Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[Pyromania]

@WolfToTheMoon

I'm glad Commodore went the Amiga route and not the 900 route. They would have been slaughtered by Sun, SGI and others. Amiga was unique with its custom chips and multitasking OS. Lets not forget its affordable price. if Commodore went the Unix route instead with their management they would have been out of business way before 1994 and we would not be discussing this on Amiga.org today.

[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.

[commodorejohn]

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.

And how has that worked out? (Hint: it ends with Alpha kiboshed just when it was getting good so's not to threaten HP's Itanium offerings, and VMS given a death sentence.)

[ChaosLord]

I don't understand what this thread is about.

Commodore made Amigas.
Commodore made Unix machines.

Nobody wanted the Unix machines so they did not sell well.

When is the last time you saw a for sale ad on any Amiga website for a Commodore Unix machine?  Never?  Unix sux.  Its 10x slower than AmigaOS.  Complete junk.

Commodore put Unix on the A2000 with a 68020 accelerator card and called it the A2500/UX.

Commodore put Unix on the A3000/030 and called it the A3000/UX.

We used to "sell" them. Ha!

I think they later had an A4000/UX too.


Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.

[commodorejohn]

I don't understand what this thread is about.

Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.

This thread is about going "oh, if only Commodore had accepted Inevitable Unix Dominance and allowed themselves to be assimilated into the collective, they might still be around as a subsidiary of some modern tech giant cranking out indistinguishable Unix boxen, instead they died pushing a neat and innovative line of personal computers, the fools - wistful sigh!..."

[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.

[WolfToTheMoon]

I don't understand what this thread is about.

Commodore made Amigas.
Commodore made Unix machines.

Nobody wanted the Unix machines so they did not sell well.

When is the last time you saw a for sale ad on any Amiga website for a Commodore Unix machine?  Never?  Unix sux.  Its 10x slower than AmigaOS.  Complete junk.

Commodore put Unix on the A2000 with a 68020 accelerator card and called it the A2500/UX.

Commodore put Unix on the A3000/030 and called it the A3000/UX.

We used to "sell" them. Ha!

I think they later had an A4000/UX too.


Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.

SUN wanted to sell A3000UX, but Commodore botched the deal. How's that for not selling?

When Commodore planned to release C900 in 85' for around 3000$, SUN was selling 68000/68010 UNIX systems for +25 000$ !!!(OK, it had a bit more memory and disk space, but still) ... You think C900 wouldn't sell? I think it would sell far better than Amiga 1000 ever did.

What Commodore got with the Amiga was a very good gaming system, but which highly depended on the Motorola CPU and it's custom chips and was not easily portable.

 With the C900, they could have made a C= variant of Mac OS X, only much earlier. OK, by the mid 90s they will probably be f*cked by Intel and x86, but that's just it, UNIX is highly portable and it wouldn't take much to change ISAs. There would be no OCS, EGS and AGA dependencies...

Oh, and as to gaming.... Haynie claims that C900 had a more sophisticated blitter chip than the Amiga.

[Bodie]

Would have loved one, if only for the keyboard:

http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/cbm-900-keyboard.jpg

[cgutjahr]

I wonder if, knowing what we know now, C= would have been better off going with the C900 vs the Amiga. It would give C= a presence in the UNIX market, a modern, easily portable UNIX based OS

Coherent never had a TCP stack until its publisher folded in the mid nineties. That doesn't exactly scream "next big thing" at me.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Coherent never had a TCP stack until its publisher folded in the mid nineties. That doesn't exactly scream "next big thing" at me.

Yes, I know... but adding a TCP/IP stack to an UNIX clone wasn't rocket science, was it?

[toRus]

Zilog's Z8000 had some interesting features but also bugs, compatibility issues and it was not ready from the start (not the MMU). It didn't translate good for the desktop either. Olivetti was selling $5000+ HD-less and unixless Z8000-based machines then; it was the HD, the RAM, the support that was expensive. The Z80000 was only on paper and the company under Exxon was a mess and many people had left in the mid 80s. This was not the case of 70s with CBM buying up and coming MOS, it was a case of entertaining opportunities to enter the enterprise after the party was over. It would take some time to catch up and find clients, the trend in the CPUs had already changed, it was not a sure thing they would manage to license Z8000 to other (i.e. Olivetti) and it could take years before Z80000 was ready. You never know but I guess they would fail miserably.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Zilog's Z8000 had some interesting features but also bugs, compatibility issues and it was not ready from the start (not the MMU). It didn't translate good for the desktop either. Olivetti was selling $5000+ HD-less and unixless Z8000-based machines then; it was the HD, the RAM, the support that was expensive. The Z80000 was only on paper and the company under Exxon was a mess and many people had left in the mid 80s. This was not the case of 70s with CBM buying up and coming MOS, it was a case of entertaining opportunities to enter the enterprise after the party was over. It would take some time to catch up and find clients, the trend in the CPUs had already changed, it was not a sure thing they would manage to license Z8000 to other (i.e. Olivetti) and it could take years before Z80000 was ready. You never know but I guess they would fail miserably.

My theory is that C= wanted Zilog because they were after vertical integration of their 16/32 bit line just like they did with the 8 bits. C900 was started under Tramiel, that was his style. And Zilog, beeing in bad shape, was probably cheap enough to buy.

When Tramiel left, obviously, the opinion to buy Amiga prevailed, thus tying the fate of the 16/32 bit line to Motorola.

There was a 32 bit 68000-like CPU project by MOS but Tramiel killed that shortly after buying MOS. Ah, the missed opportunities...

[Pentad]

I don't understand what this thread is about.

Commodore made Amigas.
Commodore made Unix machines.

Nobody wanted the Unix machines so they did not sell well.

When is the last time you saw a for sale ad on any Amiga website for a Commodore Unix machine?  Never?  Unix sux.  Its 10x slower than AmigaOS.  Complete junk.

Commodore put Unix on the A2000 with a 68020 accelerator card and called it the A2500/UX.

Commodore put Unix on the A3000/030 and called it the A3000/UX.

We used to "sell" them. Ha!

I think they later had an A4000/UX too.


Commodore offered multiple Unix machines at cheap prices to the free market and the free market rejected cheap unix machines.

Actually, the Amiga 3000UX was popular with the Unix crowd and SUN wanted to resell Amiga 3000/UX machines as low cost SUNs.  Bill Joy loved the Amiga with AMIX.  The Amiga 3000/UX were great machines compared to A/UX, NeXT, HP, IBM, etc...

We had TUX machines when I was in college and the expansion was awesome!  

Commodore -shocker- somehow screwed the deal up.

There was no 4000/UX machine.


Cheers!
-P

[Pentad]

It would give C= a presence in the UNIX market, a modern, easily portable UNIX based OS and possibly even Zilog and their pretty advanced 32 bit chip.

The Commodore 900 had some issue from what I remember and what was in Brian Bagnall's first Commodore book.  Here are some items that I remember about the Commodore 900 (keeping in mind I haven't thought about the C900 in a LONG time):

-It was 16 bit as it stood.
-It was NOT Unix but Unix like.  This eliminated you from higher education markets and shops that wanted a true Unix System V based OS.  It is one of the reasons that Atari and Commodore licensed SVR4.
-It was not POSIX compatible
-The IO was slow and buggy

The C900 needed much more development time to really polish it.

I think Commodore was right to axe it.  There is a reason that A/UX, AIX, AMIX, Atari Unix, all licensed System V.  "Unix like" means compatibility issues down the road...especially when AT&T and Dennis Richie are snooping around looking for a lawsuit.

It would been the Commodore 16 of the UNIX market....

-P

[WolfToTheMoon]

denis ritchie and AT&T examined Coherent code... it passed their scrutiny.

Z8001 had 16 x 16 bit registers, true, but instructions could "see" them as anything from 8 bit to 64 bit.

[WolfToTheMoon]

I managed to find a Sieve benchmark of Z8001 vs some other CPUs of the time...

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n6/STperformancetest.html

According to this, a 5,5 MHz Z8001 running Unix was 2 times faster than a ST with a 8 MHz 68000 in this particular benchmark.
So a 10 MHz Z8001 would give a very solid performance in a C900