4 ms·

The planar mode graphics had been a benefit in the more memory restricted days before; it was starting to become a problem but still, at that point Amigas tende

The planar mode graphics had been a benefit in the more memory restricted days before; it was starting to become a problem but still, at that point Amigas tended to play the games of the day better than PCs costing 3x as much until Doom pushed 3D to the forefront. There were enough 3D games on Amigas, but Doom was a level beyond them for a while. Still, I did enjoy Acid Software's Gloom which wasn't that far behind. As a hardware platform, it was more closely tied to the individual chips but that was rapidly fading, with OS abstraction APIs for sound and graphics coming in around then. As a software platform, while it lacked MMU-dependent features, in other ways it had major benefits. Small, fast, pretty tidy, modular, customisable. Quite frankly I'd still like something to replace the Amiga's Datatypes concept, 20 years later. A sad loss to computing. To this day I'm baffled how Commodore managed to lose the not-PC slot to Apple in spite of having cheaper harder with more features and a vastly more capable operating system. I've said before here; if Commodore had done their job properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?

psykotic 16y ago
I loved the C64 and the Amiga. They were my first and second computer. But it's painfully clear in retrospect that Commodore never stood a chance. Jack Tramiel ran the show like a cigar-puffing industrialist straight out of a Dickens novel. There was none of Gates's vision of computing or Jobs's sense of quality from the top of the company. The Amiga line was developed almost entirely outside Commodore and then bought up and brought in house.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  I wouldn't blame Tramiel for Commodore's demise either. The Amiga was a very fine platform and Tramiel is also behind the ST line (called, at that time, "Jackintosh") after departing to Atari. The ST line was truer to the Commodore of the VIC and 64 era in that it was simple (much simpler than the Amiga), powerful (somewhat less than the Amiga) and inexpensive. At that time, nobody was predicting the collapse of the PC market around the IBM PCs (which were much more expensive than the home computers of the mid-to-late 80's and much clunkier).
jerf 16y ago
I don't know much about the Amiga, but it sounds to me like the way in which it was a "nice computer" was that it was pushing a quirky design well past where it should actually have been, and that it was rapidly hitting the end of the road technically regardless of what the management was doing. That is to say, listening to descriptions of the Amiga reminds of listening to OS 9; yes, it's full of nice things and there's all sorts of ways to argue about how it's "better than PCs" but in the end you can't handwave around the fact that the foundation is at or beyond its capacity and there's no way to incrementally advance. Apple managed to make the leap to OS X, as Microsoft managed to move to the NT base before it. I don't see how Commodore was going to do it without being something fundamentally different. Their machines were nice but it seems to me they were always building machines for today, never thinking much about tomorrow. But tomorrow comes... it always does. I'm posting this because I'm curious about reactions; if this is flamingly wrong I'd love to hear. I don't have direct experience, except with the Commodore 64, which looking back was already experiencing the "make a computer for today" problem in many ways.
- psykotic 16y ago
  I have to disagree. The Amiga's design was not the decisive problem. The IBM PC prospers to this day with many traces of its legacy surviving as junk DNA from its haphazard evolutionary path. Had the Amiga survived in some form, no doubt the fully evolved platform would bear similar marks of its gaming-centric past, mostly in the hardware interface, not the operating system. You yourself bring up the Mac's leap to OS X. On a technical level that wasn't so much a transition as a hard reboot, only made possible by some truly heroic programming of compatibility systems software. OS X got off to a bumpy start but not enough to kill it. The Mac since went from PowerPC to x86 by another feat of compatibility wizardry in the form of Rosetta. But what would have been easier than looking at the state of the Macintosh in the late 90s and pronouncing it a dead-end, a lost cause? Commodore's problem was first and foremost cultural. I've always found myself in the unusual position of loving the C64 and the Amiga but hating Commodore.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  The problem is that the management of the Amiga did little to evolve it. It didn't need a revolution, ala OS X. It just needed refinement over time, of which there was none. The Amiga that Commodore purchased was the Amiga that died. The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1984. Had VideoScape 3D in 1987. It's hard to say that they were building computers for today, when they're machines were doing things the mainstream OSes (Mac and Windows) wouldn't do for a decade. It would be like introducing the iPhone in 2000. And then doing nothing for 10 years. I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so far ahead of the field when released. And yet virtually all of it squandered.

psykotic 16y ago

I loved the C64 and the Amiga. They were my first and second computer. But it's painfully clear in retrospect that Commodore never stood a chance. Jack Tramiel ran the show like a cigar-puffing industrialist straight out of a Dickens novel. There was none of Gates's vision of computing or Jobs's sense of quality from the top of the company. The Amiga line was developed almost entirely outside Commodore and then bought up and brought in house.

rbanffy 16y ago
I wouldn't blame Tramiel for Commodore's demise either. The Amiga was a very fine platform and Tramiel is also behind the ST line (called, at that time, "Jackintosh") after departing to Atari. The ST line was truer to the Commodore of the VIC and 64 era in that it was simple (much simpler than the Amiga), powerful (somewhat less than the Amiga) and inexpensive. At that time, nobody was predicting the collapse of the PC market around the IBM PCs (which were much more expensive than the home computers of the mid-to-late 80's and much clunkier).

jerf 16y ago

I don't know much about the Amiga, but it sounds to me like the way in which it was a "nice computer" was that it was pushing a quirky design well past where it should actually have been, and that it was rapidly hitting the end of the road technically regardless of what the management was doing. That is to say, listening to descriptions of the Amiga reminds of listening to OS 9; yes, it's full of nice things and there's all sorts of ways to argue about how it's "better than PCs" but in the end you can't handwave around the fact that the foundation is at or beyond its capacity and there's no way to incrementally advance. Apple managed to make the leap to OS X, as Microsoft managed to move to the NT base before it. I don't see how Commodore was going to do it without being something fundamentally different. Their machines were nice but it seems to me they were always building machines for today, never thinking much about tomorrow. But tomorrow comes... it always does. I'm posting this because I'm curious about reactions; if this is flamingly wrong I'd love to hear. I don't have direct experience, except with the Commodore 64, which looking back was already experiencing the "make a computer for today" problem in many ways.

psykotic 16y ago
I have to disagree. The Amiga's design was not the decisive problem. The IBM PC prospers to this day with many traces of its legacy surviving as junk DNA from its haphazard evolutionary path. Had the Amiga survived in some form, no doubt the fully evolved platform would bear similar marks of its gaming-centric past, mostly in the hardware interface, not the operating system. You yourself bring up the Mac's leap to OS X. On a technical level that wasn't so much a transition as a hard reboot, only made possible by some truly heroic programming of compatibility systems software. OS X got off to a bumpy start but not enough to kill it. The Mac since went from PowerPC to x86 by another feat of compatibility wizardry in the form of Rosetta. But what would have been easier than looking at the state of the Macintosh in the late 90s and pronouncing it a dead-end, a lost cause? Commodore's problem was first and foremost cultural. I've always found myself in the unusual position of loving the C64 and the Amiga but hating Commodore.
kenjackson 16y ago
The problem is that the management of the Amiga did little to evolve it. It didn't need a revolution, ala OS X. It just needed refinement over time, of which there was none. The Amiga that Commodore purchased was the Amiga that died. The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1984. Had VideoScape 3D in 1987. It's hard to say that they were building computers for today, when they're machines were doing things the mainstream OSes (Mac and Windows) wouldn't do for a decade. It would be like introducing the iPhone in 2000. And then doing nothing for 10 years. I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so far ahead of the field when released. And yet virtually all of it squandered.