Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[agami]

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.

[agami]

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.

[agami]

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.