Tales from back in the day (ICD & ASDG)

[save2600]

I got your message, and yeah, I haven't been a regular visitor there since moving to central IL... but down here, we don't have music stores like you have up there, or nice sidewalk cafes, or natural bodies of water.  These are all reasons I appreciate Madtown...

-t

Oh.... totally agree with that! As a high-end audio, vinyl and book enthusiast, you're absolutely right. Heartfelt thanks for reminding me of the 'good' things left about the city. I feel like a dolt now. Steve of Paragon Audio is a good friend of mine and a few others. Surely, lots of great aspects left to the city. Thanks Trilobyte for the centering  :-)

[B00tDisk]

Kinshi, what a fascinating pair of stories.  While I never used anything from ASDG, I had ICD gear under the hood of my A500 - namely an AdSpeed.  I remember watching renders in Vista (not the OS, the landscape rendering tool).  Back then there were two versions, Vista which did landscapes, and VistaPro which did landscapes and also water, trees, etc. and came with MakePath, which would let you do anims (although you could cheat and hand-edit scripts to make Vista do animations, which is what I did - couldn't afford the $79 for MakePath or the $119 for VistaPro).  Anyway, said renders on the 7 MHz A500 were painful...but oh boy when I got that AdSpeed, it was off to the races!

It wasn't until I got an 030 card for the A1200 that replaced the A500 that I saw a speed increase.

I've often wondered - would an AdSpeed have worked in any 68k machine from that era (an ST, or an original Mac)?

[Matt_H]

@ kinshi

Thanks so much for the stories. There's not much information out there about Amiga productivity software developers (compared to game developers), and probably even less about North American ones. Thanks for filling in some of the gaps.

I bought MorphPlus for the first time this year (still looking for the latest version) to complement good old ADPro. I haven't even come close to mastering them, but learning just how powerful this old software is is part of the fun

[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=.

[trilobyte]

Trilobyte, what a fascinating pair of stories.

Not my stories!  Kinshi's stories!   Credit where credit is due!  I am just a responder.

- t

[B00tDisk]

Not my stories!  Kinshi's stories!   Credit where credit is due!  I am just a responder.

- t

Kinshi!  Sorry!  Apologies to you both.  Had a late night service call (ah, users...) and was punchy.  Let me just edit that...

[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.

[pkivolowitz]

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.

[pkivolowitz]

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.

ASDG maintained a bulletin board over its "conference table" filled with letters from the sons of Nigerian princes and oil ministers who would let us share in the 50,000,000 dollars they had stashed away if we would let them use our bank accounts.
 
I still remember one letter written on air mail tissue asking for free copies of our "full color lepy broz."

[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.

[JimS]

kinshi: welcome aboard & thanks for the sagas of the Elder Days. ;-)

Love your avatar... you wouldn't happen to have a link to a full sized one by any chance?