Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: B00tDisk on December 05, 2011, 07:18:47 PM
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Or, to clarify things a bit let us say that Atari doesn't either. Say the Amiga is on a 3rd path, or Apple buys it and integrates parts into the Macintosh or something. But C= doesn't get it and there is no Amiga that we'd immediately recognize.
What does C= do next?
Pursue the C900 and make a go at Data General's (or even Sun or SGI's) marketshare?
Push the C65?
Push the Colt series, die on the vine as a PC-Clone manufacturer (which they essentially did anyway)?
Honestly, I think perhaps the C900 might have been their best bet (again, assuming no Amiga). Presuming that the bad **** that went down due to management looking to raid and dump the company, Coherent, running this windowing system:
http://hack.org/mc/mgr/images/mgrscreen.png
...on a workstation as inexpensive as C= could provide them may well have served the company quite well. Coherent/MGR was also targeted at x86 systems so a later transition to that platform would've been fairly easy, and put Commodore in a sort of Compaq or HP situation in the early 90s.
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There really isn't much left to Amiga, the IP has expired, the OS is permanently licensed to Hyperion. The only thing AI or the Kouri estate have is the Amiga name for use in electronic devices. That's nothing Apple or any large electronics firm would be interested in. The company who's name shall not be mentioned doesn't need the Amiga name actually, but as they've already made deal with AI, there's really nothing stopping them from using it.
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There really isn't much left to Amiga, the IP has expired, the OS is permanently licensed to Hyperion. The only thing AI or the Kouri estate have is the Amiga name for use in electronic devices. That's nothing Apple or any large electronics firm would be interested in. The company who's name shall not be mentioned doesn't need the Amiga name actually, but as they've already made deal with AI, there's really nothing stopping them from using it.
No...no, that's not at all what I'm talking about. I'm talking about history. What IF Commodore, back in the 1980s, didn't wind up with the Amiga.
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No...no, that's not at all what I'm talking about. I'm talking about history. What IF Commodore, back in the 1980s, didn't wind up with the Amiga.
People fixated with their CUSA hatred cannot understand your first message.
I wish Commodore had not gotten the Amiga and they could have some how survived with Jay fully in control of it's future. Then we would have seen some amazing progress, as I am sure he would not have rested on his laurels and it would not have taken so long to get Workbench2.x and 3.x. Also, the switch to better graphics modes, or standard graphics cards, would have happened much sooner.
Commodore did not even do half of what could have been possible with the Amiga. They had no idea what they had or how to market it. It was mismanaged right into the grave.
I don't really care what would have happened to Commodore if they had not bought the Amiga, but I suspect they would have either become better at competing in the PC space, or they would have gone under even faster than they did. PC sales (or lack of ) is what killed Commodore, as it has been reported many times that the Amiga sales were breaking even, or making a small profit, while their PC sales lost Commodore tons of money.
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People fixated with their CUSA hatred cannot understand your first message.
I hate CUSA bunches, but I understood it.
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With hindsight, it would've been better staying under Tramiel's Atari company, away from the Goulds and the Alis. Although Sam Tramiel would've sunk it in the end anyway. There was really no stopping PC sales. Modularity. Ah well, too late now anyway.
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No...no, that's not at all what I'm talking about. I'm talking about history. What IF Commodore, back in the 1980s, didn't wind up with the Amiga.
Title does use the word "doesn't", which indicates something current. "Didn't" would be more appropriate to talk about something that did or might not have happened a few decades ago. As would some mention that you're not tallking about Today Commodore or their current claimed desire to have Amiga and current use of Amiga name, and the assumption that there is a fight about that. I don't consider myself obsessed with today Commodore USA, I don't even think of them other than when I see posts about Commodore. But I did assume that's what this was about. The mention of Atari, etc. confused me until I saw the later clarification post.
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Nothing would have changed at all.
Amiga was doomed to die because it was way ahead of its time. People were never ready. As a result of this:
1-) Anyone who buys Amiga will always immediately become sleazy. This is what I call the "Amiga curse"
2-) It was not possible for Amiga to cope with the demands of capitalism and an economy focused on wanting people to consume more.
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Lynx and 3DO were too far ahead of their time for possible mass market success and seeing as that's 66% of the A1000 chipset team you can guess the rest.
I don't believe A1000 was too sophisticated at all, it was simply down to bad marketing or no marketing in the case of 1986 and the A1000 with Commodore.
BUT the reason it took until AFTER the ST for the A1000 to be finished was money, now if you said if someone with billions backed Jay and RJ and Dave fair enough, maybe then with some marketing savvy they would have survived.
Also, whilst you can argue that using PC components was inevitable (like all the 3D GPU cards in 486/Pentium era) there was no reason why you had to mate them to a $hitty PC bus like ISA or all the memory contention in the PC compatible architecture. Intelligent companies would have taken the Diamond stealth 64 chipset and mated it to a superfast bespoke Amiga architecture with 32 bits....couple with superior OS = much better performance for the same price.
I think for a real winner you would need Commodore (because they owned MOS Technologies...a massive strategic advantage in the right hands) and Tramiel still there (because he wasn't a dikhead like Gould/Ali combination so no time wasting crap like the +4 or C128 wasting R&D finances) and Amiga chipset. Tramiel at Atari had no money left to do anything, Commodore run by ****s who wasted 3 years making the butt ugly same technology as before A500 was also fail and Jay on his own had no money to develop jack $hit
YMMV
PS PC was NOT a done deal at all, home and business market place were big enough separate market sectors to make billions in one not both. We only got PC for home use because Acorn/Atari/Commodore ALL tanked around the same time. Apple was overpriced crap but their huge profit margins selling to t-w-a-t-s with no brains in the 90s saw them through until the cash iCow bollox came along to rescue them. Even today Mac doesn't even make 5% of world computer market FAIL. They only stayed commercial with iBollox sorry. Ditto for Nintendo...only Pokemon saved Nintendo in the N64 years while Sony was tearing Nintendo a new one on a regular basis for TWO console generations.
Moral of the story....cover your turds in gold dust and you will survive even if you are selling turds.
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Yep, I read the title and thought it was the evil one, sorry.
Title does use the word "doesn't", which indicates something current. "Didn't" would be more appropriate to talk about something that did or might not have happened a few decades ago. As would some mention that you're not tallking about Today Commodore or their current claimed desire to have Amiga and current use of Amiga name, and the assumption that there is a fight about that. I don't consider myself obsessed with today Commodore USA, I don't even think of them other than when I see posts about Commodore. But I did assume that's what this was about. The mention of Atari, etc. confused me until I saw the later clarification post.
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People fixated with their CUSA hatred cannot understand your first message.
Why can't you understand that CUSA hating is not a fixation? It's an aggravation, nothing more. For the record I understood the original post perfectly well. You on the other hand stereotyped all the people who don't share your opinion into one group and then insulted them all by implying a lack of intelligence. Way to win friends and influence others, got to respect those people skills.
Anyway, my apologies to B00tDisk for going off topic. To answer the original question; Without the Amiga I think the big C would be remembered with the likes of Sinclair and Amstrad. Good back in the day but all gone now. Amiga was the big opportunity for them and in the end, whatever we think now, they blew it.
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The company who's name shall not be mentioned doesn't need the Amiga name
Hyperion!
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Hyperion!
They don't have the name "Amiga", they have "AmigaOS" and "AmigaOne". Your obviously too well mannered to use nasty four lettered vulgarities with a "U" as the second letter..... I understand, it does leave a bad taste in the mouth.
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I'm going to say it, the nasty four lettered vulgarities with a "U" as the second letter, I swear, I will.
Hear goes....
CUSA
There I did it.
They don't have the name "Amiga", they have "AmigaOS" and "AmigaOne". Your obviously too well mannered to use nasty four lettered vulgarities with a "U" as the second letter..... I understand, it does leave a bad taste in the mouth.
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Hyperion!
:roflmao:
I'm going to say it, the nasty four lettered vulgarities with a "U" as the second letter, I swear, I will.
Hear goes....
CUSA
There I did it.
==What a nasty taste it's leaving! You should be banned! :lol:
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My view on this is that if Commodore hadn't stepped in then Atari would have ended up getting the technology. It probably then would have been butchered and used in everything they could think of, maybe even licensed out to other companies. Thats what I feel might have happened.
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@B00tDisk
Hey, what system is the screenshot from?. Seems like an early x11 graphic desktop.
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@Digiman
"Ditto for Nintendo...only Pokemon saved Nintendo in the N64 years while Sony was tearing Nintendo a new one on a regular basis for TWO console generations."
What, are you joking?.*The only advantage the psx had, was the affordable piracy of cdrs. If you search through the pile of crap titles on the psx, you could only end with a certain numbers that are really good games. The only exceptions on the psx were the games from well known companies like Konami or Capcom and the likes.
Nintendo had more things besides pokemon, just that the bashers don't try to see them.
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Lets not bring the Nintendo Vs the World argument into this. I really don't want to step back in time to that argument again lol.
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What does C= do next?
Pursue the C900 and make a go at Data General's (or even Sun or SGI's) marketshare?
Push the C65?
C900 would have died in the market, C65 was much later.
The C128 stood a chance but was too expensive, it needed more chip integration to bring the cost down. Plus VIC should have been compatible with 2mhz. If Jack had been around then it would have been better.
In retrospect I wish Atari had gotten the Amiga as Jack might have done something good with it, but they were just too damn greedy on the share price (which was typical Jack).
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Hyperion!
Hehe, this makes me think that "Hyperion!" would make a good battlecry or something like that. Battlecry isn't the word I want, but I can't think of the right one, some term of great excitement Like how Stan Lee says "Excelsior!"... :)
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A hypothetical C500 based on the 65816 could have been made, in place of the A500/A1000.
I think C900 was a very good product for the Unix market. I've read opinions/rumors that C= was actually considering buying Zilog outright at the time. The 16 bit Z-8000 and 32 bit Z-80000 that followed it 2 years after were very advanced designs, Z80000 being fully pipelined, though not without troubles and some design flaws at first.
With C= pricing and distribution C900 had the potential to be a winning product. I don't know which reason was given at the time for the cancellation of the C900, I simply cannot see buying Amiga as a reason enough to bin a product that was virtually developed and made for an entirely different market. Well, the usual C= chaos, I guess...
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@B00tDisk
Hey, what system is the screenshot from?. Seems like an early x11 graphic desktop.
It's Manager ("MGR") which can run on top of Coherent.
http://hack.org/mc/mgr/
...which I believe was the target for Coherent on the C900. Could be wrong, but it is one of those things we'll likely never know.
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With C= pricing and distribution C900 had the potential to be a winning product. I don't know which reason was given at the time for the cancellation of the C900, I simply cannot see buying Amiga as a reason enough to bin a product that was virtually developed and made for an entirely different market. Well, the usual C= chaos, I guess...
It was unfinished and expensive. The Amiga was better & they could only afford to finish and market one.
The Z8000 life was pretty much over in 1985, yeah it was probably cheap but the market the C900 was aimed at wouldn't be impressed. The price thrown around is $4000, it wasn't good enough value for money.
If the C900 was ready to ship, then nobody told the 8563 guys as they continued their evil deeds through out the C128 project.
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I note that neither Commodore nor Atari survived the 90's. There was a storm coming that nobody anticipated. Apple survived by the skin of it's teeth. There is nothing anyone without 20/20 hindsight could have done to survive. The clone wars would even almost claim IBM, which was forced to reinvent itself as a non-pc company.
Actually without the Amiga, Commodore would have no computer to compete with the PC and would likely have thrown most of it's resources into PC clones, something it didn't do until later. It might have survived as a clone maker had it done this.
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The price thrown around is $4000, it wasn't good enough value for money.
Depends on what you compare it too. What was the price of a Unix workstation in 85'?
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Well after a little Googling I found that the SGI IRIS 2400 came in at a shocking $60,000
For it's day it was f'ing amazing however:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk
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Well after a little Googling I found that the SGI IRIS 2400 came in at a shocking $60,000
For it's day it was f'ing amazing however:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk
Yeah the C900 really had no market.
The only place I've seen a Z8000 is in the arcade version of pole position (IIRC there are two). It's not a great CPU.
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@Persia
That is what Commodore probably would have done, but I think they wouldn't have survived unless they focused on Gaming PCs because they would always have been perceived as a company that made "toys" no matter how true (or not) that was.
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... and gaming pcs would have been crap back then anyway ... CGA/EGA goodness ... mmmmm.
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... and gaming pcs would have been crap back then anyway ... CGA/EGA goodness ... mmmmm.
I couldn't agree more. I consider the true rise of the gaming PC to coincide with DOOM, the 486 and the soundcard/CD-ROM "multimedia kit", early 90's.
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I had a soundblaster blaster pro in my 486 along with cd-rom.
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Or, to clarify things a bit let us say that Atari doesn't either. Say the Amiga is on a 3rd path, or Apple buys it and integrates parts into the Macintosh or something. But C= doesn't get it and there is no Amiga that we'd immediately recognize.
What does C= do next?
Pursue the C900 and make a go at Data General's (or even Sun or SGI's) marketshare?
Push the C65?
I think this could have likely happened....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFj-cFMp5A&feature=related
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With hindsight, it would've been better staying under Tramiel's Atari company, away from the Goulds and the Alis. Although Sam Tramiel would've sunk it in the end anyway. There was really no stopping PC sales. Modularity. Ah well, too late now anyway.
It would have never been under his company. What you have is a chain of events: 1) Jack announced buying Atari's Consumer Division to form Atari Corporation almost simultanious to Commodore announcing they're buying Amiga. 2) Commodore immediately sues Shiraz and two others of Jack's engineering staff for theft of trade secrets and puts an injunction on them doing any computer work for Jack that lasts through the entire month. 3) Jack's son Leonard discovers the cancelled check from the previous Atari's investment in Amiga. Jack contacts Warner about it, negotiates for the contract with Amiga (it was with Warner but executed through it's Atari subsidiary) and launches a countersuit at Commodore via Amiga. 4) Both suits are settled out of court.
Without Commodore buying Amiga, you simply have a lawsuit against Shiraz and the two others and Jack with no way to apply leverage to fight it. Amiga would have been out of the equation. Likewise, the contract with the original Atari Inc. that Jack was suing over was never for any sort of ownership. It was simply for licensing (which Amiga would have made a ton of money from under the terms) and access to the chip documentation being held in escrow should Amiga go under. Amiga had several investors besides Atari, and Atari needed a way to recover their investment. If Amiga went under because of their financial problems, Atari Inc. would recieve the right to manufacture the chips on their own, no licensing required.
Regardless, had Commodore not bought it Amiga would have simply soldiered on seeking more investors and a potential buyout, or gone under because of the bad financial state they were in and its assets split up among the investors.
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Regardless, had Commodore not bought it Amiga would have simply soldiered on seeking more investors and a potential buyout, or gone under because of the bad financial state they were in and its assets split up among the investors.
With Amiga not being able to meet their payroll obligations or repay Atari the money they had borrowed, there was no way they could soldier on.
Without commodore the Amiga would have ended up being controlled by Atari, with (IMHO) even more disasterous results than what happened under commodore.
While commodore could have done better, Atari could easily have done worse. Either way, by 1993, neither of them could survive against the PC market.
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Commodore did not even do half of what could have been possible with the Amiga. They had no idea what they had or how to market it. It was mismanaged right into the grave.
It wasn't certain from the start that Commodore would go down that path. If I remember my little bit of Amiga history correctly, the management which pushed for Amiga, Inc. to be acquired did not see the acquisition through, and subsequently left the company. Hence, the guys who had something of a vision where the Amiga fit into Commodore's future were not the ones who actually got to make something/anything out of it.
After the departure of the founder, Commodore was left without tech-savy management, which time and again hurt them until the end. I suppose not really knowing what to do with Amiga is but part of the picture. Did Commodore make good use of MOS Technology/CSG?
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I hate CUSA bunches, but I understood it.
+1
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If neither Commodore nor Atari got the Amiga, it would have died before it was born.
If Atari had got it, things probably would have gone much the same way.
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Well, here are some of my hypothetical thoughts: :-)
1. I think Commodore did a better job than Atari would have if they would have received the chips. Jack's business sense worked well into the early 80s but as the business shifted I'm not sure Jack would have. So I think he was still applying late 70's business sense in a new 80's technology world.
2. Apple would not have been a good fit either. For all the reverence Steve Jobs receives he is not some wunderkind. He hated complex hardware, fought Woz on slots on the Apple II, and shot down anything 'open' on the Macintosh. The Amiga would be the anti-computer to him.
3. Companies I think that could have done the Amiga better (or that I think would be interesting):
-Microsoft - I think that Microsoft could have been an interesting player in all of this. They had not hardware but were looking for a great GUI to sell to everyone. They have could licensed the chipsets and sold the GUI to many different companies. Granted, the hardware might have been a tough sell in the beginning but they had very smart people.
-SUN - Another company with very smart people and I think the Amiga would have been a great fit for them. We all know that they like the Amiga 3000 and AMIX later on so I think they could have ran the Amiga in the beginning. Of course, they could not stop the WinTel tour-de-force so we might have ended up here again.
-SGI - The Amiga would have complimented the SGI hardware on the desktop quite nicely during the time. Again I think they would have been a great match. However, SGI could not stop the WinTel team so the fate might have been Commodore like.
Of these three companies, I think Microsoft would have had the be shot of making the Amiga a standard in some form. Bill Gates was/is very smart and given his transformation of Microsoft in ten short years during the 80's he could have done something very lasting with the Amiga.
Cheers!
-P
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I suppose not really knowing what to do with Amiga is but part of the picture. Did Commodore make good use of MOS Technology/CSG?
They definately did before Jack left, although "good use" means ringing every last cent out of them without investing for the future.
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They definately did before Jack left, although "good use" means ringing every last cent out of them without investing for the future.
Business as usual, I suppose...
But, if I read this correctly, CSG went through a management-buyout and survived as a separate entity until 2001. Which I guess isn't such a bad sign for the company and its state at the time Commodore went out of business.
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With Amiga not being able to meet their payroll obligations or repay Atari the money they had borrowed, there was no way they could soldier on.
They weren't supposed to repay the money. It was provided as show of good faith towards the signing of the licensing agreement that June.
Without commodore the Amiga would have ended up being controlled by Atari, with (IMHO) even more disasterous results than what happened under commodore.
How would it have been controlled by Atari? That was never part of the agreement.
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I note that neither Commodore nor Atari survived the 90's. There was a storm coming that nobody anticipated. Apple survived by the skin of it's teeth. There is nothing anyone without 20/20 hindsight could have done to survive. The clone wars would even almost claim IBM, which was forced to reinvent itself as a non-pc company.
The Amiga would have had to start competing earlier to survive. This includes better products, marketing and R&D. I agree that once the clone wars began it was all but over. Jack Tramiel was NOT a good business man and would NOT have been able to save Amiga either. Gould was not bad but didn't understand the Amiga while Medhi Ali destroyed the company while he profited. I think the best thing that could have happen would have been for Motorola to buy the Amiga as it was floundering in the early to mid nineties. It would have been a bold move by the management of Motorola (but their management wasn't good either). It would have given them vertical integration. They could have continued to develop the 68060 but they probably would have kept their blinders on and switched the Amiga to PPC only. Keeping the 68k for the low end and doing PPC for the high end should have allowed them to sell more chips. I think the Amiga could have continued to be profitable under the right management through the clone wars. C= in Europe was profitable during the bankruptcy. They had good management and found a profitable niche market with the Amiga. Too bad they couldn't have taken over the company.