What the hell was the Amiga Jr?

[Marco]

I was just watching an incredibly poor quality video with Bill Herd and Dave Haynie chatting about the good ole' days at Commodore, and amongst all the hardware and name dropping; Haynie mentions some middle management guy who all the engineers would piss off by calling his idea the Amiga Jr, after the PC Jr (the catastrophic flop by IBM) because this guy had been part of the team that thought up the PC Jr. This riled the guy up so much he threatened to fire anyone that mentioned the name Amiga Jr.

Does anyone know what model of Amiga this was? Or if it was even one of the released models; also anyone know who the irate management guy might be?

P.S. in the vid they also had an AAA board with no chips, what exactly were the specs of AAA? Probably not too impressive by todays standards but would it have made any difference back then for the Amiga?

[Marco]

Right, so never released idiocy that drained more resources away from AAA and led to the cutting down of the 3000+ into the 4000.

Nice. The Amiga just seems to attract this kind of managerial retardation doesn't it? First Commodore, then ESCOM, then Gateway sitting on it for a while, then Amiga Inc and finally KMOS/Amiga Inc. That article makes for some very depressing reading.

[Marco]

@ weirdami

The problem is that the internal idiocy of Commodore was sufficient to lead to their downfall, no one can be blamed for the failiure of the Amiga except Commodore themselves, the management should never get involved with engineering stuff - it only results in things like the +4, the C232, C64GS and so on. AAA was in development for several years and nothing came of it. The exact same thing happened to 3DFX - they kept on offering tiny improvements to the original Voodoo chipset while promising the next big advance which never came because they kept on drawing resources away from it (I think it was the Banshee, not sure).

Commodore should have dominated with the Amiga, but their own stinginess and lack of foresight, coupled with managerial interference in engineering stuff meant that in 1994 the Amiga was almost the same machine as it had been 9 years earlier, in the meantime Apple and the PC clones had simply caught up and overtaken them.

AmigaDE is a dead end, and what's more has nothing really to do with Amiga except a name tag slapped on it. The AmigaOne should never, EVER have been made. AInc should have sourced and sold commodity PPC boards with no pointless hardware restrictions and made money off of the OS, as that is all that is actually left of the Amiga now.

Then they failed to pay employees, paid them late, stopped paying insurance, lost their headquarters, disappeared for a bit, never showed up to court hearings, accrued several million $ of debts and finally just quit - enter KMOS. Who have done what exactly? They have sat on their hands and nothing has happened, no new hardware, no final OS4, nothing.

Yes I feel like venting, because from my perspective, since the demise of Commodore virtually nothing has been accomplished with the Amiga and the various shell companies that have held it; if they'd just sell some cheap, modern PPC boards with OS4 - or sell OS4 separately and let us run it on existing PPC computers like the old Macs or the Pegasos' then the community could have something to look forward to.

Just as a hobbyist platform, not a 'second coming' because that'll never happen unless someone has the bright idea to transition to standard PC hardware and just sell the Amiga as the OS with no dedicated hardware. Either option there would be fine by me.

[Marco]

Tomas wrote:
Was it not the commodore c65?

No, the C65 was actually a very good project, it was an update to the C64 rather than a downgrade to the Amiga, it basically gave the C64 almost Amiga like graphics and sound capabilities, had an integrate 3.5" Floppy, 128K RAM (expandable to 8Mb) a 128K ROM, res up to 1280x400, 6 channel audio, even had a trapdoor expansion port like the 500/1200, this page has some info:

http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/c65.html

[Marco]

Yes, that is the major tragedy of the C65 and much of the reason why it was cancelled, it was simply too expensive and too late. It would have probably cost almost as much as an Amiga, IIRC the 128s were so expensive to produce they were being sold at a loss (to preserve the 'image' of the Amiga - not that it had much of one outside of Europe due to a catastrophic lack of advertising) and subsidised by Amiga sales. Really Commodore should have completely killed all 8-bit development the instant they got ahold of Amiga and just pushed Amiga all the way. Selling PC clones wasn't exactly a good business idea either.