accelerators. I guess it just became hard to judge the prowess of the demo developers when the platform was not a fixed package.

A history of the Amiga, part 10: The downfall of Commodore

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