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Commodore Fans: History from the horse's mouth - - -

Agent Orange

Agent Orange

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Had Commodore not gone bust, and continued their line of Amiga computers, fast forward today. What innovation would we have, how would their machines differ from mainstream Windows desktops and laptops of the 2020s and beyond?
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We would have amigas teetering on 30 year old chipset designs that could just barely take advantage of modern technologies, such as 3D.
Oh wait, that's the Amiga hardware base now! ;O
 
X86 PC crushed everybody because of volume and that volume is what allowed advances to take place which allowed prices to drop for more people to want and need a PC.

Commodore had a lot of R&D in their custom NTSC chipsets so they needed to milk that forever because going in a different direction would just kill them.
 
But Commodore was shifting towards PC Compatibles, there is no reason to believe that they would not continue down that line. They Amiga line may have continued as a separate line, maybe like Macs or even spark stations, but no reason to doubt they wouldn't expand the PC line once that really took off. It was already the standard at the time.
 
In the late 80's and early 90's there was a lot of people who were expanding into PC's. For the most part they were mediocre Taiwan OEM's that brought nothing new to the table and got pushed out by far better PC builders like Dell and Gateway. In the middle of the 90's if you tried to launch a new RISC product that wasn't at least running on Unix it was dead in the water. (Hello, Be)
Even NeXT briefly touched on the concept of a new RISC platform before abandoning their hardware division entirely to focus on software. Windows 95 pretty much slaughtered the rest by expecting the latest computer to look pretty, perform great even though it didn't have the best hardware and run Windows. Even Packard Bell won in that competition and they too started off selling rebadged XT clones.
 
NeXT said:
In the late 80's and early 90's there was a lot of people who were expanding into PC's. For the most part they were mediocre Taiwan OEM's that brought nothing new to the table and got pushed out by far better PC builders like Dell and Gateway.
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That's the impression I get too.

One of Commodore's weaknesses seems to have been siloification. While the obvious gap was the lack of a clear path to migrate 64/128 users to Amiga users, I wonder if there was a chance to use the Amiga developments to make their PCs more compelling than "generic Taiwanese clone".

There was a definite window before accelerated/super-VGA and Sound Blaster cards were ubiquitious, where the PC platform had no good answer for "gaming and creative graphics/sound." Even EGA and early VGA were lackluster if you wanted things like sprites and blitting done without pounding the CPU.

Commodore could have put together a card offering some of the Amiga's custom chips-- or integrated them into their clones. This would fill the niche, and the combination of appealing features and large market presence would ensure a large enough installed base that developers would support it. With the right timing, we'd end up with a clash between AGA PCs and VGA PCs, and I could see clone manufacturers going AGA just to try to isolate IBM on its own island.
 
Hak Foo said:
Commodore could have put together a card offering some of the Amiga's custom chips-- or integrated them into their clones. This would fill the niche, and the combination of appealing features and large market presence would ensure a large enough installed base that developers would support it. With the right timing, we'd end up with a clash between AGA PCs and VGA PCs, and I could see clone manufacturers going AGA just to try to isolate IBM on its own island.
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Exactly. I remember watching the 8-Bit Guy's Commodore history series and Bill Herd talking about the the TED line, noting that once Tramiel left, no one know what to do with it, or anything really, that is was a mess of mid level management trying to fill his shoes.

I just watched RMC's video on the Commodore 900, and it was another case of ideas that were discarded when something new came along. They didn't have focus and it seems that anytime someone had something new, they got to pull everything else out. I am sure if they had not spent all that money on Amiga, that would have died as well at some point.

The 128 was a great idea, a new computer with somewhat better specs almost 100% compatible with what came before it. Heck, even the 1571 could read other formatted disks and run the code as long as it was compatible with their CP/M version.

And yea, their PC clones were just cheap knockoffs, but the entire market seemed to be going that way, with only really Apple holding strong with their Mac line, and even then they had a habit of abandoning some lines mid development, they just locked out. They needed to try and get a foot in there, and yea, merging Amiga features into it might have made an amazing product.
 
I remember things just got overtaken by events. My Amiga 500 was the last non PC machine I ever bought

Offices went fully PC and 'piracy' was almost condoned such that it seemed madness not to have a PC at home when you could take the companies disks home and install whatever you wanted.

I think the nail in the coffin for me was MS word 6.0 as I was writing lots of stuff for Uni and it meant I could share it with everyone and take it to work for printing on the expensive laser printers for submission.

Seems so wrong now.
 
My main reason for buying a PC instead of an Amiga was money. OK, not as good as the Amiga but the PC did what I needed it for. And by the time I really needed a 32-bitter to run Oracle and had the money, Amiga was gone.
 
Here's some more 'inside' thoughts and views from someone who was there:

www.quora.com

Why was the Amiga Computer a failure when spec wise it was way beyond anything else that was out at the time?

Answer (1 of 52): Since I was there, and I saw this up-front and in the raw, I can tell you precisely why the Amiga failed. Upper Management. We engineers had big plans for the Amiga, like 24-bit graphics with a blitter per bitplane, a DSP, and other goodies that we dubbed with the code name: A...
www.quora.com www.quora.com

Be sure and read all of the comments.
 
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