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I went to the magazine expecting to read a 1985 article about declarative languages and instead (also) found a review of the first Amiga computer. This sentence

I went to the magazine expecting to read a 1985 article about declarative languages and instead (also) found a review of the first Amiga computer. This sentence in the editorial column made my day: "Dazzling graphics and audio and an open expansion bus make the Amiga the intellectual and technical heir to the Apple II." ... if only history had played out differently!

protomyth 4y ago
Well, it was more the heir to the Atari 800 where the Atari ST was actually the heir to the Commodore 64. The Atari 800 was far and away better at graphics and sound than the Apple II. I remember buying this one, and seeing an Amiga a week later in the mall. The Prolog article blew my young mind. How in the heck is it figuring this out, BASIC doesn't do this?!?
- classichasclass 4y ago
  I agree the Amiga is clearly influenced by the Atari 800, as Jay Miner's mere presence would indicate, but the Atari ST was mostly off the shelf hardware and the Commodore 64 was anything but. About all those two systems have in common philosophically or otherwise is an intentional skew to the low end of the market, and Jack Tramiel (but I repeat myself).
  - timbit42 4y ago
    Another thing the C64 and Atari ST have is common is Shiraz Shivji. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji
  - vaxman 4y ago
    This. --would even go so far to say Atari ST was intentional knock off of Amiga 1000 styled after Commodore 64/128. Tramiel spent his life building Commodore BUSINESS Machines (after his family was killed by Nazis) only to have it taken away by a new chairman (Irving Gould) who reportedly "gained control in a poker game." Tramiel reportedly dropped $45K buying the dead Atari name (from Warner Bros IIRC?), hired a hack for the design and relied on the MC68000 to do all of the processing (including graphics, though it probably had a DSP) and then dishonestly marketed the hardware as equal or superior to Amiga, knowing full well it did not have the enabling chipset that Amiga Inc. had spent four starving years developing in Los Gatos before he acquired them for a song while still at Commodore. (Many of those engineers later died of self neglect in the Aftermath of the Gould/Tramiel war.) The novice computer users and even business/data processing types of that era couldn't tell the difference between Amiga 1000 and AtariST based on that level of marketing or what few demos were available, but they sure could see the price difference and that's how Tramiel took his revenge on Irving Gould. Worse, "In business, perception is the reality" and "Careful who your enemies are, as they will define you" --so despite the then 30 year legacy of Commodore BUSINESS Machines and despite Atari being nothing but a halloween costume being worn by Jack Tramiel, Commodore quickly came to be seen by Corporate America as a video game toy maker like Atari. (Even you allude to this perception in saying that they had an "intentional skew to the low end of the market"). Bill Gates, who knew better of Commodore, didn't help things any when he brilliantly decided, probably after consulting with Steve Jobs, against porting his MS Office to Amiga, which totally ruined Amiga's credibility --because why wouldn't Gates want to support the very best chipset on the market, if it truly were? Then dystopia...
    - retcore 4y ago
      Please forgive me for this flippant speculation - if there's a biographical record of those who died of self neglect presumably in despair please can you information or suggest sources* - but I can't help but thinking how much rebranding simply to CBM could have done for Commodore Business Machines. Granted, three letter abbreviations are jealously guarded commonly across industrial classifications, but usually specious and purely with pseudo legal hubris and wishful thinking. I may have just touched on a good reason why something like this wasn't attempted. I can't imagine the original Commodore folk going in for any superficiality or legal shenanigans let alone affecting their identity. Thus Tramiel set the tone for commerce in the computing age much more broadly, I'm thoroughly disheartened to imagine. * not least because the industry was infinitely more (historical invocation of the word) artisanal and the work personalized, I very much want to read. If I may be so forward, it sounds like you have personal history close to this. I'm seriously interested in doing anything possible to help get history like this published with effective general reader marketing and can tap a variety of serious resources and experience.
PaulHoule 4y ago
The GFX and sound for the Amiga were great but the 68k CPU was overrated. When you factored in how the memory bus worked, 68k machines didn't perform that much better than the Apple II. Even Motorola gave up on the 68k line and every computer manufacturer that depended on it such as Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun Microsystems and many others either scrambled to switch to a new CPU or went out of business. The computer press of the 1980s tells a compelling story about the rise of the 68k but I've never seen a good account of the fall other than the account of why the BBC Micro didn't use it.
- jll29 4y ago
  1984: MOS 6510 - first encounter with machine code 1986: Motorola mc68000 - 32 bit is beautiful 1991: Intel 80486DX2 - ugh, how ugly, those segment registers! 1993: HP PA9000 - the arrival of the RISC panther brings enlightenment at the speed of light But seriously, that issue of Byte magazine reminded me that such mags no longer exist. Now it's just ads and tests.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    Yes, but by 1990 Byte had already degenerated into useless "application" reviews and mostly uncool ads. Something that happened to nearly all the magazines after some years (including e.g. Personal Computer World). And when that happened, long-time subscribers like myself just left.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  In the early 1990s the "common wisdom" was that CISC architectures were obsolete and that RISC architectures would take over any day. Motorola was part of the alliance that developed the PowerPC architecture (even if it is often described as just coming from IBM). The lack of focus on the 68k was a self-fulfilling prophecy as current versions just couldn't keep up with Intel or the PowerPC, and newer versions weren't being created.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Intel came out with this ill-fated chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 but they didn't throw the x86 under the bus for it's name. If they had, Intel would be a has-been chipmaker the same way Motorola is. In 1964 IBM realized it was a revolutionary idea to keep the same architecture from one generation of computers to the next. Intel was the second company to take this vision seriously and realize it and that's why Intel not only made the first microprocessor but it is still a dominant producer today. (Alternately the Apple II has no heirs because there wasn't a progression to a compatible Apple 3, Apple 4, etc.)
vaxman 4y ago
"I just read it for the articles."
rbanffy 4y ago
> make the Amiga the intellectual and technical heir to the Apple II The hallmark of the Apple II was its simplicity. A person could understand all of it, from the hardware up, quite easily. The Amiga, OTOH, is a very complicated machine. There is no denying it was an incredibly capable machine back then, but, ultimately, its complexity became an issue when VGA and PCM sound became a thing on PCs and the ISA bus made it trivial to add new capabilities to a PC while Commodore had to push out a new computer (or, at least, a new chipset) for the same capabilities.

protomyth 4y ago

Well, it was more the heir to the Atari 800 where the Atari ST was actually the heir to the Commodore 64. The Atari 800 was far and away better at graphics and sound than the Apple II. I remember buying this one, and seeing an Amiga a week later in the mall. The Prolog article blew my young mind. How in the heck is it figuring this out, BASIC doesn't do this?!?

classichasclass 4y ago
I agree the Amiga is clearly influenced by the Atari 800, as Jay Miner's mere presence would indicate, but the Atari ST was mostly off the shelf hardware and the Commodore 64 was anything but. About all those two systems have in common philosophically or otherwise is an intentional skew to the low end of the market, and Jack Tramiel (but I repeat myself).
- timbit42 4y ago
  Another thing the C64 and Atari ST have is common is Shiraz Shivji. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji
- vaxman 4y ago
  This. --would even go so far to say Atari ST was intentional knock off of Amiga 1000 styled after Commodore 64/128. Tramiel spent his life building Commodore BUSINESS Machines (after his family was killed by Nazis) only to have it taken away by a new chairman (Irving Gould) who reportedly "gained control in a poker game." Tramiel reportedly dropped $45K buying the dead Atari name (from Warner Bros IIRC?), hired a hack for the design and relied on the MC68000 to do all of the processing (including graphics, though it probably had a DSP) and then dishonestly marketed the hardware as equal or superior to Amiga, knowing full well it did not have the enabling chipset that Amiga Inc. had spent four starving years developing in Los Gatos before he acquired them for a song while still at Commodore. (Many of those engineers later died of self neglect in the Aftermath of the Gould/Tramiel war.) The novice computer users and even business/data processing types of that era couldn't tell the difference between Amiga 1000 and AtariST based on that level of marketing or what few demos were available, but they sure could see the price difference and that's how Tramiel took his revenge on Irving Gould. Worse, "In business, perception is the reality" and "Careful who your enemies are, as they will define you" --so despite the then 30 year legacy of Commodore BUSINESS Machines and despite Atari being nothing but a halloween costume being worn by Jack Tramiel, Commodore quickly came to be seen by Corporate America as a video game toy maker like Atari. (Even you allude to this perception in saying that they had an "intentional skew to the low end of the market"). Bill Gates, who knew better of Commodore, didn't help things any when he brilliantly decided, probably after consulting with Steve Jobs, against porting his MS Office to Amiga, which totally ruined Amiga's credibility --because why wouldn't Gates want to support the very best chipset on the market, if it truly were? Then dystopia...
  - retcore 4y ago
    Please forgive me for this flippant speculation - if there's a biographical record of those who died of self neglect presumably in despair please can you information or suggest sources* - but I can't help but thinking how much rebranding simply to CBM could have done for Commodore Business Machines. Granted, three letter abbreviations are jealously guarded commonly across industrial classifications, but usually specious and purely with pseudo legal hubris and wishful thinking. I may have just touched on a good reason why something like this wasn't attempted. I can't imagine the original Commodore folk going in for any superficiality or legal shenanigans let alone affecting their identity. Thus Tramiel set the tone for commerce in the computing age much more broadly, I'm thoroughly disheartened to imagine. * not least because the industry was infinitely more (historical invocation of the word) artisanal and the work personalized, I very much want to read. If I may be so forward, it sounds like you have personal history close to this. I'm seriously interested in doing anything possible to help get history like this published with effective general reader marketing and can tap a variety of serious resources and experience.

PaulHoule 4y ago

The GFX and sound for the Amiga were great but the 68k CPU was overrated. When you factored in how the memory bus worked, 68k machines didn't perform that much better than the Apple II. Even Motorola gave up on the 68k line and every computer manufacturer that depended on it such as Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun Microsystems and many others either scrambled to switch to a new CPU or went out of business. The computer press of the 1980s tells a compelling story about the rise of the 68k but I've never seen a good account of the fall other than the account of why the BBC Micro didn't use it.

jll29 4y ago
1984: MOS 6510 - first encounter with machine code 1986: Motorola mc68000 - 32 bit is beautiful 1991: Intel 80486DX2 - ugh, how ugly, those segment registers! 1993: HP PA9000 - the arrival of the RISC panther brings enlightenment at the speed of light But seriously, that issue of Byte magazine reminded me that such mags no longer exist. Now it's just ads and tests.
- Tor3 4y ago
  Yes, but by 1990 Byte had already degenerated into useless "application" reviews and mostly uncool ads. Something that happened to nearly all the magazines after some years (including e.g. Personal Computer World). And when that happened, long-time subscribers like myself just left.
jhbadger 4y ago
In the early 1990s the "common wisdom" was that CISC architectures were obsolete and that RISC architectures would take over any day. Motorola was part of the alliance that developed the PowerPC architecture (even if it is often described as just coming from IBM). The lack of focus on the 68k was a self-fulfilling prophecy as current versions just couldn't keep up with Intel or the PowerPC, and newer versions weren't being created.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Intel came out with this ill-fated chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 but they didn't throw the x86 under the bus for it's name. If they had, Intel would be a has-been chipmaker the same way Motorola is. In 1964 IBM realized it was a revolutionary idea to keep the same architecture from one generation of computers to the next. Intel was the second company to take this vision seriously and realize it and that's why Intel not only made the first microprocessor but it is still a dominant producer today. (Alternately the Apple II has no heirs because there wasn't a progression to a compatible Apple 3, Apple 4, etc.)

vaxman 4y ago

"I just read it for the articles."

rbanffy 4y ago

> make the Amiga the intellectual and technical heir to the Apple II The hallmark of the Apple II was its simplicity. A person could understand all of it, from the hardware up, quite easily. The Amiga, OTOH, is a very complicated machine. There is no denying it was an incredibly capable machine back then, but, ultimately, its complexity became an issue when VGA and PCM sound became a thing on PCs and the ISA bus made it trivial to add new capabilities to a PC while Commodore had to push out a new computer (or, at least, a new chipset) for the same capabilities.