7 ms·

Crash and Burn: The Amiga ST Story

56 points by simonpure 6y ago

andi999 6y ago
"By late 1983 Tramiel had crushed his enemies, seen them driven before him and heard the lamentations of their dealerships. ".... wait.. isnt this a Conan reference?
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  Yup; not dealerships though of course.
- kanobo 6y ago
  I wish there was a chrome extension that would highlight cultural references on a page and link to source. Nothing more frustrating then having that feeling of unknown familiarity.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  The Conan scene paid homage to by this quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos
johnyzee 6y ago
For those curious, there was never an 'Amiga ST'. The headline is just a play on the competition between Amiga and the Atari ST.
detritus 6y ago
This ended too soon! For me the real age of the Amiga started with the 500, which this article - wonderful as it is - stops exactly short of.
- mastazi 6y ago
  Yes we need a Part 2, it was a very enjoyable reading! The YouTube channel “Nostalgia Nerd” [1] could scratch that itch in the meantime - look for the “Amiga Story” documentary (made up of 2 videos, about one hour each), it’s well done. On the same channel there are also several longer videos about the various Atari product lines (ST, Jaguar etc). [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd
  - ansible 6y ago
    For even more about the computers back in the 1980's, check out The 8-bit Guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22 https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22
    - mastazi 6y ago
      Oh yes, great channel I agree
  - detritus 6y ago
    Just so you know - you have cost me at least four hours of background cognitive potential so far, as I've had this on whilst I worked.
    - mastazi 6y ago
      Ahah :-D
- w4tson 6y ago
  Yeah I grew up with A500. I loved that machine. It came with a paper BASIC reference manual. It was years before I worked out what it’s purpose was. Once I did though, I was hooked, I tried AMOS basic, though this was a little difficult because of patchy intel. No YouTube tutorials to learn from. Only books from the library or AmigaFormat magazines. Blitz basic was easier and I had some better tutorials. I progressed to writing my own games. When I finally moved to PC I picked up rudimentary C++ to write a game, I managed but but it was difficult. Then pascal at school. Java at university. Now it’s my day job. JavaScript was learned on the job. On the side I’ve learned groovy, scala, kotlin, go, rust. I’ve now been a software dev for 16 years professionally and have started a consultancy this year. All pretty much thanks to the Amiga. That machine was an Xmas present, I almost got a Nintendo instead. I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been!
teknopurge 6y ago
what a great article - fantastic 10m read on a specific part of the computer business.....part that is arguably responsible for where the compute industry is today. These are the people that were superior to Apple at the time - both in technology and business acumen. Then they imploded...
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "Then they imploded..." On that subject, there's this article from the fantastic Ditial Antiquarian blog: "We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up" https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-amiga-they-fucked-it-up/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made...
- icedchai 6y ago
  I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years. The 500, 2000, and even 3000 were all refinements of the same original system. The basic platform hardly changed at all until the Amiga 1200 and 4000 in 1993, when they added AGA graphics. And it was too little, too late.
  - ci5er 6y ago
    > I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years. EVERYBODY lacked business acumen. Motorola, MOSTEK, TI (although they were better than most), Apple, Radio-Shack (Tandy), Tramiel, Commodore, Amiga and Intel. What a mess! It's a wonder that they ever got out of the swamp. I guess MS, ARM and Intel all turned out doing OK. And, Steve Jobs grew up and returned (in greater numbers with a turtle-neck!) and became an incredible intuitive design-evaluator and huckster (is that what you call the person who starts a new religion?), but having lived through so much of this (including Compaq and Star (the Dallas one - not the Xerox one - but that counts too!), [EDIT: I forgot about ComputerLand and their sinister hand in all of this - and of course Garry Kildall missing the IBM meeting - I'm not even getting into the software stack with zip-zip-zimmerman] and the origins of Dell and the ending of Compaq (and Tandem and DEC and HP!), everything seems to chaotic and random. I know that we all (probably) like to feel like we are the gladiators on the field, and winning from strategy and planning and cunning and intelligence and skill - but in retrospect - everything seems so random to me. Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical.
pmoriarty 6y ago
"Commodore's phones rang off the hook. They had 50 calls a day from people wanting to sell the PET. Distribution couldn't keep up with demand. The PET's success was partly due to it's built-in BASIC interpreter. Commodore outsourced BASIC to a small firm called Micro-Soft. Micro-Soft agreed to be paid per PET once delivered. Delays hurt cash flow so much they nearly went under. Micro-Soft were saved only by Apple licensing Micro-Soft BASIC for their Apple II." Twenty years later, in 1997, with Apple near bankruptcy, Microsoft invested $150 million in to Apple. It's interesting to wonder what would have happened had these companies not throwing each other a lifeline at these critical times, or if they instead just bought the other outright.
- betamaxthetape 6y ago
  It was in the renewal of the Applesoft Basic license that Apple gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac interface: > Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed by John Sculley in November 1985. source: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
  - ethanpil 6y ago
    Wanna try it? https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10
- rasz 6y ago
  >agreed to be paid per PET reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC >Commodore licensed BASIC from Microsoft in 1977 on a "pay once, no royalties" basis after Jack Tramiel turned down Bill Gates' offer of a $3 per unit fee, stating, "I'm already married," and would pay no more than $25,000 for a perpetual license
kabdib 6y ago
> Shivji’s Atari 130ST display units were hollow cases, but people could see them. Those were live STs, running actual OS bits. There weren't many of them working (I think we had five machines, and limited supply of the custom chips). But they were there for people to see, pushing real honest pixels. From time to time a display machine would die (IIRC they were overheating a lot), and the hw folks would take it away and fix it.
ethanpil 6y ago
For some post Amiga post Commodore drama you should check out the Amiga Documents... https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/ https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
cycomanic 6y ago
I owned an St when I was a teenager, I still think it stands a lot in the shadow of the amiga. I was excited to read a bit more about the background story (I know bits and parts of it), but this article is terribly written. It is very incoherent and different characters are mentioned at random without any relation to each other. It almost feels like a row of (only marginally related) bullet points that seem to have been pulled together from different sources. There are lots of grammar mistakes kissing definite and indefinite articles...) which makes it very hard to follow. As a note to future writers, if you put together a story like this and seemingly start with a "main" character, don't just start talking about other characters (also companies) without telling how they relate to the main characters.
- Geezus_42 6y ago
  The way it was written made me question if they had used gpt-3. Lol
- karmakaze 6y ago
  Same here. I had an Atari 8-bit and couldn't wait for the Amiga to be released. The ST fell short of expectations but was still lots of fun that I couldn't get with the 8-bit like Megamax C and Minix. Gem was fine but not that exciting and I had the higher res monochrome monitor so not many games just Magaroids and Balance of Power. I read the post as a fairly complete collected history and overlooked the incoherence. There were some details I didn't know or had forgotten. I had a good view of the Atari side of things as I had connections that got first ST units and early beta software and programming docs.

56 points by simonpure 6y ago

"By late 1983 Tramiel had crushed his enemies, seen them driven before him and heard the lamentations of their dealerships. ".... wait.. isnt this a Conan reference?

michaelcampbell 6y ago
Yup; not dealerships though of course.
kanobo 6y ago
I wish there was a chrome extension that would highlight cultural references on a page and link to source. Nothing more frustrating then having that feeling of unknown familiarity.
pmoriarty 6y ago
The Conan scene paid homage to by this quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos

johnyzee 6y ago

For those curious, there was never an 'Amiga ST'. The headline is just a play on the competition between Amiga and the Atari ST.

detritus 6y ago

This ended too soon! For me the real age of the Amiga started with the 500, which this article - wonderful as it is - stops exactly short of.

mastazi 6y ago
Yes we need a Part 2, it was a very enjoyable reading! The YouTube channel “Nostalgia Nerd” [1] could scratch that itch in the meantime - look for the “Amiga Story” documentary (made up of 2 videos, about one hour each), it’s well done. On the same channel there are also several longer videos about the various Atari product lines (ST, Jaguar etc). [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd
- ansible 6y ago
  For even more about the computers back in the 1980's, check out The 8-bit Guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22 https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22
  - mastazi 6y ago
    Oh yes, great channel I agree
- detritus 6y ago
  Just so you know - you have cost me at least four hours of background cognitive potential so far, as I've had this on whilst I worked.
  - mastazi 6y ago
    Ahah :-D
w4tson 6y ago
Yeah I grew up with A500. I loved that machine. It came with a paper BASIC reference manual. It was years before I worked out what it’s purpose was. Once I did though, I was hooked, I tried AMOS basic, though this was a little difficult because of patchy intel. No YouTube tutorials to learn from. Only books from the library or AmigaFormat magazines. Blitz basic was easier and I had some better tutorials. I progressed to writing my own games. When I finally moved to PC I picked up rudimentary C++ to write a game, I managed but but it was difficult. Then pascal at school. Java at university. Now it’s my day job. JavaScript was learned on the job. On the side I’ve learned groovy, scala, kotlin, go, rust. I’ve now been a software dev for 16 years professionally and have started a consultancy this year. All pretty much thanks to the Amiga. That machine was an Xmas present, I almost got a Nintendo instead. I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been!

teknopurge 6y ago

what a great article - fantastic 10m read on a specific part of the computer business.....part that is arguably responsible for where the compute industry is today. These are the people that were superior to Apple at the time - both in technology and business acumen. Then they imploded...

pmoriarty 6y ago
"Then they imploded..." On that subject, there's this article from the fantastic Ditial Antiquarian blog: "We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up" https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made-amiga-they-fucked-it-up/ https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made...
icedchai 6y ago
I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years. The 500, 2000, and even 3000 were all refinements of the same original system. The basic platform hardly changed at all until the Amiga 1200 and 4000 in 1993, when they added AGA graphics. And it was too little, too late.
- ci5er 6y ago
  > I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years. EVERYBODY lacked business acumen. Motorola, MOSTEK, TI (although they were better than most), Apple, Radio-Shack (Tandy), Tramiel, Commodore, Amiga and Intel. What a mess! It's a wonder that they ever got out of the swamp. I guess MS, ARM and Intel all turned out doing OK. And, Steve Jobs grew up and returned (in greater numbers with a turtle-neck!) and became an incredible intuitive design-evaluator and huckster (is that what you call the person who starts a new religion?), but having lived through so much of this (including Compaq and Star (the Dallas one - not the Xerox one - but that counts too!), [EDIT: I forgot about ComputerLand and their sinister hand in all of this - and of course Garry Kildall missing the IBM meeting - I'm not even getting into the software stack with zip-zip-zimmerman] and the origins of Dell and the ending of Compaq (and Tandem and DEC and HP!), everything seems to chaotic and random. I know that we all (probably) like to feel like we are the gladiators on the field, and winning from strategy and planning and cunning and intelligence and skill - but in retrospect - everything seems so random to me. Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical.

pmoriarty 6y ago

"Commodore's phones rang off the hook. They had 50 calls a day from people wanting to sell the PET. Distribution couldn't keep up with demand. The PET's success was partly due to it's built-in BASIC interpreter. Commodore outsourced BASIC to a small firm called Micro-Soft. Micro-Soft agreed to be paid per PET once delivered. Delays hurt cash flow so much they nearly went under. Micro-Soft were saved only by Apple licensing Micro-Soft BASIC for their Apple II." Twenty years later, in 1997, with Apple near bankruptcy, Microsoft invested $150 million in to Apple. It's interesting to wonder what would have happened had these companies not throwing each other a lifeline at these critical times, or if they instead just bought the other outright.

betamaxthetape 6y ago
It was in the renewal of the Applesoft Basic license that Apple gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac interface: > Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed by John Sculley in November 1985. source: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- ethanpil 6y ago
  Wanna try it? https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10
rasz 6y ago
>agreed to be paid per PET reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC >Commodore licensed BASIC from Microsoft in 1977 on a "pay once, no royalties" basis after Jack Tramiel turned down Bill Gates' offer of a $3 per unit fee, stating, "I'm already married," and would pay no more than $25,000 for a perpetual license

kabdib 6y ago

> Shivji’s Atari 130ST display units were hollow cases, but people could see them. Those were live STs, running actual OS bits. There weren't many of them working (I think we had five machines, and limited supply of the custom chips). But they were there for people to see, pushing real honest pixels. From time to time a display machine would die (IIRC they were overheating a lot), and the hw folks would take it away and fix it.

ethanpil 6y ago

For some post Amiga post Commodore drama you should check out the Amiga Documents... https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/ https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

cycomanic 6y ago

I owned an St when I was a teenager, I still think it stands a lot in the shadow of the amiga. I was excited to read a bit more about the background story (I know bits and parts of it), but this article is terribly written. It is very incoherent and different characters are mentioned at random without any relation to each other. It almost feels like a row of (only marginally related) bullet points that seem to have been pulled together from different sources. There are lots of grammar mistakes kissing definite and indefinite articles...) which makes it very hard to follow. As a note to future writers, if you put together a story like this and seemingly start with a "main" character, don't just start talking about other characters (also companies) without telling how they relate to the main characters.

Geezus_42 6y ago
The way it was written made me question if they had used gpt-3. Lol
karmakaze 6y ago
Same here. I had an Atari 8-bit and couldn't wait for the Amiga to be released. The ST fell short of expectations but was still lots of fun that I couldn't get with the 8-bit like Megamax C and Minix. Gem was fine but not that exciting and I had the higher res monochrome monitor so not many games just Magaroids and Balance of Power. I read the post as a fairly complete collected history and overlooked the incoherence. There were some details I didn't know or had forgotten. I had a good view of the Atari side of things as I had connections that got first ST units and early beta software and programming docs.