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?

[Ohforf]

About the Amiga jr. :
Google found this

No Details about the Machine there.
I wonder how they built a cheaper Amiga...
No Floppy Drive ? 128K RAM ? :-?
Whatever, must have been a lousy Idea.

[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.

[Matt_H]

From what I remember, the Amiga junior started development as the A1000+, an AGA system in an A1000-like case with some expansion capability.

Idiot management stripped the project of resources and the system ended up as another (unneeded) ECS machine before it was cancelled entirely.

The engineers called the whole disaster the A1000jr.

[weirdami]

@Marco

I bet that there are a lot of companies that have piles of "never released idiocy", not just Commodore. Some of those companies went under and some didn't. The ones that went under consider the piles a lack of focus or management failure. The ones that didn't probably chalk the piles up to the vagueries of the developement cycle. If Commodore was still around, we wouldn't care one bit about what the Amiga Jr. was or was not.

Commodore put out some good stuff. Escom put out the last run of A1200's and people were happy. Gateway Amiga put us on the QNX bandwagon for a time, then LINUX; and they made some IP advances that people were excited about at the time even if they didn't end up in a new Amiga. Amino/AI gave us that whole TAO/Intent/Amiga Anywhere/DE thing that did end up in some cell phones and is still being sold right now. They also facilitated the Amiga One thing that people were happy about. And, people are still excited about Amiga OS 4.0 which McEwen and crew did get rolling through Hyperion. KMOS/AI only recently got their hands on things, but I don't see what you mean about retardation on their part. From where I sit, they've done what they said they'd do, even if it was cell phone stuff. That's the main reason they bought the Amiga IP, and that was stated right up front.

But, I guess you just needed to vent.

[Tomas]

Ohforf wrote:
About the Amiga jr. :
Google found this

No Details about the Machine there.
I wonder how they built a cheaper Amiga...
No Floppy Drive ? 128K RAM ? :-?
Whatever, must have been a lousy Idea.

Was it not the commodore c65?

[Tomas]

I bet that there are a lot of companies that have piles of "never released idiocy", not just Commodore. Some of those companies went under and some didn't. The ones that went under consider the piles a lack of focus or management failure. The ones that didn't probably chalk the piles up to the vagueries of the developement cycle. If Commodore was still around, we wouldn't care one bit about what the Amiga Jr. was or was not.

Commodore put out some good stuff.

What good stuff did CBM do in their later years?? The only thing i saw them do was buy up amiga and milk it for all it was worth without doing anything significant with it or even market it. They basicly milked the a1000 design from 85 for years with only small upgrades, which is why Amiga was behind the pc in many areas when the a1200 came out.

[Phoenix]

I thought it was unoffically the A600, as it was the cut down version of the 500... probably going to get burned for this comment

[redrumloa]

They also facilitated the Amiga One thing that people were happy about.

People were happy about that :-?

[nadoom]

i read some where that the junior tag was an engineering joke based on the fact that the head engineer was the same geezer who came up with the IBM junior which flopped spectacularly.

[Martyn]

Phoenix wrote:
I thought it was unoffically the A600, as it was the cut down version of the 500... probably going to get burned for this comment

Yes it was the abomination that was the A600.  What a complete waste of time and resources that was!  

nadoom:
i read some where that the junior tag was an engineering joke based on the fact that the head engineer was the same geezer who came up with the IBM junior which flopped spectacularly.

Yep that's right, I think you can hear all this in the Deathbed Vigil???  Haven't watched it for ages.

Martyn.

[Jose]

"...
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?"

Actually it would still be usable by today's standards. The thing would've probably be able to play PAL/NTSC video at native resolution straight from the custom chipset with the added memory bandwith and color capabilities, and also using stuff like HAM10 and some programable custom chip that made chunky to planar conversions on the fly before the video data was output to the DAC. The copper was also very improved with 32 bit and even it's own bus!!!
AAA would have ruled the world, even if not by it's raw power, the architecture of it and the cool "demoscene" coders the Amiga had at the time, that were very familiar with techniques to take advantage of the Amiga's custom chipsets (wich AAA was the continuation of).
I get very sad everytime I read about it. Even today it would be a very cool curiosity some Amiga users would pay to see
 :-)

[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

[Tomas]

Marco wrote:

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

You are probably right.. The ram specs just seemed similar. But i disagree strongly with C65 being a good project.. I might have been a good project in the 80s, but this was aimed for the 90s and you already had Amigas with much better specs and the c65 was outdated compared to pretty much everything.
Why not just promote the Amiga as the new succedor to the c64? Why should people buy low end c65 when they could have had an Amiga? I highly doubt the c65 would have been significantly cheaper either.