Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[WolfToTheMoon]

In 1984, Commodore bought Amiga and released what is now known as the Amiga 1000. The 1000 was, in honesty, a rather poor seller, and not untill the Amiga 500 and 2000 did Amiga gain significant market traction.
In 1984, Commodore was also getting ready to release the Commodore 900 UNIX machine, that was developed inhouse by Commodore Germany(the same team would later design A500 and A2000). Looking back, was it really smart to choose Amiga over the 900?

The 900 was marketed(before it was cancelled, about 500 units were made, and later, sold for 4000$ in Germany) at around 2700-3000$ for a base machine, with 512kB RAM(expendable to 2 MB on motherboard), 20 MB HDD, 1.2 MB 5,25" floppy and 10 MHz Z8001, running Coherent OS(An UNIX clone) + Commodore's own windowing software by Rico Tudor. There were 2 versions, one a server and other a workstation(1200x800 monochrome display with a dedicated 128 kB video chip, 14" and 20" monitors offered as option).
On the other hand, Amiga 1000 had a 256k of RAM, 880 kB 3.5" floppy, 7 MHz 68000 and no disk drive, yours for 1295$ in 85'.

When Amiga was released, it was released into a pretty competitive market, with Mac, Atari ST and, up to a point, IBM PC compatibles. However, C900 had little competition for 2700$ on the UNIX market.

A post from Dr. Peter Kittel from usenet groups illustrates the impact of the C900 had, at the time...

Yes, at that time it meant just below DM 10,000. You should have seen
the hords of worried HP and DEC people coming over to our booth(ceBIT 85') and
look at that beast and recognize it did practically everything their
much more expensive, established machines did.

Comparing the 2 system, IMHO, the Z-machine had a bigger potential(except maybe in regards to Z8001 vs 68000)... in 2-3 years, cca 88-89' timeframe, Zilog would have probably finished the (initially buggy) Z80000 and thus give it a full-on 32 bit upgrade path(Z80000 was a fully pipelined(6 stage) design with 256 byte of on-chip cache, comparable in some regards to 68040 and 486, but few years earlier). Commodore even considered buying Zilog in 84-85', obviously for intentions of full vertical integration of the C900 line, just like with the 8 bits.

In the end, C='s poor financial situation in 84-85 and the acquisition of Amiga spelled the end of the Z-machine. I wonder if, knowing what we know now, C= would have been better off going with the C900 vs the Amiga. It would give C= a presence in the UNIX market, a modern, easily portable UNIX based OS and possibly even Zilog and their pretty advanced 32 bit chip.

[commodorejohn]

Commodore may or may not have done well to introduce the 900 (The Z80000 is certainly a pretty nifty chip for 1986,) but it wouldn't have been a good alternative to the Amiga anymore than the Amiga would've been a good alternative to the 900. Unix was even less of a home-user OS in the mid-'80s than it is today (hell, XWindows had just been introduced a couple years prior, and had a long, long way to go to catch up to where even the Amiga started usability-wise, to say nothing of Mac OS's polished GUI.)

And as good as the hardware may have been, there was and is a lot more to success in the big-iron market than pure specs - software options, reliability, quality of support, etc. Could Commodore have delivered on those? I dunno...

[WolfToTheMoon]

Commodore may or may not have done well to introduce the 900 (The Z80000 is certainly a pretty nifty chip for 1986,) but it wouldn't have been a good alternative to the Amiga anymore than the Amiga would've been a good alternative to the 900. Unix was even less of a home-user OS in the mid-'80s than it is today (hell, XWindows had just been introduced a couple years prior, and had a long, long way to go to catch up to where even the Amiga started usability-wise, to say nothing of Mac OS's polished GUI.)

C900 used Commodore's own windowing system, described by Dave Haynie as being very fast and polished.
I'm not arguing that C900 would replace Amiga... it wouldn't... it was 2 times the price of the A1000 and aimed at higher educational and business market. I'm arguing it would have been better for C= as a whole.

And as good as the hardware may have been, there was and is a lot more to success in the big-iron market than pure specs - software options, reliability, quality of support, etc. Could Commodore have delivered on those? I dunno...

Agreed... That was one area where C= badly lacked.

[Darrin]

Interesting.  I never heard of the C900.

That said, I think Commodore made the right choice.  Back in the 80s $2700-$3000 was an awful lot of money.  Even the lower price of the A1000 at $1295 placed it out of reach for your average family which is why it took the A500 to make inroads into the home computing market.  The only reason I got my hands on a A2000 when I did was that I had just completed Basic Training in the Army and hadn't been able to spend my pay on anything for months and then I was living in a barracks with minimum outgoings (I didn't even own a car back then).  The A2000 probably saved my liver from getting more pickled than it did.

What commodore would have been better of doing was opening up the Amiga to ISA/PCI expansion cards and upgrading the processor/RAM in the base machines to encourage better software development (and ports of PC software which was starting to eclipse the Amiga).

Unless future C= Amigas switched processor on the motherboard then I suspect that it would have gone the same way as the C64 and C= would have ended up selling PCs running Windows.

[save2600]

I agree with Darrin, besides, Commodore already had too many models all competing with each other. Market was confused enough as it was. Another line and Amiga would have been left even more neglected.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Interesting.  I never heard of the C900.

That said, I think Commodore made the right choice.  Back in the 80s $2700-$3000 was an awful lot of money.  

Indeed... it is, but relatively speaking... Macintosh 128k was 2595$ in US(the quoted price for the C900 is the European price, as C900 was not initially planned to go on sale in the US).
Compare a Macintosh(128k RAM, 7 MHz 6800, no disk, lousy OS, no software) with C900(512k RAM, 10 MHz Z8001, 10 MB disk, UNIX based, thus has available software - C900 was planned to ship with an C compiler, BASIC compiler and 50ish apps built in) and I think it's actually a steal at that price.

[Darrin]

Indeed... it is, but relatively speaking... Macintosh 128k was 2595$ in US(the quoted price for the C900 is the European price, as C900 was not initially planned to go on sale in the US).
Compare a Macintosh(128k RAM, 7 MHz 6800, no disk, lousy OS, no software) with C900(512k RAM, 10 MHz Z8001, 10 MB disk, UNIX based, thus has available software - C900 was planned to ship with an C compiler, BASIC compiler and 50ish apps built in) and I think it's actually a steal at that price.

Put that way, it does seem a bargain.  

However, from what I remember of the average family living on an average wage, it was in the "business" price-range, rather than directed at the home user.  The same can be said for the A1000 and it was really the arrival of the cut-down and much cheaper A500/Atari ST that brought a new generation of computing into the home.

The C900 might have been one of those computers in a magazine that we wished we had while playing Defender of the Crown on our trusty (but afordable) Amigas.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Put that way, it does seem a bargain.  

However, from what I remember of the average family living on an average wage, it was in the "business" price-range, rather than directed at the home user.  The same can be said for the A1000 and it was really the arrival of the cut-down and much cheaper A500/Atari ST that brought a new generation of computing into the home.

I imagine that C900 would excell in higher education, on universities, and in small to midsize companies. Also, it's 1 megapixel screen in 85' might establish C= as a market leader in DTP, and not Apple.
For home users, C128 and it's follow ups( let's call it C256), on which Haynie and his crew worked before A2000, would replace A500.

Somewhere in, say 88-89, C= would release a Z80000 based C900 successor, while producing something cheaper for the lower end. Possibly a cheaper, simplified C900, which would be competitive with lower end Macs and 286 PCs untill 90-91.

[toRus]

Commodore were a really lame company and did not do Amiga justice most of the time. Despite that, they did the wise thing of staying out of the 80s business trend of trying to captitalise on the aftermath of the AT&T split and revive a terrible (for the desktop) OS. In the end of the day their only chance would be to sell el-cheapo Z8000-based machines to the enterprise (Z8000 was introduced in 1979) rather than risking with a new product (Z80000) of a dieing company (Zilog was in rebuilding/restructuring/survival mode under Exxon). Commodore would fail miserably as it failed with the Commodore PC later on and ultimately with the Amiga since they did not have the marketing to compete in either the enterprise or the home market nor did they have the vision to understand what they really had in their hands (the Amiga).

The Amiga, even though being underfunded and underdeveloped under Commodore, became an economic and cultural success since the hardware and software was too good to fail and the word of mouth prevailed over any lame marketing efforts of the parent company. But in enterprise you have to market yourself in order to sell the product.

[Kronos]

the Commodore 900 UNIX machine, that was developed inhouse by Commodore Germany(the same team would later design A500 and A2000).

C= Germany designed the ill-fated A2000A based on the orginal A1000 chips (and afaik the Sidecar/bridgeboards).

A500 and A2000B with the more intregrated "Fat Agnus" were done in West Chester.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Commodore were a really lame company and did not do Amiga justice most of the time. Despite that, they did the wise thing of staying out of the 80s business trend of trying to captitalise on the aftermath of the AT&T split and revive a terrible (for the desktop) OS.

It's a business and scientific targeted machine. And still has multiuser and protected memory in 85, which AmigaOS still doesn't have.

In the end of the day their only chance would be to sell el-cheapo Z8000-based machines to the enterprise (Z8000 was introduced in 1979)

which is the same year MC68000 debuted

rather than risking with a new product (Z80000) of a dying company (Zilog was in rebuilding/restructuring/survival mode under Exxon).

C= was in talks to buy Zilog at that time.

[toRus]

which is the same year MC68000 debuted

Yes. MC68000 was a more capable processor and 68020 was released 2 years before the Z80000 - the latter was good on paper but got delayed and did not sell.

[Heiroglyph]

That would have put them in strong competition with HP, DEC, Sun, SGI and NEXT.  Those companies didn't require so much marketing since they weren't going after home users.  They were focused on high end scientific and educational markets.

I actually think Commodore would have done better in that market.  Commodore was much better at leading the race to the bottom on pricing than at competing once prices had reached the bottom.

The C900 could have done for scientific computing what the C64 (or at least VIC20) did for home computing.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Yes. MC68000 was a more capable processor and 68020 was released 2 years before the Z80000 - the latter was good on paper but got delayed and did not sell.

68000 was no more capable than Z8000... The benchmarks from  BYTE show that Z8000 is somewhat faster per clock than a 286. That should make it comparable to a 68000.

In 1987, if Commodore goes down the C900 route(and buys Zilog), you would probably have a fully pipelined Z80000 with MMU on board vs a vanilla 68020, which didn't have an MMU and had 3 pipeline stages. In theory, Amiga, as happend historically, would not have an comparable CPU until late 92' and 040 A4000.

Zilog rated a 10 MHz Z320(CMOS version of the Z80000) at 10 MIPS peak. Motorola rated a 50 MHz 030 at 18 MIPS and 44 MIPS for a 40 MHz 040. While MIPS rating is not the best benchmark for different CPUs, it shows the potential the Z80000 architecture had.

[Pyromania]

@WolfToTheMoon

I'm glad Commodore went the Amiga route and not the 900 route. They would have been slaughtered by Sun, SGI and others. Amiga was unique with its custom chips and multitasking OS. Lets not forget its affordable price. if Commodore went the Unix route instead with their management they would have been out of business way before 1994 and we would not be discussing this on Amiga.org today.