Amiga's Worst Move?

[plasma]

The worst move in the history of Amiga was when they backed off from the deal with Atari. Why? Partly because Amiga would then never have gotten competition from the Atari ST, and partly because Atari was a more wellknown company than Commodore.

[plasma]

bloodline wrote:

Plaz wrote:
And from the "What If" files....

What if Amiga would have been absorbed in to Atari? If I recall the history correctly, Amiga owed Atari a large amount of money. If it was not payed back by the deadline, all assest would have belonged to Atari. At the last minute CBM stepped in and payed the bills and purchased Amiga. In the end Atari met a similar end to CBM, but would that history have been changed if they owned Amiga instead of CBM? Maybe not. Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection. And they had no intention of hiring the original Lorraine team, so the out come would have been vastly different for sure.

Plaz

Atari wanted to use the Amiga hardware to make a system that would basicly have been a "better ST"... AmigaOS would have gone, and some of the amiga's more osoteic features would have been forgotten... They wanted a 16bit games console nothing more

Atari's fate would not have changed. Imagine if Apple had bought the Amiga team... :idea:

Why did Atari make the Atari ST then? That wasn't a game console, was it? It was even released before the Amiga IIRC.

Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.

[plasma]

Plaz wrote:
Atari never did much better at avertising their machines either from my recollection.

I believe they did actually. How else would they be able to sell so many Atari STs, when that computer was inferior to the Amiga?

Besides, the Atari ST had a much better design than the Amiga, which would also be a selling point. The name "Amiga" was never a marketable name IMHO. And everyone knew what an "Atari" was, but what was an "Amiga"?

Some of the last computers Atari made was far better than the Amiga (except for the OS of course.) Atari Falcon, for example.

All in all, I believe Amiga would have been better hands with Atari.

[plasma]

bloodline wrote:

Anyway what makes you think that the Amiga team wouldn't be able to convince Atari to use AmigaOS? It was far better than GEM OS.

If you read the Atari-Amiga agreement (it is available if you google it)... it shows clearly that Atari want to use parts of the Amiga technology (ie the stuff which Amiga had patents on, like DMA, blitters etc...). Atari did not want the Chips or the OS, they just wanted the technology for their own machines without having to licence the patents.

Apparently they had plans to, at least, use parts of AmigaOS in their Atari 1850XLD.

From http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/1850xld.html
One ex-Atari Corp. also discovered proposals for a Unix-style GUI kernel for the "Mickey" project. How much of this was the original AmigaOS system is unknown but it is likely that it contained information on the Amiga EXEC and Intuition, with some kind of custom "AtariDOS" additions.