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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: WolfToTheMoon on August 03, 2013, 06:14:43 PM
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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@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.
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It's a tough one. I do love playing the hindsight game; He who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it.
At the time I remember being happy that Atari didn't have the winning bid, but that was because I was a C64 user and was not interested in switching camps, and we'll never know how the industry might have turned out if it did.
Jay Miner and Co. set out to created the most advanced gaming computer, so it made sense for Commodore as the C64 was the most celebrated gaming computer of the early '80s. If Commodore wanted to continue playing (pardon the pun) in this market space, the Amiga architecture was surely up the the challenge.
But the Commodore of the second half '80s was more interested in playing with the big boys, fancied itself in competition with IBM and HP. And with money being tight they did what pretty much many businesses and individuals end up doing; they rationalised.
I wasn't there but I could imagine conversations along the lines of:
"Well we cant afford both an advanced gaming computer and an advanced Unix business machine".
"The C900 is not really designed for gaming and it would cost too much as a family computer"
"The Amiga architecture is powerful enough to also be used as a business machine"
I would have to say that Commodore would have been better off going with the high end business and education market. Who knows, they might have even survived throughout the '90s and eventually got bought out like DEC, Compaq, or Sun.
As for the Amiga? Through another funding source it may have also survived, but I'd have to venture that somewhere in the first half of the '90s it would have become a games console, competing with Nintendo and Sega. And maybe today I would be playing the latest iteration in the Alien Breed saga on my 2012 Amiga X1 console in 1080p 60fps glory with dozens of other players online via AmiNet.
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I would have to say that Commodore would have been better off going with the high end business and education market. Who knows, they might have even survived throughout the '90s and eventually got bought out like DEC, Compaq, or Sun.
And how has that worked out? (Hint: it ends with Alpha kiboshed just when it was getting good so's not to threaten HP's Itanium offerings, and VMS given a death sentence.)
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I don't understand what this thread is about.
Commodore made Amigas.
Commodore made Unix machines.
Nobody wanted the Unix machines so they did not sell well.
When is the last time you saw a for sale ad on any Amiga website for a Commodore Unix machine? Never? Unix sux. Its 10x slower than AmigaOS. Complete junk.
Commodore put Unix on the A2000 with a 68020 accelerator card and called it the A2500/UX.
Commodore put Unix on the A3000/030 and called it the A3000/UX.
We used to "sell" them. Ha!
I think they later had an A4000/UX too.
Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.
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I don't understand what this thread is about.
Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.
This thread is about going "oh, if only Commodore had accepted Inevitable Unix Dominance and allowed themselves to be assimilated into the collective, they might still be around as a subsidiary of some modern tech giant cranking out indistinguishable Unix boxen, instead they died pushing a neat and innovative line of personal computers, the fools - wistful sigh!..."
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I don't understand what this thread is about.
Here's a response with the cynicism dialled down to zero:
The post is about the lesser known goings-on at Commodore around the time they bought Amiga. It's about revealing how things aren't always so cut and dried and also very dependent on a lot of external actors.
And it's about peoples opinion and a bit of imagination.
Yes, Commodore shoe-horned Unix onto the Amiga; that is called poor execution. The question is would they have been better off with a primary Unix strategy rather than some custom gaming hardware with a secondary Unix strategy.
Based on your experience the Unix on Amiga hardware didn't sell well an therefore if they went into the Unix market with a dedicated machine the same would happen. That too is possible. There are no guarantees. But it is also possible that any number of alternate fates could have befallen Commodore, and it can be interesting to imagine different events set against what we know about the industry over the past 20 or so years.
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I don't understand what this thread is about.
Commodore made Amigas.
Commodore made Unix machines.
Nobody wanted the Unix machines so they did not sell well.
When is the last time you saw a for sale ad on any Amiga website for a Commodore Unix machine? Never? Unix sux. Its 10x slower than AmigaOS. Complete junk.
Commodore put Unix on the A2000 with a 68020 accelerator card and called it the A2500/UX.
Commodore put Unix on the A3000/030 and called it the A3000/UX.
We used to "sell" them. Ha!
I think they later had an A4000/UX too.
Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.
SUN wanted to sell A3000UX, but Commodore botched the deal. How's that for not selling?
When Commodore planned to release C900 in 85' for around 3000$, SUN was selling 68000/68010 UNIX systems for +25 000$ !!!(OK, it had a bit more memory and disk space, but still) ... You think C900 wouldn't sell? I think it would sell far better than Amiga 1000 ever did.
What Commodore got with the Amiga was a very good gaming system, but which highly depended on the Motorola CPU and it's custom chips and was not easily portable.
With the C900, they could have made a C= variant of Mac OS X, only much earlier. OK, by the mid 90s they will probably be f*cked by Intel and x86, but that's just it, UNIX is highly portable and it wouldn't take much to change ISAs. There would be no OCS, EGS and AGA dependencies...
Oh, and as to gaming.... Haynie claims that C900 had a more sophisticated blitter chip than the Amiga.
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Would have loved one, if only for the keyboard:
http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/cbm-900-keyboard.jpg
:D
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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
Coherent never had a TCP stack until its publisher folded in the mid nineties. That doesn't exactly scream "next big thing" at me.
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Coherent never had a TCP stack until its publisher folded in the mid nineties. That doesn't exactly scream "next big thing" at me.
Yes, I know... but adding a TCP/IP stack to an UNIX clone wasn't rocket science, was it? :)
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Zilog's Z8000 had some interesting features but also bugs, compatibility issues and it was not ready from the start (not the MMU). It didn't translate good for the desktop either. Olivetti was selling $5000+ HD-less and unixless Z8000-based machines then; it was the HD, the RAM, the support that was expensive. The Z80000 was only on paper and the company under Exxon was a mess and many people had left in the mid 80s. This was not the case of 70s with CBM buying up and coming MOS, it was a case of entertaining opportunities to enter the enterprise after the party was over. It would take some time to catch up and find clients, the trend in the CPUs had already changed, it was not a sure thing they would manage to license Z8000 to other (i.e. Olivetti) and it could take years before Z80000 was ready. You never know but I guess they would fail miserably.
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Zilog's Z8000 had some interesting features but also bugs, compatibility issues and it was not ready from the start (not the MMU). It didn't translate good for the desktop either. Olivetti was selling $5000+ HD-less and unixless Z8000-based machines then; it was the HD, the RAM, the support that was expensive. The Z80000 was only on paper and the company under Exxon was a mess and many people had left in the mid 80s. This was not the case of 70s with CBM buying up and coming MOS, it was a case of entertaining opportunities to enter the enterprise after the party was over. It would take some time to catch up and find clients, the trend in the CPUs had already changed, it was not a sure thing they would manage to license Z8000 to other (i.e. Olivetti) and it could take years before Z80000 was ready. You never know but I guess they would fail miserably.
My theory is that C= wanted Zilog because they were after vertical integration of their 16/32 bit line just like they did with the 8 bits. C900 was started under Tramiel, that was his style. And Zilog, beeing in bad shape, was probably cheap enough to buy.
When Tramiel left, obviously, the opinion to buy Amiga prevailed, thus tying the fate of the 16/32 bit line to Motorola.
There was a 32 bit 68000-like CPU project by MOS but Tramiel killed that shortly after buying MOS. Ah, the missed opportunities...
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I don't understand what this thread is about.
Commodore made Amigas.
Commodore made Unix machines.
Nobody wanted the Unix machines so they did not sell well.
When is the last time you saw a for sale ad on any Amiga website for a Commodore Unix machine? Never? Unix sux. Its 10x slower than AmigaOS. Complete junk.
Commodore put Unix on the A2000 with a 68020 accelerator card and called it the A2500/UX.
Commodore put Unix on the A3000/030 and called it the A3000/UX.
We used to "sell" them. Ha!
I think they later had an A4000/UX too.
Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.
Actually, the Amiga 3000UX was popular with the Unix crowd and SUN wanted to resell Amiga 3000/UX machines as low cost SUNs. Bill Joy loved the Amiga with AMIX. The Amiga 3000/UX were great machines compared to A/UX, NeXT, HP, IBM, etc...
We had TUX machines when I was in college and the expansion was awesome!
Commodore -shocker- somehow screwed the deal up.
There was no 4000/UX machine.
Cheers!
-P
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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.
The Commodore 900 had some issue from what I remember and what was in Brian Bagnall's first Commodore book. Here are some items that I remember about the Commodore 900 (keeping in mind I haven't thought about the C900 in a LONG time):
-It was 16 bit as it stood.
-It was NOT Unix but Unix like. This eliminated you from higher education markets and shops that wanted a true Unix System V based OS. It is one of the reasons that Atari and Commodore licensed SVR4.
-It was not POSIX compatible
-The IO was slow and buggy
The C900 needed much more development time to really polish it.
I think Commodore was right to axe it. There is a reason that A/UX, AIX, AMIX, Atari Unix, all licensed System V. "Unix like" means compatibility issues down the road...especially when AT&T and Dennis Richie are snooping around looking for a lawsuit.
It would been the Commodore 16 of the UNIX market....
-P
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denis ritchie and AT&T examined Coherent code... it passed their scrutiny.
Z8001 had 16 x 16 bit registers, true, but instructions could "see" them as anything from 8 bit to 64 bit.
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I managed to find a Sieve benchmark of Z8001 vs some other CPUs of the time...
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n6/STperformancetest.html
According to this, a 5,5 MHz Z8001 running Unix was 2 times faster than a ST with a 8 MHz 68000 in this particular benchmark.
So a 10 MHz Z8001 would give a very solid performance in a C900 :)
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I managed to find a Sieve benchmark of Z8001 vs some other CPUs of the time...
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n6/STperformancetest.html
According to this, a 5,5 MHz Z8001 running Unix was 2 times faster than a ST with a 8 MHz 68000 in this particular benchmark.
So a 10 MHz Z8001 would give a very solid performance in a C900 :)
That's not a good benchmark. It compares different thnigs at the same time. And certainly not indicative of CPU performance, unless you are ok seeing the same CPU (68k) performing 3 times faster/slower using different OSes and compilers.
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That's not a good benchmark. It compares different thnigs at the same time. And certainly not indicative of CPU performance, unless you are ok seeing the same CPU (68k) performing 3 times faster/slower using different OSes and compilers.
That's to be expected, with different compilers. It just shows that Z-8001 is certainly very competitive to a 68000 and 80286.
BTW, I think that the prime reason for poor Macintosh performance is that the C compiler on 128k models barely ran due to little available memory. ST is much better in that regard(512k)
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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).
The Commodore 900 and the Amiga 500 were designed in the US.
The A2000 is slightly more complex. The first A2000 was designed in Germany by taking the A1000 and adding the Los Gatos Zorro 1 backplane and turning it into Zorro 2 by changing the form factor to fit the PC style case. They also added the cpu slot, video slot and isa slots. This was developed around the same time that the Amiga 500 was being designed in Westchester.
The second A2000 (the one that you want if you buy an A2000 as it's the one that actually works properly) was designed in Westchester based on the A500. The cpu slot was fixed so you could insert an accelerator without having to remove the onboard 68000. The video slot was made useful and a lot of the new ttl logic was shrunk down into buster.
The Commodore 900 might have been a good unix workstation, but it had been stuck in development hell for a long time & Commodore prototyped a lot of machines and only manufactured them if they got orders for them. The Amiga 2200 was one such system, on the other hand orders kept coming in for the c64 into the 90's.
The Commodore 900 was offered for sale as a development platform for the Amiga before development was self hosted. The few that made it out were likely left over from that.
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What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM? :)
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What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM? :)
Unlikely, since they had Lisa and the Mac.
But, theoretically, had they bought Amiga, they would have positioned it as a high-end workstation and charged much more than C= ever did (Macintosh II was around 10 000$ with a video color card, and it still disn't multitask)
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What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM? :)
Atari were the only company that were likely to buy them and ship computers that we would have bought.
Supposedly some workstation manufacturers were interested in the chipset, but this was way before it was finished and they would have used their own software. It's unlikely we would have ever afforded to buy one & there would have been no real reason for us to either.
Commodore pumped a lot of money into Amiga to get it finished, the os didn't really exist and it was outputting yuv instead of rgb at the time. While the Los Gatos group were treated as heroes and commodore treated as villains who paid no part in the development, it wasn't really like that.
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To understand the UNIX market of the early to mid 80s you do have to realize how many of the soon to be big / big companies were using M68000 and better chips. Porting UNIX, which is as portable an OS as they come, to a new arch like Z80000 or whatever and then getting important applications ported would have been beyond Commodore's capabilities. And for those who've not seen what could be done with mid 80s UNIX, go try NeXTSTEP in virtualbox (the hw is really hard to get, although it's brilliant). That GUI was a generation ahead from what was available at the time!
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And for those who've not seen what could be done with mid 80s UNIX, go try NeXTSTEP in virtualbox (the hw is really hard to get, although it's brilliant). That GUI was a generation ahead from what was available at the time!
NextSTEP came out towards the end of 1989, not really the same timeframe as the commodore 900 (which had blown the development schedule by 1985).
The commodore 900 wouldn't have been able to compete with the next computer on hardware, it's likely that commodore would have milked it as they did the Amiga & it would have ended the same way.
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By 1989, C= could be using Z80000, which blows the NeXT's 68030 away.
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The C900 looks like an interesting machine, the Z8001 being an early RISC CPU, albeit one with a lot of flaws.
The video chip is actually the same as the C128's video chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_8563) but presumably running at a faster speed to generate the 72Hz 1024x800 display. Despite having its own blitter, it was probably not a patch on the Amiga's graphics chip.
The line would have provided Commodore with a premium professional workstation line of products, but they were right to not spread themselves too thinly. They needed to get the Amiga into new configurations far quicker than they eventually did.
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The C900 looks like an interesting machine, the Z8001 being an early RISC CPU, albeit one with a lot of flaws.
The biggest flaw was that it was late to the market... performance was very good, once bugs were ironed out. The Z80000 had a huge potential.
And one more plus is that it was cheap... Z8000 had only about 51000 tranistors... That's some 17 000 less than the 68000 that came out the same year. Z80000 had 91 000 transistors, vs 273 000 for the 68030.
The video chip is actually the same as the C128's video chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_8563) but presumably running at a faster speed to generate the 72Hz 1024x800 display. Despite having its own blitter, it was probably not a patch on the Amiga's graphics chip.
video chip had it's own 128k of memory. Blitter was an add-on card, Haynie claims it was superior to Amiga's blitter.
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Even if the blitter was superior, the actual output of the 8563 doesn't have jack on the Amiga - a character-oriented bitmap mode with two colors per character cell, or one color per character in text mode, out of a palette of 16 with no custom palette capability included, compared to sane, linear bitmaps at up to 64 colors from a total of 4096 or even a mode that allows all 4096 colors? Yeah, you can keep your superior blitter, C900.
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Even if the blitter was superior, the actual output of the 8563 doesn't have jack on the Amiga - a character-oriented bitmap mode with two colors per character cell, or one color per character in text mode, out of a palette of 16 with no custom palette capability included, compared to sane, linear bitmaps at up to 64 colors from a total of 4096 or even a mode that allows all 4096 colors? Yeah, you can keep your superior blitter, C900.
color was not an issue in those days, especially for Unix workstations. What was important is the 1 megapixel screen that C900 was capable of displaying. That was pretty much the same as the first NeXT box, but 4 years earlier, and at half the price.
And it could support something like RTG out of the box, thus being some 7-8 years ahead of Amiga in that regard(remember, C= did the A2410, which was only used by AMIX, only later did it became supported under AmigaOS).
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Who cares whether color was important for Unix workstations? The point is, the Amiga had that capability, and it was used for a lot of great stuff. The C900 didn't. Had Commodore gone the 900 route, would we have gotten the Cinemaware titles? Shadow of the Beast? Deluxe Paint? If we even had, they would've looked like ass by comparison, unless you sprang for an expansion card to provide the capabilities that the Amiga had right out of the box.
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By 1989, C= could be using Z80000, which blows the NeXT's 68030 away.
The z80,000 was cancelled in 1984 before it was completed, either because the z8000 was a failure or because the z80,000 never worked.
It's likely competitive to the 68020, although it's irrelevant. Commodore were still shipping 68000 based Amiga's in 1992. There is no way they'd have switched from the z8000 to a z80000 by 1989.
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The z80,000 was cancelled in 1984 before it was completed, either because the z8000 was a failure or because the z80,000 never worked.
It's likely competitive to the 68020, although it's irrelevant. Commodore were still shipping 68000 based Amiga's in 1992. There is no way they'd have switched from the z8000 to a z80000 by 1989.
Not true... Z80000 was sold to military and telco, where it was used to upgrade from Z8000. They made a CMOS version too(Z80000 was NMOS), called Z320.
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Don't get confused with the Z80180 which was basically an imroved Z80. Z-88000 was only in test phase after being late 2-3 years, the bugs were not ironed out and by 1987 the word was that it did not perform very well in practice and was considered vapourware. I don't think CBM would fair better than Exxon and I find it difficult to believe that a C900 machine would stand a chance against Amiga in the desktop or the existing minicomputer market in the enterprise.
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Who cares whether color was important for Unix workstations? The point is, the Amiga had that capability, and it was used for a lot of great stuff. The C900 didn't. Had Commodore gone the 900 route, would we have gotten the Cinemaware titles? Shadow of the Beast? Deluxe Paint? If we even had, they would've looked like ass by comparison, unless you sprang for an expansion card to provide the capabilities that the Amiga had right out of the box.
You must suffer from CMPS (Chronic Missing-the-Point Syndrome). The questions was not whether we (the Cinemaware title playling public) would have been better off, but rather would Commodore (the computer company) have been better off.
Obviously if Commodore never bought Amiga, or if it did and then pulled a "Gateway" we wouldn't have had all the things that Amiga enabled. Computer game players would maybe have the C256 or may have gone over to Atari ST systems. The graphics and video amateur would have waited a bit longer until someone else kick-started the multi-media computer revolution.
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You must suffer from CMPS (Chronic Missing-the-Point Syndrome). The questions was not whether we (the Cinemaware title playling public) would have been better off, but rather would Commodore (the computer company) have been better off.
Well, A. that really hasn't been the general thrust of this thread, even if the OP tried to sound like it - it's been much more this wistful pining for the idea that maybe we could all have had chickenheads on our generic Unix workstations - and B. who cares? Commodore the company was sunk at least as much by managerial malfeasance and refusal to commit to improving its product line as it was by failing to catch on to some theoretically-inevitable shift towards Unix workstations (and I'd just like to ask, how much could they really have expected to benefit from that? Even if they had managed to establish a foothold in that market, it's not like Unix workstations were enough to save DEC from a buyout.)
I swear, it's like half the people in this community operate on the logic that the way things did go is the only way things could have gone - because Unix/Unixoid is the "in" thing right now, it must have been inevitable, and anybody who explored another avenue that ultimately didn't pan out should be alternately mourned and castigated for their lack of vision in failing to accurately predict future developments and accede to their obvious inevitability. Who cares if Commodore might have made it through a few years more, if doing so would require sacrificing their hands-down best product for some generic-ass Unix box? I'd rather they have died doing something good (or even having done something good and just failing to follow up on it) than hang on through mediocrity.
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Who cares if Commodore might have made it through a few years more, if doing so would require sacrificing their hands-down best product for some generic-ass Unix box? I'd rather they have died doing something good (or even having done something good and just failing to follow up on it) than hang on through mediocrity.
I think a generic UNIX box is a little harsh to say about the C900.
It had custom graphics system. Commodore's own windowing system on top of Coherent.
And it was pretty cheap(for an UNIX box)... 3000ish $, and that's without the inevitable educational discount... It could have been far bigger than Amiga 1000 ever was.
Commodore the company was sunk at least as much by managerial malfeasance and refusal to commit to improving its product line
Apparently, Ghould wanted Gasse before he brought Ali into C=... maybe that was the last chance to change something...
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I swear, it's like half the people in this community operate on the logic that the way things did go is the only way things could have gone - because Unix/Unixoid is the "in" thing right now,
Unix always had a following & it's basically the same people who followed it in the 70's that follow it now. Amiga was different, some people ended up getting sucked into Unix but it's just a pretender to the Amiga legacy.
I think a generic UNIX box is a little harsh to say about the C900.
It had custom graphics system. Commodore's own windowing system on top of Coherent.
And it was pretty cheap(for an UNIX box)... 3000ish $, and that's without the inevitable educational discount... I
The 8563 was horrible in the C128 and it would have been no better in the serial terminals for the C900. It would have sunk commodore quicker. At least with the Amiga they didn't have competition for people making compatible computers. How long do you think they'd have succeeded with competition?
The Amiga lasted so long because it was in a niche market.
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The 8563 was horrible in the C128 and it would have been no better in the serial terminals for the C900.
Which reminds me of Bil Herd's great tale (http://homepage.hispeed.ch/commodore/c128_story.html) of the development of the 128, and all the trouble they had getting the dang 80-column video to work...