Where Are They Now?

[amigadave]

Since several of them attend AmiWest, I should say so.

Carl and Dale for instance

and Bryce Nesbitt

and R.J. Mical

and Dave Haynie

#6

I wonder if the Amiga was the "High Point" in the careers of most of them, or if most of them went on to bigger and better projects?

I would guess that the Amiga was a once in a lifetime experience for all of them and they remember that time when they were creating the Amiga under the supervision of Jay, as the best time of their careers and the most fun they ever have had creating something new and exciting.

Projects like the Amiga don't come around very often.  I doubt any of us will see anything even close to the creative genius that was assembled to think up what became the Amiga again in our lifetimes, in any field, and specially not in the field of computing.

It will probably take many more years, or perhaps generations, before another quantum leap is made in computing, like the Amiga made happen with Personal Computers when it was first introduced.

It still baffles the mind to think that Commodore ownership and management could so completely screw up and miss out at making the Amiga the dominant personal computing choice in the late 1980's and prevent Microsoft from ever becoming the giant monster that it became in the 1990's and beyond.  The management of Commodore during the Amiga years must go down in history of computing as the most inept and incompetent computer company managers of all time.

The only reason they don't, is because no one remembers the Amiga or the people who killed it.  The good name of Commodore, which the C64 series of computers earned was not tarnished, because the C64 was too big of a success.  It is almost like Commodore was two different companies and the former Commodore is still remembered for their astounding success with the C64, while the failure of Commodore's management during the Amiga days was so complete and Microsoft's dominance to over powering, that no one even remembers the Amiga, which is devastating to everyone who knows what the Amiga should have really become, and also knows that Windows should never have gained 1/10 or less the popularity that it now has.  If the Amiga had been marketed and developed properly, Microsoft should have been put out of business, instead of the reverse of that situation and Commodore going out of business.

I guess Commodore's success and longevity of the C64 was also the cause of their downfall, as management did not see that the world of computing was changing at an unbelievable rate, and they could no longer rest upon their successes.  Commodore needed to aggressively begin R&D on the successor to the Amiga, later called the A1000, so they would have been the first company to start using dedicated video cards and sound cards.  They needed to stay 1 or 2 generations ahead of all other Personal Computers, instead of thinking they could just keep selling the same 1984-85 technology for 5 to 8 years.  Every Amiga user knows that the AGA chipset was too little too late.

Ask any of those original Amiga engineers and developers about how many of them Commodore kept working on improving the later generations of Amiga computers and operating systems and how little was spent to keep the Amiga head and shoulders above any other Personal Computer.  How much marketing money was spent to get Amigas into every business, school district, and government agency?

I don't blame any of the original Amiga engineers and developers for the monumental failure of the Amiga to dominate in every arena, I blame Commodore management for not keeping the Amiga ahead of every other Personal Computer on the planet, and for not placing an Amiga in business, schools and government, where it could be seen by everyone as the best personal computer ever invented.

With the proper marketing, sales should have been ten times more than they were the first 6 months and then exploded to 100 times more during the following 6 months.  With that amount of sales and success, Commodore would have had the resources to improve AmigaOS into a secure multi-user, business capable operating system that it would have had to evolve into, for it to replace Windows as the most popular operating system in the whole world.

That is what should have been the path of the Amiga, if not for the thieves and blind, greedy, idiots who ran Commodore into the ground from 1986 to their demise in 1994.

[amigadave]

Highly unlikely. Linux is too different from AmigaOS. To re-architect AmigaOS to a point where it could supplant Linux would take a massive effort - you'd need to add memory protection, multi-user support, reduce the GUI dependency, and provide a full Unix-compatible API, as all of these are stuff that the vast majority of uses of Linux *depends* heavily on.

Did MS-DOS, or Windows1.0 have any of those features you mention would be required for AmigaOS to have possibly prevent Linux from ever being created? (I am too lazy and have better things to do, than to look it up)

I am not saying that Linux would never have been created, or some other Open Source equivalent, but it is impossible to tell what would have happened in our alternate Universe, where the Amiga had become the dominant choice and marketing monopoly that Windows eventually evolved into.  But with the money that Microsoft made on MS-DOS and Windows applied to the Amiga during the first years after the Amiga was released, almost anything could have been possible.  What Jay and his merry band of geniuses would have actually done with that much money and the freedom to do anything they wanted is an entirely different question, that we will never know the answer to.

Keep in mind that while there are millions of people using Linux on the desktop, that's still a miniscule niche for Linux compared to use on servers and embedded devices where the features that appeal are often extremely different from user-interface heavy devices.

Also, Linux started in '91. By the time of the demise of Commodore, Linux was already starting to get serious traction on the server side but nobody were really targeting Linux at the desktop side at all.

We are not talking about what Commodore could have done in 1991, or even in 1989.  I was referring to what maybe could have happened if Jay and the whole Los Gatos team could have accomplished if given 100% freedom and unlimited funds at the beginning of 1986, which is when they should have started moving past OCS to ECS, or even AGA maybe.  Then on to dedicated third party video and sound cards well before any IBM compatible system had a chance to even catch up to the graphic and sound capabilities of AmigaOS1.0

Enough of my fantasy about what could have been, or should have been, or might have been.  We are lucky that we still have any community left after so many greedy, stupid, idiots, have done their best to kill the Amiga for so many years.

It is amazing that we have so many choices in both hardware and operating systems that are descended from, or patterned after the original Commodore Amiga computer line and AmigaOS.  Plus there are still hundreds of people who still use their original Commodore Amiga computers and a few people still making hardware accessories and accelerators for them over 20 years after they were first introduced.

[amigadave]

R.I.P

Jay Miner
Dave Morris
Rob Peck

I think it was spelled Dave Morse, not "Dave Morris", check the signatures on the inside of your A1000 case, if you still have one.

I am still alive (well, sort of alive, but go by David, not Dave, and I am not a member of the Los Gatos team that invented the Amiga).