Commodore and the Amiga what went wrong.

[DeluxePiantXX]

I always wonder what Commodore might look like if they had choosen another path. For me the worst decision was to produce the Amiga 600 and sell it as a new "computer". They depended for too long on old technology.

1990 and at least 1991 the Amiga 500+ should have improved to the following specs.

68020 CPU with at least 14 MHz
2 MB CHIP
2 MB FAST
at least an 8-bit Color Palette and a resolution of 640x400 or 640x480 without interlace or a full VGA Compatible System - e.g. working together with ATI, TsengLabs or CirrusLogic.
Built-In Harddisk Support SCSI or IDE
Professional Solution Add-On Card for MS-DOS / PC-AT compatible System
Easy to say but already with a built in network-component. (Ethernet etc.)

So perhaps someone has similar thoughts or how the perfect Amiga 500+ should have been manufactured.

 

[Amiga Forever]

I was going get Amiga 500 Batman pack in May of 1991 but they sold out as went for Amiga 500+ Cartoon Classic Pack(still amazing!)

I seem agree with Amiga 500+ spec would be at least 14mhz with more Ram and Hard drive support as well.

 

[Sardine]

Naa 500+ should have stayed as it was. It was well supported for hdd / extra ram / accelerators etc.

They should have gone straight to the 1200 as is to keep costs down with an internal 72pin simm socket to add up to 8mb fast ram and an empty but there fpu socket for any budding lightwave fans.

Cant have cost that much more for a slight redesign to accommodate 72pin simm socket and a socket for a fpu.

That would have been the perfect amiga and would have lasted much longer.

The atari ste had it right with the addition of simm sockets to add more ram.

 

[JHanna]

People forget how much RAM cost back in the day. Also adding Ethernet would've been very expensive, and almost pointless, unless on a Big Box Amiga, and there were Zorro cards for that.

I've been mulling the same question over for the last 30 years, and I've recently come to the conclusion that nothing could have been done. Without the developers it was only a matter of time. Sad but true.

 

[gilesjuk]

Pretty simple in my opinion. They bought the chipset and didn't retain the designers of it. (They did have Jay Miner as a consultant for a while)

Commodore marketing couldn't work out what to do with it. Just watch the original Amiga TV advert, it's nonsensical.

The original OS was rushed and not up to scratch. Amiga OS 2 was how it should have been on launch.

Either the OS needed to be in ROM or a small hard disk needed to be standard. Booting workbench from floppy was a major pain.

Amiga Inc was a very nimble and cheap operation, but as soon as the Amiga went to Commodore the pace of development slowed down and it became more expensive to develop. The AAA chipset was behind schedule, if it had come out on time it would have given the Amiga a new lease of life.

 

[qz3fwd]

The Amiga was doomed at the outset due to selecting Motorola which could not or would not compete and conceded the market eventually. The second reason it was doomed is that while initially technically superior for a couple years, Commodore was far to small a company to keep pace technologically with hardware developments compared to the behemoth of the PC industry and that combined with the overall industry not supporting it due to it being incompatible with everything else.

Thirdly they were doomed due to almost 0 market presence in the USA. Europe was far too small a market alone.

On top of that we’re all the bad decision they made.

 

[DeluxePiantXX]

The Amiga was doomed at the outset due to selecting Motorola which could not or would not compete and conceded the market eventually. The second reason it was doomed is that while initially technically superior for a couple years, Commodore was far to small a company to keep pace technologically with hardware developments compared to the behemoth of the PC industry and that combined with the overall industry not supporting it due to it being incompatible with everything else.

Thirdly they were doomed due to almost 0 market presence in the USA. Europe was far too small a market alone.

On top of that we’re all the bad decision they made.

The not existing market presence in the USA was indeed a major problem. They should have send the machine to every school and every university and ask software developers to program education- and commercial software. Apple did that in the past and they still exist. And Apple had some hard years during the end of the 1990s.
In Europe the success of the Amiga 500 was due to the easy potential as a game machine. I totally agree that the problem was the Commodore management.
The major problem regardless of the ram and memory prices was the missing harddisk and the focus on higher working resolutions to profit from commercial use.

Why was the Atari so succesful in the music industry because of the midi-port. And the decision for Motorola was not bad at all.

The root of the failure of Commodore was the model politics beginning from 1990 until 1992.

 

[dkasten]

I always wonder what Commodore might look like if they had choosen another path. For me the worst decision was to produce the Amiga 600 and sell it as a new "computer". They depended for too long on old technology.

1990 and at least 1991 the Amiga 500+ should have improved to the following specs.

68020 CPU with at least 14 MHz
2 MB CHIP
2 MB FAST
at least an 8-bit Color Palette and a resolution of 640x400 or 640x480 without interlace or a full VGA Compatible System - e.g. working together with ATI, TsengLabs or CirrusLogic.
Built-In Harddisk Support SCSI or IDE
Professional Solution Add-On Card for MS-DOS / PC-AT compatible System
Easy to say but already with a built in network-component. (Ethernet etc.)

So perhaps someone has similar thoughts or how the perfect Amiga 500+ should have been manufactured.

Honestly, i've had a lot of time to think about this..

Looking back on it after 35 years... there's only one thing that that could have saved Commodore.

A meteor entering Earth's atmosphere with just the right velocity and mass to split apart into two chunks; one that would land firmly on Medhi Ali, and the other on Irving Gould. David Pleasance would have then been the designated survivor, and would have returned Commodore's US operations to profitability.

Joking aside, the only thing I think could have saved Commodore?

An open-source port of the Amiga kernel + AmigaDOS to x86, with a community support network geared toward college students and hobbyists in place by 1992.

By 1992, the writing was on the wall. The 32-bit era was on the horizon, and the Amiga's hardware, while still impressive, was starting to show its age. Rather than being truly groundbreaking and OMG-level advanced, the AGA chipset only really brought the Amiga up to a level where PCs would eventually find themselves within a matter of 6 months or so's time.... There's no way that Commodore, alone, would have won a hardware war against literally the entire universe of PC hardware manufacturers. So they would have needed to establish dominance on a different front. A non-hardware front.

Commodore _did_ have one massive advantage in the days before chunky pixels sealed its fate. The kernel, and the OS.

Commodore would have had a clear advantage in a four-way war OS held between IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS. When you think about it, an x86 port of the Amiga kernel, and AmigaDOS would have been a Hiroshima-level event for IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.

More to the point, if Commodore had decided to go in a different direction circa 1989-90, and did something radical like spawn an entirely new ecosystem for x86....Specifically, an x86 port of the Amiga kernel and roughly 2.04-era AmigaDOS...._and_, had it made that ecosystem open/readilly accessible to college students and hobbyists, I think there would have been a chance.

Not a great one, but a significant chance. There was a goldren window of opportunity between about 1987 and 1991 where it was still anybody's game.

 

[suavek]

Intel and PC happened.

 

[dkasten]

Intel and PC happened.

A port to x86 wouldn't necessarily been a bad thing, either..

 

[eton975]

People forget how much RAM cost back in the day. Also adding Ethernet would've been very expensive, and almost pointless, unless on a Big Box Amiga, and there were Zorro cards for that.

I've been mulling the same question over for the last 30 years, and I've recently come to the conclusion that nothing could have been done. Without the developers it was only a matter of time. Sad but true.

Ethernet expensive in 1991? I could believe it if you wanted a particularly high-performance implementation but on the PC side you had the Novell NE1000/2000 cards that were pretty cheap.

You would think that a cheapish version could be done for the Amiga, provided that there were enough sales to amortise the development cost.

 

[dkasten]

There's also another wrinkle to this -- Ethernet was just one of many different networking standards floating around back then. Token Ring, anyone?

There were just so many missed opportunities, coupled with sooooooo many different potential paths of evolution to reliably predict..and not enough time to really get behind it, even if you could predict it..

This was a time before the word "internet" had even entered the public's vocabulary.. Even if, as a company, you _did_ know what was coming, how would you sell people on the idea? What good is a NIC card when the majority of your customers are home users, and own nothing to connect it to?

This was an era where if you really needed to move data between machines without resorting to sneakernet (tm), there wasn't much of a demand to send more than a few minutes worth of data, and that much could be accomplished with a $10 DB25 cable and a $3 adapter.

Did Commodore fuck up? Absolutely. Were they short-sighted? .......... Maybe. But then again, organizations and people alike, when faced with an existential crisis, start investing heavilly in short-sightedness.

 

[miggymad]

When they let the money men who are only interested in lining their own pockets (Medhi Ali and Irving Gould), that's when the rot set in.

At least for now, the brand appears to be in much safer hands with Christian Simpson (Peri Fractic) and co.

 

[dkasten]

When they let the money men who are only interested in lining their own pockets (Medhi Ali and Irving Gould), that's when the rot set in.

At least for now, the brand appears to be in much safer hands with Christian Simpson (Peri Fractic) and co.

Heh, that's not saying much. Putting Commodore in the hands of a chimpanzee with a flamethrower would have been a safer bet compared to Ali & Gould.

 

[qz3fwd]

I don't think Peri Fractic has any control over anything Amiga related unless I missed something.

 

[JHanna]

Ethernet expensive in 1991? I could believe it if you wanted a particularly high-performance implementation but on the PC side you had the Novell NE1000/2000 cards that were pretty cheap.

We're talking about Commodore. The same company that at the last minute didn't include an LED for the PCMCIA port to save about 1p per machine.

 

[Bojster]

Don't overlook the role of Bill Sydnes. The ex IBM manager who among other mistakes also delayed the AGA chipset

 

[Amiga Forever]

so AGA Chipset could release in 1990? Right?

 

[kyle_b]

Not that early. The first AGA machines were brought up in February 1991, but the chips were quite buggy. The target shipping date for the original A3000+ with AGA and the DSP system was April 1992, which would give them 12 months to finish bugs and the rest of the computer and have them already in manufacturing ready to go on sale.

I suppose if they put all hands on deck to produce a system with just AGA and no other new technologies, and if they weren't distracted by the A600, the DSP stuff, switching to SMT etc, they could've got it out before 1992.

But really, all this fantasy football isn't productive. I prefer to enjoy what we have not what we could've, because we can't change it.