6 ms·

"Commodore threw together what they could to keep the C64 band together for one more tour, but... let's be honest, their last album sucked." I've sometimes see

by jerf 4y ago

"Commodore threw together what they could to keep the C64 band together for one more tour, but... let's be honest, their last album sucked." I've sometimes seen people say "Oh, modern computing sucks so much, if only the Commodore line had continued on and been the basis for computing instead of the IBM line"... and I have no idea what they mean. Even the Amiga may have been neat for the time, but trying to project that line forward all the way into 2022... well, whatever would have gotten here probably wouldn't be all that different than what we have now. Commodore did some interesting things. They lost for reasons, though. Even the Amiga.

NovaVeles 4y ago
While the Amiga was impressive in the 80's, they failed to continue on that path of technical innovation. The technical lead they provided simply vanished by having everyone else move forwards just a little bit faster than they were. Thus the inevitable erosion of their space. By the mid 90's there was little compelling that gave the Amiga an advantage and thus they had their lunch eaten. I suspect if we were to project the Amiga forward to today it would have actually meant us being in a worse place than we are today. In the same way if we had of waited for Silicon Graphics to provide desktop 3D graphics, we would have been waiting for a LONG time and at a high price.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > waited for Silicon Graphics to provide desktop 3D graphics OTOH, we wouldn't need to put up with Windows for so long ;-)
  - lproven 4y ago
    Sir is aware that SGI made Windows NT workstations, right? They were lovely things, too. I wish I'd bought one when PIIIs were being flogged off. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Visual_Workstation
- tssva 4y ago
  > While the Amiga was impressive in the 80's, they failed to continue on that path of technical innovation. The US market was the largest computer market at the time and the Amiga sales in the US were awful. This left Commodore financially incapable of continuing on the path of technical innovation. Even in the few countries where the Amiga could have been considered a success, UK, Germany and Italy, the vast majority of sales were for the low end and margin A500.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    They trashed so many of the opportunities they had, too.
rbanffy 4y ago
> Even the Amiga. To me, the biggest tragedy was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to package the A3000 as a low-end Unix workstation. It could have changed the world. I regard the C128 as a very flawed project - even more of a kludge than the Apple IIgs (a 16-bit computer built around an 8-bit one from the previous decade, kind of a 16-bit Apple /// with a //c inside and two completely different ways to output pixels, plus a full professional synthesizer attached somewhere in there - fun machine, but don't look too close). They could have used the effort that went into the 128 to beef up the VICII with a TED-like pallette and have a brilliant last C-64 computer to show.
- pcwalton 4y ago
  > even more of a kludge than the Apple IIgs (a 16-bit computer built around an 8-bit one from the previous decade) Well, on the other hand, it did give us the 65816, which the SNES was built on top of. On the other other hand, though, it probably would have been better if the SNES had gone with m68k.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    The 65816 was as much a dead end as the 8086. Unfortunately, Apple saw that and discontinued the GS. IBM, unfortunately, doubled down with the 286, then 386 and here we are. Notably, IBM had a 68000 desktop computer that ran Xenix, the IBM CS 9000. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02/page/n279/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02/page/n279/...
    - ajross 4y ago
      > The 65816 was as much a dead end as the 8086. The 8086 was a... what now?
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        It's a horrible architecture. Every iteration on top of it made it even more hideous. It's a unnatural thing that should have never been. Every time an x86 powers up, it cries in despair and begs to be killed.
bitwize 4y ago
This is why I say the PC was doomed to win. IBM established the PC and then immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS, so the PC ecosystem became this mishmash of companies, each contributing to and extending the platform as a whole. Any one of them can rise and fall and the ecosystem as a whole would keep on going. Commodore was mismanaged and died. Apple was mismanaged and nearly died. A proprietary computer ecosystem controlled by a single company is at risk of being run into the ground by incompetent management or sheer bloody economics. That's why the PC and not the Amiga, Old World Mac, or Atari ST became the basis of modern computing.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Yes, multiple redundancies prevented complete failure unlike other platforms. And the IBM stamp of approval legitimized the PC, starting the unstoppable tsunami.
- jecel 4y ago
  "immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS" is also a good description of the Apple II, but Apple was able to mostly keep clones at bay in their key markets. I believe IBM could have as well, but didn't initially care enough (the PC was a small part of its business, but micros were 100% of Apple). Note that they took out 7 patents on the PC AT (286). When their attempt to take back control via the PS/2 in 1987 failed, they spent the 1990s getting chipset makers and clone makers to license their patents. Had they tried this in the 1980s the industry might have gone in a different direction.
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    I suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware. You can't clone a Mac without their ROMs, and a clean-room implementation would fall quickly behind without a sustained effort. But Microsoft can sell anyone the disks, and your clone can respond to the right interrupt calls, and IBM can't do a thing to stop either of you.
actionfromafar 4y ago
I think people would have sat up and noticed if they took away the real-time aspects of the platform. On paper, there isn't much about Amiga which was real-time. Culturally though, so many programs were realtime. I still miss the instant latency. iOS, Android, MacOS etc nothing holds a candle to how it felt.
- robinsonb5 4y ago
  This. There were plenty of flaws in the Amiga experience (like "please insert disk..." dialogs that simply won't take no for an answer because the programmer didn't check for errors) but that instant feedback is what's missing from so many modern systems. I call it "having the computer's full attention" - and it comes from the fact that (using the stock GUI system) the gadgets which make up the UI are drawn and redrawn in response to input events on the "intuition" task rather than whenever the application's main loop next gets around to it. That's why Magic User Interface felt "wrong" on the Amiga, despite being a superb toolkit in lots of ways* - drawing was relegated to the application's task, making it feel "Windowsey". (*I would genuinely like to see a port of MUI to X / Linux.)
- rep_lodsb 4y ago
  Because iOS, Android and MacOS are all based on a 1970s minicomputer operating system designed to communicate with ASR33 teletypes, with layers and layers of bloat added on to it over the years. That it can support a graphical user interface at all is only due to having a lot of CPU time to waste!

by jerf 4y ago

NovaVeles 4y ago

While the Amiga was impressive in the 80's, they failed to continue on that path of technical innovation. The technical lead they provided simply vanished by having everyone else move forwards just a little bit faster than they were. Thus the inevitable erosion of their space. By the mid 90's there was little compelling that gave the Amiga an advantage and thus they had their lunch eaten. I suspect if we were to project the Amiga forward to today it would have actually meant us being in a worse place than we are today. In the same way if we had of waited for Silicon Graphics to provide desktop 3D graphics, we would have been waiting for a LONG time and at a high price.

rbanffy 4y ago
> waited for Silicon Graphics to provide desktop 3D graphics OTOH, we wouldn't need to put up with Windows for so long ;-)
- lproven 4y ago
  Sir is aware that SGI made Windows NT workstations, right? They were lovely things, too. I wish I'd bought one when PIIIs were being flogged off. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Visual_Workstation https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Visual_Workstation
tssva 4y ago
> While the Amiga was impressive in the 80's, they failed to continue on that path of technical innovation. The US market was the largest computer market at the time and the Amiga sales in the US were awful. This left Commodore financially incapable of continuing on the path of technical innovation. Even in the few countries where the Amiga could have been considered a success, UK, Germany and Italy, the vast majority of sales were for the low end and margin A500.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  They trashed so many of the opportunities they had, too.

rbanffy 4y ago

> Even the Amiga. To me, the biggest tragedy was when Commodore refused to allow Sun to package the A3000 as a low-end Unix workstation. It could have changed the world. I regard the C128 as a very flawed project - even more of a kludge than the Apple IIgs (a 16-bit computer built around an 8-bit one from the previous decade, kind of a 16-bit Apple /// with a //c inside and two completely different ways to output pixels, plus a full professional synthesizer attached somewhere in there - fun machine, but don't look too close). They could have used the effort that went into the 128 to beef up the VICII with a TED-like pallette and have a brilliant last C-64 computer to show.

pcwalton 4y ago
> even more of a kludge than the Apple IIgs (a 16-bit computer built around an 8-bit one from the previous decade) Well, on the other hand, it did give us the 65816, which the SNES was built on top of. On the other other hand, though, it probably would have been better if the SNES had gone with m68k.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  The 65816 was as much a dead end as the 8086. Unfortunately, Apple saw that and discontinued the GS. IBM, unfortunately, doubled down with the 286, then 386 and here we are. Notably, IBM had a 68000 desktop computer that ran Xenix, the IBM CS 9000. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02/page/n279/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-02/page/n279/...
  - ajross 4y ago
    > The 65816 was as much a dead end as the 8086. The 8086 was a... what now?
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      It's a horrible architecture. Every iteration on top of it made it even more hideous. It's a unnatural thing that should have never been. Every time an x86 powers up, it cries in despair and begs to be killed.

bitwize 4y ago

This is why I say the PC was doomed to win. IBM established the PC and then immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS, so the PC ecosystem became this mishmash of companies, each contributing to and extending the platform as a whole. Any one of them can rise and fall and the ecosystem as a whole would keep on going. Commodore was mismanaged and died. Apple was mismanaged and nearly died. A proprietary computer ecosystem controlled by a single company is at risk of being run into the ground by incompetent management or sheer bloody economics. That's why the PC and not the Amiga, Old World Mac, or Atari ST became the basis of modern computing.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
Yes, multiple redundancies prevented complete failure unlike other platforms. And the IBM stamp of approval legitimized the PC, starting the unstoppable tsunami.
jecel 4y ago
"immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS" is also a good description of the Apple II, but Apple was able to mostly keep clones at bay in their key markets. I believe IBM could have as well, but didn't initially care enough (the PC was a small part of its business, but micros were 100% of Apple). Note that they took out 7 patents on the PC AT (286). When their attempt to take back control via the PS/2 in 1987 failed, they spent the 1990s getting chipset makers and clone makers to license their patents. Had they tried this in the 1980s the industry might have gone in a different direction.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  I suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware. You can't clone a Mac without their ROMs, and a clean-room implementation would fall quickly behind without a sustained effort. But Microsoft can sell anyone the disks, and your clone can respond to the right interrupt calls, and IBM can't do a thing to stop either of you.

actionfromafar 4y ago

I think people would have sat up and noticed if they took away the real-time aspects of the platform. On paper, there isn't much about Amiga which was real-time. Culturally though, so many programs were realtime. I still miss the instant latency. iOS, Android, MacOS etc nothing holds a candle to how it felt.

robinsonb5 4y ago
This. There were plenty of flaws in the Amiga experience (like "please insert disk..." dialogs that simply won't take no for an answer because the programmer didn't check for errors) but that instant feedback is what's missing from so many modern systems. I call it "having the computer's full attention" - and it comes from the fact that (using the stock GUI system) the gadgets which make up the UI are drawn and redrawn in response to input events on the "intuition" task rather than whenever the application's main loop next gets around to it. That's why Magic User Interface felt "wrong" on the Amiga, despite being a superb toolkit in lots of ways* - drawing was relegated to the application's task, making it feel "Windowsey". (*I would genuinely like to see a port of MUI to X / Linux.)
rep_lodsb 4y ago
Because iOS, Android and MacOS are all based on a 1970s minicomputer operating system designed to communicate with ASR33 teletypes, with layers and layers of bloat added on to it over the years. That it can support a graphical user interface at all is only due to having a lot of CPU time to waste!