Tales from back in the day (ICD & ASDG)

[kinshi]

My time working in the Amiga community was the best time I had in my computing career (working QA.Tech support for both ICD and ASDG), and for the longest time I have wanted to tell how both companies fared, and how the demise of Commodore affected us. Lots of attention has been given over the years to Commodore itself, but what about all the independant, small businesses who comprised its development community...lots of stores to be told out there that are just as compelling.
 
ASDG Inc. - The bankruptcy of Commodore affected us like a Tsunami rolling in out of nowhere. The very DAY of the announcment, we had distributors and consumers alike cancelling their orders. Or revenue stream turned off nearly instantaneously like a spigot being closed off. It was often asked back then why ASDG would not bring Elastic Reality to the Amiga, and that was why...all the distibution channels for the Amiga contracted at once, combine that with the sudden loss if revenue, we simply could not afford to self-publish it with no distribution channel to sell to. We were lucky we did not go out of business within a month of Commodore.
 
What saved our bacon as a company was ER for the Mac. We got ER into the distribution channel with Ingram Micro, and quite literally it was ER for the  Mac that saved ASDG from near immediate demise (We also had sales from out Silicon Graphics version, but it took a lot longer to sell those given it was being sold into film studios).
 
Also, it was made worse because Commodore stiffed us for shipments of AdPRo we made to them for their A500 bundle deals (you may remember towards the end, Commodore was bundling vouchers instead of actual copies). THis was because Commodore was not paying us for the copies we already shipped to them (they did the same to EA with DPaint). In the end, Commodore never paid us for an entire shipment of AdPro for that program which really hurt us bad.
 
It also made our owners a LOT less willing to keep making Amiga products (tbh, a lot of us were upset with the community reaction, because we had people on our BBS, and on Portal, saying we shoudl fire/lay people off, and have the devs do tech support as well as code so we could afford to keep making products for the Amiga. hey I love the Amiga too but not so much I would want me or my coworkers to be decimated for it. It literally was develop for Mac or die.
 
I was working for them when Amiga World magazine published its last issue. THis was important to me because I wrote an article that got published in that issue (and when I heard the news AW was going away, I was really nervous my article would have never gone to print). but it did (it was titled 'Face to Face with Morph Plus'.)

[kinshi]

ICD Inc.
 
ICD really never was in the forfront of the minds of the Amiga community but it made some of the most technologically advanced gadget for the Amiga. It was one of the first to use FPGAs in its product line, and it had a level of miniturization that was only common to laptops at the time, plus it had some innovative approaches (like with the AdSpeed, with its dual 16k data/instruction static RAM caches which made that device produce benchmarks that rivaled a 68020.)
 
We also extended the A500 internally like no one else, internal IDE laptop hard drives, internal A500 FLicker fixer, accelerator products, and RAM expansions, not to mention the Trifecta 500 (combo SCSI-2/IDE for the 500...that thing got a great review in Amiga Format)
 
However, ICD death had nothing to do with the Amiga's death, nope, they got into money troubles of their own making, could not pay suppliers, could not meet distributor shipments, and ultimately the 2-man partnership dissolved , and everyone got laid off. THis was a bit of an uglier than normal time because we all found out later on (like about 3 months after the layoff) that ICD had not been paying our health insurance premiums, even though they had been witholding for them. We found out because our HMO sent us all letters to that effect.
 
ICD was a pretty big company (medium sized) personell-wise...we actually produced our product on site (including the soldering and PCB dip-tank, we ran 2-production shifts at the height of operation, along with shipping, packaging and all QA/repair, and we had a German sales office. We had a lil over 100 people all told at the height.
 
I used to man our trade-show booth at World of Commodore, got to travel a lot, meet a lot of people, and work with a lot of the big AMiga names, and got to meet some fo the folks of Amiga legend (like meeting Jay Miner, Jim Sachs, Leo Schwab (complete with cape and hat), Fred Fish, and Harv Laser of Portal fame, Marc Brown of .Info, and of course Kiki Stockhammer LOL
 
Not to metntion getting to meet some cool people from the other Amiga developers out there (like from CSA, and GVP).
 
ICD had some cool products waiting in the wings at the time of its demise. We had the Viper 1230 which we showed for the first time at World of Commodore NYC, it was a '030 acellerator  for the A1200, and we had a big ol AMiga-chipset based project where we develop what amounted to a 'Amiga Blade Server and enclosure' complete with Ethernet connections and a shared SCSI HDD cluster. This was a prototype of a system we developed to stream movies on a pay-per-view basis in Hotels based on the Amiga classic shipset.
 
Some of you may recall the demo ICD used to show at tradeshows, the 3 minute clip of 'Star Wars' that could be controlled with a joystick. (we used that demo to show how fast the transfer rates were on our SCSI products...pretty cool we could play full motion, NTSC res HAM video on a A2000 with a mere 68k processor.
 
Later on when I worked for ASDG, I found Commodore had stiffed ICD too, but in a different way. We hired a VP of sales that was formerly on the CDTV team at Commodore, and we were talking about the good ol days, and he revelaed where Commodore got the hints (if not the actual design) for their IDE controllers in the A600/A1200. See ICD had given loaners of the AdIDE and AdSpeed/IDE to the CDTV team ostensibly for evaluation  and potential licensing of or design for use in future CDTV revisions. I found out from this fella that instead COmmodore used the AdIDE as a roadmap for their implementation of the A600's IDE controller. (since their own controllers were huge and clunky).
 
---
 
Long story short, at times Commdore was an AWFUL partner, and they never gave warning to the official developers about new models. The A500 Plus came as a total suprise, as did the A600 (and we could not even get them from Commodore..we had to press our European distrubutors to get the machines so we could develop for them).
 
Which was sad considering Commdore used to be good about providing protoype units to developers (we had a prototype A3000 that was mounted to a peice of plywood shipped to us way back when, and they got us a prototype A4000 even, but they they still flung suprises at us like that, knowing full well how much we had invested in the European markets.

[kinshi]

Cool to know the poster girl of the Amiga (Kiki) is still out there kickin it.
 
As far as used ICD stuff, we sold far more product in Europe (specifically Germany) than we did in the US, so if someone is looking for that stuff, I would look in that venue first.
 
Also when buying used A500s, always ask what is under the hood, since ICD had a whole bunch of stuff that went on the inside that folks could easily forget about. I already saw one post here from someone who has an ICD Phobe II card (that sits under Paula) but the AdRAM card it connects to is missing from their 500.
 
The truly rare (and sweet) ICD product is the Trifecta 500, it was the newest in the product line, and we only had one production run of them. (and as much as I hate to say/admit this, if you have a Trifecta 2000 or an AdSCSI 2000, you will NEVER get them to work right with an 040/060 card. The reason why is the designer cheaped out on the PCB, and went with a 2-layer PCB instead of 4-layer, and the added electronic noise on the Zorro Bus created by a 040 card will send the Trifecta 2000/AdSCSI 2000 into a tailspin (just cannot boot in 040 mode). At least with SCSI drives. We never did fully test IDE drives with under 040's, company died before we got that fleshed out. THe first 040 cards appeared on the market after TRifecta's production run was complete)
 
It still pisses me off however that I did discover that issuer PRIOR to the Trifecta's production run. I tested the Trifecta prototype alongside a pre-release Progressive 040, and the powers and I could nto convince the powers that be that in order for a SCSI-2 controller to be taken seriously in the US Amiga market, it HAD to work with the 040 cards.
 
The problem in thinking was that ICD was too used to making 'consumer' grade stuff for enthusiasts, but with the Trifecta, we had a performance product with a feature set that would be desired on those high-power A2000s which were always fitted with an 030 or better, and a Video Toaster. Plus the company could not afford to redesign at that time. We were near death anyway. Sad thing is Trifecta 2000 *could* have made us a lot of money if we had made it work with the 040s when we (I) first discovered the issue.
 
You can use them just fine with a '030 card for what its worth. Works great with the A2630, and heres the kicker..the Trifecta 500 is perfectly happy with 040s...A500's Zorro bus is insulated and isolated enough that it wont interfere, go figure.
 
Course I have no idea how it would behave with the modern version of the OS, I would not be suprised at all if the the ICDPrep failcascaded under 3.5 and 3.9 (heck 3.1 even). It was only tested up to Kickstart 2.05

[kinshi]

Great stories. I worked for a former Commodore distributor, about two years after they stopped doing any Amiga business. I got to watch them go down the tank too, selling video editing products for PCs and Macs.
 
Being from Rockford, hearing about ICD is always interesting for me. I actually bought a Link II adapter from Tom himself in 1999/2000, just by walking into the complex on Rock St. and asking the security guy how to go about getting in contact with ICD. Tom came down and we worked out a deal. I may have purchased one of the last new ICD SCSI adapters around
 
Everybody was threatened with having to leave that big old complex eventually because the landlords stopped paying their utility bills. It was big news in the local paper. All tenants were "left in the dark." I think there are some ICD customers/partners who would probably giggle at that...
 
- t

 
 
hehe that big old complex was a former textile mill, Reed-Chatwood that dated back to the 1880's. I swear the place was haunted. THe ICD offices were in a newer part of the complex (built in the 60's but our production floor was off in the OLD part of the the place). The big, long wooden storage shed out back held some of the old production machinery, like giant cast-iron gears, and other industrial-age relics.
 
The owners of the Reed-Chatwood bldg were slumlords, thats for sure. There were always fires strating out in the nearly abandoned regions of the plant, and the neighborhood it was in was awful (Rockford's first carjacking happend in our parking lot ) I dont know how downtown Rockford is now, but in those days it felt more like Beirut.
 
Honestly, I think they (the bldg owners) were trying to burn the place down for insurance money. The electrical in the blg was horrid...I was rewiring a power supply once, and had an accidental short, and it took out the power to the entire floor.
 
hehe ASDG's offices were no prize either. We were crammed into a small cinderblock bldg in south Madison, WI. that was a former machine shop, and was right next door to the foodbank. Place was cold as a tomb in the winter, and broiled in the summer and the bldg only had one, consumer-grade, air conditioner that barely worked that spat out dust most of the time.
 
Which distributor was that btw? I recall one being down in Champaign-Urbana but I forget the name (I and one of our sales guys went down there once for a dog and pony show of the AdSpeed/IDE when it was first released).

[kinshi]

Thats correct, ASDG never folded, we were purchased by AVID Technology (after we had renamed ourselves to Elastic Reality). None of the ASDG staff remained with AVID however, later a few formed a new company with Perry Kivolowitz, and one of the former devs went to Microsoft, and cpl more are also living out in my neck of the woods
 
Tom Harker of ICD is an entrepenuer, so I am not suprised if he has been doing his own thing since, and I spose if hes running an ISP, that explains why the ICD website has been up for so long hehe.  I talked to him a bit a cpl years back, he was still trying to get rid of some old ICD stuff (mostly Atari ST junk, so don't get your hopes up in regards to lost stocks of Amiga product hehe). ICD I spose techincally never went out of business, it just shrunk to a one-man operation.
 
A big part of the reason why ICD did not (and could not) keep making product at that point was the fact Tom was not the engineering guy. The other partner, Mike Gustafson, was engineer-prime for the place and did all the design work the Amiga products from the firmware, to the drivers, to the programmable logic chips. When they parted ways, there really was no way for ICD to continue.

[kinshi]

Wow, a new MorphPlus user in 2009!
 
MP does have a learning curve to it, but it can do some darn cool stuff, even by today's standards.
 
BTW, if you can lay hands on copies of Elastic Reality 1.0 (3.0 an 3.1 for that matter) it runs fine still under Windows Vista. I still use ER 3.1 from time to time (AVID retired the name and the product a few years back). You can use ER as a sort of 'AdPro' for Windows in terms of doing bulk image conversion, as well as using to create video, animated GIFs, etc.
 
You just made me recall something else that was cool @ ASDG...we licensed our image processing and image format conversion to NewTek for the later versions of Lightwave 3D (We called it 'HIIP' for Host Independant Imaging Protocol) and we used HIIP for all our future Mac, Windows and SGI products, and I now recall the development effort we made to document and prep the technology for licensing).
 
So yea some of our advancements did make it back to the Amiga after the fall of Commodore But its true, the North American Amiga dev community has lived in the shadow of the European market for a long time, and lived n its shadow even when C= was alive. in NA, Amiga was an uber productivity platform, in Europe it was an uber games platform, but for some reason C= was incapable of reconciling the difference in usage.

[kinshi]

Oh, the reason I brought up N.A.R.C, my intro is because at their picnic, I gave them a hands on look at the A500 Plus and the A600 (inside and out). They never published what it was I showed in their newsletter at my request but now that I think about it, that might have been the first public showing of the A500 Plus and the A600 in North America :roflmao: since C= was actively pretending in NA that the two did not exist.
 
They weren't even protptypes, they were simply retail machines we bought off our distributors in the UK and Norway LOL..silly C=.

[kinshi]

@Bootdisk, to answer your question, ICD *DID* in fact have Mac and Atari ST versions of the AdSpeed, though the AdSpeed for the Atari ST was different since the 68k CPU in that thing was a PLCC form factor. AdSpeed for the Mac looked just like the AdSpeed for the Amiga (but it had blue lettering on the label instead of red).

We never sold many of the Mac version because its 68k CPU was soldered in, and those original 68k Mac were hell to crack open. As such it required two things Mac enthusiasts feared greatly (technical expertise, and seeing the inside of a computer :roflmao: Plus you had to get that Mac case cracker tool to get inside w/o destroying the case, and you had to avoid electrocuting yourself on the exposed CRT.

Ugh..that made recall a tech support case from hell...some fella with a Atari AdSpeed called up, super distraught over having installation trouble, and believe it or not, got so upset he threatened to commit suicide on the phone. We got his local policie depts and suicide prevention hotline folks to get over there.  I give a lot of points to Howard (he was our Atari ST dev/support guy) for keeping this guy from losing it long enough for the cops to get there. Tech support never gets paid enough . I know I worked through a few cases of rabid end users myself, but did manage to switch one angry T-Rexx user from wanting to kill me, to offering to dance at my wedding (no I did NOT take him up on it). Some days it seemed I was less of tech support and more a psych counselor.

I got some odd and interesting support letters while I was doing ICD tech support.

1. A letter from a 14-year old Polish kid who was basically asking us to give him an AdSPeed, well we did NOT given him an AdSpeed BUT we sent him a T-Shirt, a hat, and some ICD stickers

2. Got a letter from some researcher in Iran who was trying to write a 020 emulator to run on the 68k (since Iran was and still is under a tech embargo and the 020 was a forbidden export to Iran, he wanted some help trying to use an AdSpeed for the job, but we had to tell him no or have the Feds comedown on us.)

3. Got a support phone call from a A500 AdSpeed user in of all places..Leningrad, Soviet Union! Pretty wild to be getting calls from Russia BEFORE the wall came down, and to discover there were Amigas and AdSpeeds being used there.

I still have a envelope/stamp collection of all the support letters I received while I worked at ICD (Supported customers in over 43 nations, and on ALL 7 continents, and yes I do mean all of them. A lot of folks don't realize just how international the Amiga was, and really how North American a phenomenon the PC and the Mac were at the time.

[kinshi]

Kinshi - don't know who you are but thank you for the posts.
 
I can verify that they are accurate with respect to ASDG.
 
I can verify that at the moment Commodore went under, 50% of our income disappeared - that day.
 
One of the things I am most proud of in my business career is that I saw that day coming and started diversifying long enough ahead of time to have the other 50 percent of our business still left. I should have started sooner.
 
Did I bail on the Amiga? No - it is only true that I put a great deal of our resources into the diversification. I was responsible for 35 families. I owed it to them to climb out of the religious mindset that I too lived by (Amiga uber alles). Commodore management bailed on the Amiga.

Hey Perry, long time!

Kinshi = Chris Edgin, formerly of ASDG technical support. If ya called ASDG for tech support between 1993 and 1995, odd are it was me on the phone

Perry is right, ASDG did NOT bail on the Amiga, it literally bailed on us. We did a LOT to help prop up C= but they stuck it to us in the end.Amiga sales of ASDG products practically dried up the same day C= announced bankruptcy as our distributors literally were calling on that very day canceling orders.

Of course the utter chaos that was C= post-bankruptcy did not help at all. Certainly not in a way that would attract revenue via Amiga products.