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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: sdyates on December 14, 2007, 03:57:55 AM
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Imagine for a minute that Amiga Corporation never existed adn that Commodore never bought it. Also imagine that Jack never left Commodore.
Also imagine that Bushnell did not sell Atari and Jay was allowed to move forward with his Lorraine project at Atari... How different would the world be?
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Well lets see.........
Atari were games oriented (at that time) so possibly two things could have happened (accord to me that is)
1. Atari dumps the project .. it is too much computer like ie: no need for computer games platform (No AMIGA computer as competition).
Plus too costly (again no competition to base against).
Most probably it might be a short lived machine for the rich techno geeks of that period.
2. I would'nt be here, probly sitting in front of a PC all my life never getting to enjoy the magic that was Amiga or should I say the Love that Never Dies (or is that Waiting that Never Dies ) :lol:
Any case If Amiga never existed I definetly would have avoided any computers (all greek) in my life.
What a horrid thought! An Amigaless life :-o :crazy:
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Both Co's would be dead by now regardless, its the way the operated at fault not the products. I dont think contemporary computing would be any different, just that that bit of the early history would be altered.
The 80's was all about proprietary, expensive closed systems - good riddance! I'm happy we now have inexpensive and plentiful hardware that is open to anyone to develop for.
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I'll bite, because this actually turns out to be a pretty interesting question.
First, let me link an interesting interview (http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_joe_decuir.html) stumbled across while trying to figure out where Atari got their ASICs fabbed.
...
I wasn't able to find a straight answer for that, actually (apparently at least one rev of the 2600 TIA bears a 'S' marking, who was that?), so I'll try not to weigh that too heavily in the rampant speculation to follow.
First, ground rules: Let's assume Jay got a green light to assemble his own independent project group to work on a multitasking computer capable of 'simulation-grade' graphics, resulting in a chipset similar to Lorraine.
Fact is, if conditions had been favorable, this could have worked out a lot better for both Atari and Commodore.
First, Atari:
If Jay proceeded at Atari, the team would've been a bit different, and software certainly couldn't help but be different. In the end, many of the same compromises would have to be made -- RAM was stratospherically expensive, the biggest constraint on any design of the era -- but a lot of time pressure would've been taken off the OS team.
I believe Atari would've needed a solid fab partner or its own fab to produce the chipset for any use, and the nature of that deal would have had rather huge repercussions in the industry, especially in relation to MOS as supplier for the 8-bit world.
There would've been what, in retrospect, we can see would have been a major difference propagated through the resulting machine:
Graphics at 400 lines NI would have been supported in the first model; Atari didn't have quite the same concerns with sourcing monitors as Commodore did, and if the project were greenlit as a computer (requisite to keeping Jay there), it would've been accepted from day one.
In relation to this, monochrome monitors were relatively cheap at the time, and if the machine was capable of a crisp high-res display, they probably would've been the choice of many early-adopters.
With either display, it would have been more expensive. It would likely have been more 'complete' at release time, assuming all the QC processes of a healthy Atari were brought to bear. This would have made it very obviously a 'serious workstation,' while the same chips would rapidly be repurposed into coin-op hardware and, perhaps, larger stuff for the low end of the simulation market.
Atari marketing would've had as hard a time with it as Commodore's did in our universe, but the slightly more complete machine would probably have been an easier sell to certain markets (CAD, etc). In the US, despite being a 'games company,' Atari also had wide recognition (via the 2600) as a 'big' national brand that, like Disney, might potentially have the resources to diversify into 'serious' fields... in contrast, even through the C64's success, nobody ever quite knew what to make of Commodore.
Atari had already started thinking about compatibility (at least between peripherals), something Commodore was still struggling with.
Atari would have had no more prejudice than Commodore at selling a sub-$1,000 model once that became feasible, something that would've put the likes of IBM and Apple on higher notice in a machine that bore more resemblance to products made by them. (The resolution issue always made the Amiga look a little weird, frankly, especially in comparisons -- look at ArsTechnica's attempt at a Commodore-style comparison ad between the IBM PC, Mac, and A1000; while the capabilities are there, the display is half the DPI of the competition, even when the competition only had a character generator.)
...
Commodore, in the meantime, wouldn't have had anyone to 'rescue,' probably would've seen the CBM 900 or something like it to market, and together with the LCD could have had an interesting business system worthy of their full name. They probably would've found a more-than-modest success in the UNIX market, with its own interesting repercussions. The 8-bit line would've probably carried on, culminating in something like the C65 -- probably with more 'smart terminal' functionality built in, and Jack probably would've felt some cognitive dissonance until he could actually unify the big server machines (for the 'classes') with the next low-cost designs (for the 'masses').
Figure a 'reverse NT' situation, with an Amigaless Commodore releasing a next-wave single-user home machine for the early '90s, perhaps learning to monetize MOS and pick up free rights to interesting third-party silicon in the process. Depending what CPU won out, this might've forced MS into interesting contortions, trying to stretch Windows onto that platform as well as the Alpha. Also figure Tramiel, were he still at the helm, to see the potential in the Internet through exposure to the UNIX market, and push for it to be well-supported... It's very hard to say what Commodores would've looked like by then, but they might've encompassed a niche between WebTV and the iMac.
Where Atari would be by then, what 3D gaming would do, and what (likely small) percentage of the market they'd retain... who knows? At least they would've been in a position to adapt circa 1994, instead of already being doomed.
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coldfish wrote:
The 80's was all about proprietary, expensive closed systems - good riddance! I'm happy we now have inexpensive and plentiful hardware that is open to anyone to develop for.
Been reading here for months, but here is my first post:
Open and inexpensive only applies to x86 architecture, I don't think that is very open!
I think the Power PC architecture is really better, even if Freescale is not developing it as fast as it should.
Here is the latest from them (though I don't think this webpage has been updated in a while, like everything Freescale)
Freescale MPC8641D (http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC8641D)
Another Note:
The GP2X would be great if it had Wi-Fi!
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Floid wrote:
First, let me link an interesting interview (http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_joe_decuir.html) stumbled across while trying to figure out where Atari got their ASICs fabbed.
Link is dead. Even a search of the site turns up a dead link...
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http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_joe_decuir.html still works fine here. See if it made Archive.org?
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What would of happened? Atari would of been known as having the better 16/32-bit system and Commodore with the inferiour one! lol
I imagine the Amiga would of been released more like a video game system since it would of been Atari, kinda like a XEGS type system with detached keyboard...
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unknown1 wrote:
coldfish wrote:
The 80's was all about proprietary, expensive closed systems - good riddance! I'm happy we now have inexpensive and plentiful hardware that is open to anyone to develop for.
Been reading here for months, but here is my first post:
Open and inexpensive only applies to x86 architecture, I don't think that is very open!
The PC architecture was pretty easy to crack open for the 'free market'... and having "learned from IBM's mistake," it's pretty hard to imagine Commodore or Atari being any more amenable to 'cloning' than Apple -- unless, of course, they'd come to the same conclusion Apple did and experiment with it to gain market share.
I get the impression that Jay and others were open to thinking of Lorraine as a "chipset" as well as a specific machine, and as noted above, an Atari with an active coin-op business would have been thinking about using it in various devices. In our universe, Commodore treated it as sort of a superior alien technology, which wasn't helped by rapidly losing all the people who designed it.
An Atari universe might have included an "Amiga card" for IBM and clones much earlier in the game -- which might have made things very weird. (What happens when the card outsells the computer? Could they have snuck a whole 68000 on there and been price-competitive circa 1989, and would they have leveraged that 'inverse bridgeboard' to drive sales of a full machine 'now with MS-DOS compatibility?')
Perhaps the chipset would've garnered enough respect among big customers to require a second source, at which point it would've become available, and potentially 'clone'-able, though a third-party OS would have had to overtake whatever was included to really make that 'open' in the sense we use today. (Look where the Apple cloners wound up... Of course, Microsoft, Microware and lots of others might've smelled opportunity...)
Meanwhile, a more businesslike, UNIX-ey Commodore wouldn't have been tied to a flagship 68000 at all, and depending on Zilog's fate, might have dove onto the 386 and 486 along with everyone else -- and a surviving MOS Tech might have gotten into the fray that begat Cyrix and even less-remembered names. In this respect they'd be a lot like Unisys or Sun, big vendors who dabbled in x86 but weren't necessarily part of the mainstream no-name clone market. Things could've gotten very interesting there, too, especially if they stumbled out of the wilderness with a dirt cheap UNIXey machine just as the opened Internet was picking up steam. (Or perhaps their timing would've been off even if they went down that road, one never knows.)
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Okay, someone else chime in, I've hogged this thread enough. And I haven't put enough thought into how at-the-time heavyweights like Apple might've reacted... [What was the FCC quirk that allowed the Apple II expansion slots and stymied the 800? Or did Atari just get tired of the expense of shielding to meet specs?]
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I'm not as knowledgable as Floid on these matters and intriguing details, but my understanding is that Jay Miner's foremost want / desire before leaving Atari was to move over to a kick-ass CPU architecture, the 68000. So at that point there was no "Lorraine project" floating about his head. At least I don't think so, that is :-) In other words, putting myself in his shoes, I'd be blinded by the awesome power and feature set of this CPU, so far ahead of its time, but concurrently be pressured by the "Atari mantra" that games are the way, and so my thoughts would be driven towards gaming ends. So, a powerful gaming machine that could be turned into a computer wouldn't be such a compatible view. From that perspective, neither would be a simulation-capable computer, etc. Thus no "Amiga".
Another thing that is an indivisible part of the Amiga, and an Amiga wouldn't be an Amiga without it, is the core OS (Exec, Intuition and friends). In order for someone such as Carl Sassenrath to leave HP as a top Operating Systems engineer, or other folks in similar situations, like Dale Luck or Ronald Nicholson, etc, to join a gaming company for a plain gaming console, would have been close to impossible, thus again making impossible yet another "Amiga". To be more specific, Carl was sold on joining the Amiga group when he was told "we want you to write an Operating System, but you decide what it is to be". He had just come off HP, having worked on Opearating System projects and collected a bunch of his own ideas and thoughts on them and was ready to blast them out to reality at the first opportunity. At Atari, I have a feeling it would have been more like "we want you to write an Operating System, and we'll tell you how it's going to be". Blah!
All in all I'm happy how things turned out... right about until 1993-4!!! :-(
As for the "open platforms", I don't quite buy it. Yes things are cheap today, but so was the C64 back in its day!
And as for hackers and coders taking advantage of systems, I'm sorry, but the kind of hacks that I've seen on "closed" systems, top any hack that I've seen on an open system. I just don't think that 1) the world of "innovation" (I've come to hate this word because of Microsoft...) would have been NECESSARILY stiffled if we didn't have the IBM clone appear, on the contrary, one can say that because there are so few viable propriatery solutions today the IBM clone wave HAS dulled and killed variatey, and 2) the market pressure (buyers, users, etc, and businesses) would have forced equilibrium back into an overly overweight monopolistic platform.
And now to ask for some recommendations:
where on the web (other than the great Ars Technica articles, and wikipedia) can I find more "biographies" about the Amiga founding fathers? (some of my info I've gleaned from the CVs of those who have pages, such as Nicholson, RJ Mical, etc, but many don't...)
Amiga Forever!
Cheers!
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Since we're in this "what if" game, I might as well add something interesting:
So I headed over to the Computer History Museum for Commodore 64's 25th anniversary, and to get to see Jack Tramiel, Steven Wozniak, William Lowe and Adam Chowaniec talk about the good old days. I just can't describe how enjoyable it was and how many cool people I met, but I'll give some details (if you want more, just ask). If you're near the area and you didn't come, you really missed out big time (you know who you are :-) oh, and there was TONS of food, all for free! I should have eaten some instead of talking to interesting people all the time...)
So, after the main show ended, people stormed the "celebrities". Jack was impossible to get a hold of, and I didn't really have much to say in such a short amount of time (WHY? OH, BLOODY WHY!?!??). I got the Woz while he was leaving and walked with him for a bit, else he wouldn't stay to talk :-( Afterwards I got a hold of William Lowe, the "father" of the IBM PC...
I asked him only one question:
"Sir, why did you ever, ever, decide to go with such a crappy CPU such as the Intel x86 series, and not a Motorola 68000?" (note: if you've not done tons of x86 assembly programming with only 8 registers, 4 segment registers and overlays, you are *not* qualified to comment on the "crappy" part)
I finally felt closure on the matter when he answered (I'm paraphrasing):
"It was all politics. You see, IBM was very much a 'closed shop', and when my group came up with the idea of an 'open architecture', we had some heated arguments. Needless to say, the head of the opposition (I forget the name he gave) was very friendly with the Motorola guys. So we had no choice but to look elsewhere."
After that bit, I saw "a guy" with a bright silver + red Amiga jacket with the famous boing ball. And I commented, "Now this guy, has good taste! And not only that, but he was sitting almost next to Atari's founder!!" I was promptly told: "Do you know who this is?", so I said "No, your name sir?" and to my most enjoyable delight the answer was "Dale, Dale Luck". BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOING! :-D
I offered my worship appropriately soon after. Little did I know that who I thought was Mel Gibson (he really looks like him!) was one of the Amiga founding fathers! Also one of the MOST AWESOME DUDES I've ever met!
So anyways, we got to talking about all Commodore and Amiga stuff and he told me many interesting tid-bits, like how he realized they could add line drawing capability to the chipset with some minor modifications etc.
So then I asked him to comment on a little BIG bone that Carl Sassenrath had thrown out at us back at AmiWest 2006: "Is it true that the hardware guys at Amiga and Jay Miner had a memory protection scheme which required only a couple more chips, aka MMU, ready for the Amiga and Commodore decided to drop it because of cost?" And as he's preparing for the answer in jumps this other "unknown" guy who was nearby and says, "Yes, we not only had a simple memory protection scheme, but an MMU with indirect page tables and all, but it would have added too many delays in the memory paths, so it had to be dropped." His name was Ronald Nicholson, yet another famous Amiga founding father! Very cool guy and one smart motherf....ather! Yes, motherfather, as in mother and father of the Amiga :-)
So there you have it: the Amiga was very close to being UNIX capable without MMU inside the CPU, from the get-go! Talk about being ahead of its time... (WHY?? OH WHY, JACK!???)
Finally, I also spoke with Adam Chowaniec, the VP of Technology at Commodore and the one who oversaw Amiga's development from the time Commodore bought the company to the release of the A1000. To succinctly state his views, Commodore had no idea how to market the machines, business vs game machines, and by the time the 1990s had come it was already too late to stop the bleeding and turn things around, thus causing the collapse in 1994. I believe we'll be hearing a lot more from his side of things at some point in the future :-)
A relevant article with more on Adam's side of the story:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9052598&source=rss_topic64
EDIT:
Sentences in quotes are paraphrasings of mine, so if the authors of said statements are reading and want to correct me, by all means do so :-)
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Certainly karma factor should be taken into account. You can try very hard (your best), but results just come out the same-- karma.
I would state that one good thing about IBM being the top seller was that IBM set standards that are in hardware whereas Microsoft is/was setting standards in software which are not as good. Doing a MOV instruction to the VGA memory (A000:0000) to set a color at a pixel location is much preferred over calling some bloated API function. Doing a IN/OUT instructions to read from ports 60H/61H would always beat out a GetMessage loop on same system. Now without hardware standards, you basically have to rely on API calls and complicate any real-time system analysis and slow things down.
Commodore and Atari had hardware standards but they threw them away when they upgraded to 68000 based systems. They should have left the 6502 (and custom chips) in the 68000-based systems. Just a theoretical scenario.
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The 80's was all about proprietary, expensive closed systems - good riddance! I'm happy we now have inexpensive and plentiful hardware that is open to anyone to develop for.
In what way was Amiga closed?? Absolutely ANYONE could develop for the Amiga, how much more open can it be?
The reason for Amiga failing can only be blamed on the management of commodore.
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Also imagine that Bushnell did not sell Atari and Jay was allowed to move forward with his Lorraine project at Atari... How different would the world be?
Atari would have bankrupted in 1994 and former Infogrames would be known as Commodore now.
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@Tomas:
I'm with you on this whole open/closed platform. I've heard others mention the same reasons for "the downfall", but it's so obvious that there was a larger hand in play from the C= management. (read my comments from Adam Chowaniec above).
One question that always comes to mind when I'm reading about the Amiga story is: where did all the money that C= was making through the 1980s go, when it came to the early 1990s? I mean sure, a big company has expenditures, but they also sold like 20-30 million C64s and so many other machines! Where did all the money go, in order to cause the company to declare bankrupsy? Isn't it directly pointing the finger to management? Anyways...
@amigaksi:
Do you mean left the 6502 as a co-processor or main processor? I hope you mean the former, because the 68000 was the only sane future for Jay and crew (even Atari, Apple, etc)
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There was virtually no chance of any of the closed systems surviving. It is impossible for a single company to produce a computer as cheaply as the parts assemblers do.
Looking back it's hard to find a scenario that would see them survive. Apple pulled it off but sheer luck, guts and a cult of personality around Steve Jobs, take away any one of these and you'd be looking at a solid Microsoft world with only Linux asa an alternative.
Amiga's only chance would have been to embrace Intel hardware and remove reliance on the custom chips or put them in an video card that would fit in an intel box. Even then it would be hard pressed to survive a dogfight with Microsoft, especially in partnersip with IBM, which meant computers back then..
Face it, there's nothing but no win situations. There's no way that we could have had Atari and Amiga/CBM as viable companies in 2007. It was all a dream.
Actually their is one way, unfortunately it involves the use of a Tardis to go back in time armed with the for-knowledge of what has happened. But even then you'd never convince CBM to go open platform with Amiga.
Plus you have to remember that a lot of us early Amigans suffered badly from Apple envy, we wanted an Apple, but back then Apples were more expensive than Amigas. I still remember the thrill that Emplant brought to the Amiga community. We could run MacOS! Even though it wasn't as sophisticated as AmigaOS, it was wonderful.
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amigaksi wrote:
Commodore and Atari had hardware standards but they threw them away when they upgraded to 68000 based systems. They should have left the 6502 (and custom chips) in the 68000-based systems. Just a theoretical scenario.
Actually there is a 6502 in the Amiga... take a look at the keyboard controler chip. :-D
But there is no way the Amiga or Atari should ever have stuck with the 6502... You probably think there should have been a VIC and a SID in the amiga too...
@Thread... If Jay had got his way, we would have ended up with an improved VCS... based on the 68k... no need for an OS... certainly not as powerful as the amiga, but with many of hardware features we know from the Amiga. It would have been pushed out much earlier... 1984 at the latest. Probably would have been quite popular... in fact I expect the machine would have been much like the Sega Mega Drive, but obviously much earlier...
-Edit- Actually the Amiga 1200 used a 68HC05 as the keyboard controller not the 6502 :-)
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>Do you mean left the 6502 as a co-processor or main processor? I hope you mean the former, because the 68000 was the only sane future for Jay and crew (even Atari, Apple, etc)
The former since the 68000 was definitely a faster and more powerful chip and there was no upgrade to 6502 that could match it. So they should have memory mapped the 6502 into the 68000 address space (64K chunk) and let old software continue to run in some mode like 8086/8088 DOS-based code still runs on Pentium 4 machines. Of course the custom chips would also have to map in there as well so the old software does not see that it's running in a new-processor machine.
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>Actually there is a 6502 in the Amiga... take a look at the keyboard controler chip.
>But there is no way the Amiga or Atari should ever have stuck with the 6502... You probably think there should have been a VIC and a SID in the amiga too...
Basic point was that it should have been an upgrade machine not a new machine so as not to alienate loyal fans/customers as well as software developers (at least). Perhaps hardware developers would have to do some redeveloping but at least the system should have been backward compatible.
Then again, the CEO's karma played a major role so it was not meant to be (he didn't deserve it). A normal goat always loses to a normal lion as the body attained through material nature sets it's limits to what it can attain (just an example).
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persia wrote:
There was virtually no chance of any of the closed systems surviving. It is impossible for a single company to produce a computer as cheaply as the parts assemblers do.
You mean like Intel, NEC, or Sun?
Amiga's only chance would have been to embrace Intel hardware and remove reliance on the custom chips or put them in an video card that would fit in an intel box. Even then it would be hard pressed to survive a dogfight with Microsoft, especially in partnersip with IBM, which meant computers back then..
In short, the Amiga to survive would have to stop being an Amiga and just be a PC with a boing logo on it? AInc tried that, didn't work too well
Face it, there's nothing but no win situations. There's no way that we could have had Atari and Amiga/CBM as viable companies in 2007. It was all a dream.
I can come up with several scenarios that would have made either a formidable foe that would have crushed the competition, all missed opportunities
Actually their is one way, unfortunately it involves the use of a Tardis to go back in time armed with the for-knowledge of what has happened. But even then you'd never convince CBM to go open platform with Amiga.
Plus you have to remember that a lot of us early Amigans suffered badly from Apple envy, we wanted an Apple, but back then Apples were more expensive than Amigas. I still remember the thrill that Emplant brought to the Amiga community. We could run MacOS! Even though it wasn't as sophisticated as AmigaOS, it was wonderful.
Amiga was open platform. I can still buy the hardware manual for the Amiga and write my own drivers. I cannot do the same with nVidia, ATI, XGI, SIS, VIA, not even Intel nor AMD release their docs in a timely manner. Amiga, the hardware manual shipped before the actual hardware did. That is the very definition of an open platform.
Amiga's main issue had nothing to do with openness, and everything to do with mismanagement.
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i've seen a few conspiracy type theory dvds in my time. i watched a dvd on the likes of some organisations... presidents written in the big old book even before the elections. i guess big bill may have been chosen to come out ahead with his os? i suspect he must have had dealings with the kind of people mentioned it's the only reason i see how windows could come out on top of some of the other stuff that was around at the time. not every other guy would play ball and give a "commission"! the you scratch my back mentality. you do this for us... we'll get your product up there. i bet it's still out there now too. it might explain how someone can be denied a dream when someone has been given a reason not be helpful in your community! :roll:
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@persia:
I disagree with some of your key points, and below is why.
persia wrote:
There was virtually no chance of any of the closed systems surviving. It is impossible for a single company to produce a computer as cheaply as the parts assemblers do.
Below you'll prove to yourself why it's just virtually impossible, but not impossible. But for your second sentence, consider that at the time there was no plethora of Taiwanese and Chinese parts manufacturers/assemblers. There were a few, but most of the stuff came from fewer, but larger companies. A lot more in-housing of technology than today. As an example, Commodore bought MOS, and that meant it had solved its problems with silicon, and not only that, but also made a profit selling 6502s and other parts. In fact, at that time it had a much better deal on silicon than many other players.
persia wrote:
Looking back it's hard to find a scenario that would see them survive. Apple pulled it off but sheer luck, guts and a cult of personality around Steve Jobs, take away any one of these and you'd be looking at a solid Microsoft world with only Linux asa an alternative.
Right there you proved your point wrong: Apple *DID* make it, and in fact growing very fast today, and may I add: with semi-propriatery technology, very much like the Amiga (most components other than the custom chips were generic).
In fact, to see why the Amiga *would* have survived, is rather simple, and I will juxtapose those to Apple's "hads" (as in: to have):
Apple had: Amiga had:
Steve Jobs Commodore
clout or renown clout or renown
from Apple 1 & 2 from VIC20 & C64
"culture" "best technology"
(ex. used by (ex. NASA & Hollywood
artists + DPS) used Amigas)
1st to market with 1st to market with best hardware
GUI, mouse, etc trinity: graphics, sound, video
(aka: multimedia)
To explain "culture": it's what gave you and/or many others that "Apple-envy" (the want, desire to own an Apple). Jobs is a cultured businessman. Amiga on the other hand, as everyone knew, maybe had not the best culture (anyone want to comment on non-square pixels?) but certainly the best technology, and most people at the time KNEW about this. Remember, they were looking behind the table at the Chicago CES, because they couldn't believe the Lorraine did what it showed on screen with its own technology. They thought it was faked!
And now what I believe is the real reason the IBM PC took over: it wasn't the cheap parts so much (although it played a role), but the fact that the largest market in the world, the US, and the largest spenders, US businesses, were sold: it was an IBM, and to top it off, they could source parts easily. Unfortunately, the last major factor was Microsoft. For the lack of anyone else trying to bring a GUI to the IBM PC, and doing it successfully, they gave the IBM PC a "fighting chance" against the Amigas, Ataris, Apples, and that was enough to make that trio ( 1. open architecture=cheap parts, 2. IBM was behind it, and 3. a "chirstened by IBM" OS, DOS, was at hand and a GUI, Windows, was starting to take shape, malformed and grotesque I may say, but very important to businesses nonetheless) the driving force for the IBM PCs. This was the critical time where marketing at Commodore failed miserably.
persia wrote:
Amiga's only chance would have been to embrace Intel hardware and remove reliance on the custom chips or put them in an video card that would fit in an intel box. Even then it would be hard pressed to survive a dogfight with Microsoft, especially in partnersip with IBM, which meant computers back then..
I disagree here too, for a simple fact: look at how many HUNDREDS if not thousands of peripherals were spawned around the Amiga. amiga-hardware.com lists over 1800!! Not only that, but the BEST peripherals were non-Commodore. In other words, there was a very big and thriving market for 3rd party manufacturers around the Amiga. In fact, it was just like the PC market! There was nothing really that much different between the two. The most "closed" part of the Amiga were the custom chips, but their interfaces were available to those wanting to make hardware.
persia wrote:
Face it, there's nothing but no win situations. There's no way that we could have had Atari and Amiga/CBM as viable companies in 2007. It was all a dream.
Yes, unfortunately, today it's all but a dream. But for Apple it's a reality. Amiga/CBM could have been here, was it not for their sheer lack of ability to market the superior goods they had. And their propensity to milk the damn cow until it bled to death! (C64 and then the Amigas, kept stale, technologically, and made just cheaper, a la C64)
persia wrote:
Actually their is one way, unfortunately it involves the use of a Tardis to go back in time armed with the for-knowledge of what has happened. But even then you'd never convince CBM to go open platform with Amiga.
Given the Dr. Who reference, I will whole-heartedly agree with you :-) Unfortunately CBM I think were too dumb to realize many things and wouldn't have changed even if you shoved future knowledge in their face. Perhaps this stubborness came from Mr. Jack? I don't know.
@bloodline:
"Actually there is a 6502 in the Amiga!" :-)
I concur with your "SuperVCS" theory, if Jay had stayed at Atari. Although now that I think about it, it would indeed be very interesting to see how the console/gaming market would have changed had they made a Sega Megadrive clone that early on (I believe he wanted to do the 68k machine even before 1982!).
@amigaksi:
A!! I get it! Backwards compatibility! Yeah, that would have rocked for the MILLIONS of C64 fanatics! Why even allow them to have MORE of a choice, by looking at other platforms (Ataris, Apples, Spectrums, Amstrads), for their upgrade path? "The Amiga keeps your investment in C64 software AND gives you an awesome NeXT-Gen upgrade path!!", could have been their marketing slogan. Damn idiots at CBM!
That might have been a genius move (assuming I'm not missing any big "buts") on Commodore's part. But... Commodore probably wouldn't be able to see it anyways... :-(
BTW, I *just* read your 2nd post, and I can see I pretty much re-iterated your exact thoughts with my above writing!
@downix:
Agreed. Exactly what I wrote before (sorry for the duplication, but I read the thread as I reply). The Amiga was open or at least 'open enough', because in part, back in those days it was part of the status quo of the "computer hacker" community or better yet the "homebrew club" ideal: hardware came with the necessary info to starting hacking it. Granted not all hardware, like Apple's, but even they eventually had documentation for doing hardware and software add-ons ( and if anyone here is not aware of this, I'd be glad to sell you my "Inside Macintosh" volumes, akin to the ROM Kernel Manuals of the Amiga - in very good condition may I add :-D )
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Just came across this thread and couldn't help but to throw my 2 cents in.
Now, this is not exactly what I think *would* have happened, but it's certainly along the lines of what could have happened. But mostly it is what I might liked to have happened.
Atari - I know Jay probably wanted to create his own full-fledged computer, but Atari being savy (sic) knew they needed to stick to there core business and come out with a next generation game machine. Score one for us! A kick-ass game machine that would have kept the Sega competition at bay. As a concession to Jay, and as a way to edge themselves into the computer market allow him a "game-machine" on an ISA card for IBM computers. They would market this not only as a superior graphics card for business and video production, but also as a lower cost way to create games for their next gen game machine. Score two for us! They would have sold like frig'n hot cakes.
CBM - Commodore, not having the whole Amiga thing to derail them, could have focused on their success --low cost home computers. The C128 was an pretty good move, they should have made a little more effort to improve upon that design, but they still had ample opportunity to put out a C256, pushing the hardware to the next level, but with a continued focus on lowering costs. Imagine a C256 that could still run all the old C64 stuff, but with 256K, 8 times faster CPU, and better graphics and only $395 retail, shipped for Christmas 1987/88. At the same time they had slipped a CP/M mode into the C128 that could have morphed into Unix over the next couple of iterations something CBM was already dipping their toes in at the high-end. They should have doubled down on the strategy. It would have payed off well by the 90s.
As you can tell from my analysis and *wishful* thinking. What killed both of them was diverting from their core business and not continuing to build upon their previous successes.
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Atari + Amiga would have taken a different development path, but still been call a "game system", and eventually would have faded just as with Commodore. The only way I see anything could have survived long term is if Atari/Commodore merged resources and made a serious attempt at next gen systems with a more open architecture for a wider market that could have kept it going through the rougher times kind of like Apple. Heck drag Palm in to the mix for the PDA device market too. 3M didn't know what to do with it. In that configuration MAYBE it would have been different today. As it was, neither Atari or Commodore had moxie enough to survive the desktop wars.
Plaz
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Right there you proved your point wrong: Apple *DID* make it, and in fact growing very fast today, and may I add: with semi-propriatery technology, very much like the Amiga (most components other than the custom chips were generic).
The only chip the Amiga had that commodore didn't make themselves was the 68000. Nobody else could make an Amiga compatible computer.
Apple don't make any chips, their computers are PC's. They can choose between amd or intel, nvidia or ati etc. You can install MacOS on your PC.
Even smartphone hardware is starting to homogenise.
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Both Co's would be dead by now regardless, its the way the operated at fault not the products. I dont think contemporary computing would be any different, just that that bit of the early history would be altered.
The 80's was all about proprietary, expensive closed systems - good riddance! I'm happy we now have inexpensive and plentiful hardware that is open to anyone to develop for.
I like standards but there are still companies trying to lock us into their proprietary Operating Systems and hardware solutions. There is one in particular that is as close to a vertically integrated monopoly as you can get.
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Hi,
Fairy Tales can come true it can happen to you, I think it is best that you don't think of Atari allowing Jays dream, because you will get stressed over the old Jay Miner team
smerf
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Atari would never have been good for Amiga. Commodore may not have been brilliant but it kept the likes of Stan Sheperd, Bob Burns, Sheryl Knowles and the wonderful Rob Peck together.
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I think Jay would be as famous as Bill Gates, but unlike Bill Gates instead of promising that technology would promise us a better tomorrow, he'd be very keen to point out that technology will be our undoing, and will erode our freedoms and privacy. Producing generations of people caught up in things that really don't matter, and who don't have the passion or patience for things of substance or traits that help them develop and live as a healthy, happy, human being.
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I think Jay would be as famous as Bill Gates, but unlike Bill Gates instead of promising that technology would promise us a better tomorrow, he'd be very keen to point out that technology will be our undoing, and will erode our freedoms and privacy. Producing generations of people caught up in things that really don't matter, and who don't have the passion or patience for things of substance or traits that help them develop and live as a healthy, happy, human being.
HI,
@XDelusion,
Touche'
smerf
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Producing generations of people caught up in things that really don't matter,
Now this thread is going into dangerous territory.
Is there any life up to now that actually did matter ?
Staf.
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I think Jay would be as famous as Bill Gates, but unlike Bill Gates instead of promising that technology would promise us a better tomorrow,
What Bill got right was that it's easier to take one slice of the pie than two. Apple got their market share by being first and being better & selling to people that had plenty of money. While Microsoft sold software to the people who already had computers, to allow them to do more with what they had.
Atari & Commodore tried to use the 8bit computer model in the 16bit market and they never escaped that mentality. With businesses moving to PC's or Mac's and games players moving to consoles, there really wasn't anywhere left for them to sell to.
If there ever was a chance then they had blown it by the late 80's. By 1995 it would have been game over as Intel & Microsoft were wiping the floor with them.
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Now this thread is going into dangerous territory.
Is there any life up to now that actually did matter ?
Staf.
Of course life matters, it's part of the structure of universal order, without it we couldn't have death, and what a drag that would be. ;)
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Been reading here for months, but here is my first post:
Open and inexpensive only applies to x86 architecture, I don't think that is very open!
I think the Power PC architecture is really better, even if Freescale is not developing it as fast as it should.
Here is the latest from them (though I don't think this webpage has been updated in a while, like everything Freescale)
Freescale MPC8641D (http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC8641D)
Another Note:
The GP2X would be great if it had Wi-Fi!
MPC8641D?
The e600 core?
Old and dying a slow death.
All the new PPC development (@ Freescale) is going on in the Qorlq lines.
http://cache.freescale.com/files/netcomm/doc/fact_sheet/QORIQOV.pdf
The e5500 and e6500 64 bit cores are considerably more advanced then the e600.
Years ago, Paul Gentle at Varisys pointed me toward this line as something more easily obtained then the PA6T.
And Andreas Wolf (who regularly posts at MorphZone) has been keeping all of us updated as to any new PPC development.
The real question I have, is what processor would Atari have moved to after the 68K?
We know Commodore wasn't thinking of using a PPC.
Would Atari have chosen this course or something else?
I'm pretty sure that if Paul and Trevor Dickinson produce a successor to the X1000, its going to have a processor based on one of these two cores.
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The real question I have, is what processor would Atari have moved to after the 68K?
The Jaguar 2 had a custom RISC processor. If Atari had more money and the market would have supported it then I imagine a computer based on Jaguar 2 would have made some form of sense.
Commodore were going to use a licensed HP PA-RISC, because they could make modifications to it.
Sony went for a custom embedded MIPS processor, so the idea was actually quite sane.
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The Jaguar 2 had a custom RISC processor. If Atari had more money and the market would have supported it then I imagine a computer based on Jaguar 2 would have made some form of sense.
Commodore were using a licensed HP PA-RISC, because they could make modifications to it.
I miss the Jag, freaking awesome system with sadly only a handful of games that were worth going back to. AVP being one of them! :)
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The Jaguar 2 had a custom RISC processor.
And so did the "1" - you weren't supposed to use the 68000 really, it was more of a bugfix/developer smoothing incident.
The riscs had a good few bugs in them AFAIK and so the general computing model and compiler generated code was hurting/failing. The 68000 meant developers could get code working much faster than getting to know a new architecture and having to work out whether the game bugs were hw or sw. The riscs thus became accellerators.
Wasn't the 2 supposed to be more or less a cleaned up Jag with the 68000 dumped and more 3D oomph? Someone will correct me any moment now.
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I never gave it much thought, but game consoles have quite a history of using Risc processors.
So if all three of the major players in the console market use PPC derived CPUs, I guess the architecture isn't that dead.
It's just a shame that the devices available are so over-priced.
I'm fascinated with what A-eon has managed to create, but without a large market the price of the X1000 commands is out of my league.
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[youtube]unOQuhiNOuc[/youtube]
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[youtube]unOQuhiNOuc[/youtube]
Jay Miner - Flat Earther?
Man that was depressing.
I'll admit, when that was recorded, I wasn't sure we'd have enough useful applications to make this a practical device.
And now I exchange ideas, code, and commentary even hardware with people all over the world.
Pity he let his general lack in faith obscure the fact that we can never predict the future (and sometimes things get better).
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Cthulhu waits... sleeping. ;)
I have to say I see the same thing Miner saw more and more every day, and not as a bible thumper, I don't need to be a bible thumper to see the obvious. Likewise, I can not notice the same things that Neil Postman noticed. Despite all the glitter, cheer, and overwhelming public consensus, I still don't believe the hype.
What is not depressing me is having knowledge and awareness within a world filled with so many false prophets, media messiahs, and misplaced enthusiasm. Never underestimate
the power of human folly and the folly within human philosophy. Nature hasn't changed, we have. And my Love for that order, that mystery from which we were born, will keep my eyes open for years to come, and it is hoped that it will also serve to correct my own human folly. ;)
P.S. Only the culture that brought you the printing press actually lost touch with history and them selves long enough to actually believe somehow that the earth was flat. And here we are, years later, thinking the printing press has been nothing but a boon to humanity. Funny stuff.
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CBM lost it's technology vision & roadmap when JT fck'd over Chuck Peddle ... twice!
Chuck should have been CTO and CBM would still be around today - Amiga may have still come to CBM and if Chuck had of been there, along with Kit Spencer (marketing genius that made c64 the success it was & also fck'd over by CBM), imo the CBM & Amiga would still be with us today just like Apple!
IMO there is room for 3 major players in the computer Market - Amiga would ahve needed to corner a niche but with the head start they got in video editing etc it wouldnt have been hard.
As for a current platform, freescale PPC chips are imo a joke - the real action is in IBM's POWER range and the 7+ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7#Specifications) is an absolute fire breathing beast! (They Power, pun intended, IBM's Watson project)
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As for a current platform, freescale PPC chips are imo a joke - the real action is in IBM's POWER range and the 7+ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7#Specifications) is an absolute fire breathing beast! (They Power, pun intended, IBM's Watson project)
IBM Doesn't allow mere mortals to work with stuff like that.
And bugs me about Freescale is their inability to get their PPCs to clock any higher then IBM managed almost 10 years ago.
But, I still like the e6500 core. Hyperthreaded, multi-core, 64 bit PPCs are kind of cool.
BTW - X, don't take my less then admiring comments on Miner too seriously.
Honestly, I don't have any faith in humanity either.
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Amiga alone would have never worked without the backing of a company such as CBM as they lacked the resources or cash to mass produce their product/s.
Commodore would have been more successful with the Amiga line if they
> Limited the A500 to the 512k thin Agnus and a memory slot such as the one featured on the A600. No side expansion slot.
(Would have forced serious buyers to purchase A2000)
> Provided a faster processor to the base A2000
(68020 minimum)
> Reduced the chip count with ECS
(Merge CIAs and other custom chips)
> Updated Paula with AGA even if only to provide support for full speed HD floppies
(Would have saved C= a lot in floppy disks and purchasing custom half spin HD Floppy drives)
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they would only be successful if they had consequently invested in innovations and technically (expecially graphics and sound) stayed ahead to the competition (PC and consoles). But that would have become more and more difficult over the time and I think the age of custom chips would have ended in the mid 90s. The only chance to stay competitive (price and hardware) would have been to use standard components.