4 ms·

Commodore could have been Apple with better leadership. The Amiga was ahead of almost any other PC for its time and like Apple had a cult following. The Commod

by api 3y ago

Commodore could have been Apple with better leadership. The Amiga was ahead of almost any other PC for its time and like Apple had a cult following. The Commodore 64 before it was way ahead in graphics and sound for its era, especially for the price. PC compatibles didn’t even catch up to that 8-bit machine until EGA and Adlib and Sound Blaster cards came around.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
I felt that the Amiga needed someone with a sense of design directing the computer's UI. Despite its more advanced capabilities it still always looked like a kit-car to the Apple's Lotus Elan offerings in the 90's.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Amiga OS 1.x was definitely rather amateurish looking (blue and orange color scheme.) The 2.x series and above looked much more professional (gray scale, more of a beveled 3D look, etc.)
  - retrac 3y ago
    The reason for that is interesting, IMO. The Amiga was intended as a home computer. And in 1985, a home computer might have a TV for display, or a very fuzzy low-quality colour monitor. For some reason, yellow/orange/red/white on blue is particularly legible on poor-quality monitors and TVs. (Many DOS applications of the era were white or yellow on blue, for the same reason. And early Windows had similarly horrible schemes.) By the late 1980s, colour monitors were nearly as good as a B&W one for showing crisp text and lines, and so grey/black on white.
    - nradov 3y ago
      The way that the Amiga engineers used interlaced video modes to support CRT displays with low refresh rates was also not a good look. In the early models that was the only way to get VGA equivalent screen resolution, but the flickering was so bad that some people literally wore sunglasses and configured the desktop with low-contrast colors in order to reduce eye strain. It was one of several design decisions that probably seemed like a good idea at the time but made the product look shoddy and held it back from mainstream adoption.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        Nobody I know used interlace other than very occasionally for still images. VGA resolutions were not common at that time, so they were not what my circle compared against anyway. When I visited one of my dads business associates who ran a software company, for example, the vast majority of PC's in their offices had monochrome text screens. A handful had EGA graphics cards and colour screens. I remember playing Zaxxon on one of them and finding it hysterical that the graphics and sound on their most expensive machines was worse even than on my C64. The Amiga looked like sci-fi technology in comparison with what most people actually had in their offices or homes until several years in. Ironically if anything the significantly better graphics contributed to it being pigeonholed as a game machine despite the original Amiga looking like an office machine and being way too expensive for games. The problem was not so much the original or enhanced graphics chips, which were groundbreaking in 85 and maybe even until ~'88 or so, but that AGA in 92 was way too little, several years too late as an upgrade to still justify the price premium on the Amiga. 7 years at that time was an eternity for the graphics capabilities to stand still. Had AGA started a couple of years earlier, maybe Commodore would have lived long enough to complete their next two upgrade projects (AAA[1] and Hombre[2]), but with the chaos of Commodore at that time it's no surprise they didn't pull that off. I feel like Commodore was still in the 8-bit mindset of thinking they had time to milk their existing designs for much longer than they actually could. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
        stormking 3y ago
        They never understood how to build a product line or a roadmap. To them, the Amiga was a on/off kind of thing, a product they acquired once and planned to sell for some years. They would have happily sold some new, completely incompatible home computer, afterwards.
        vidarh 3y ago
        The fascinating thing is that they were sort-of understanding they couldn't really do that anymore towards the end, but too late. Hombre, their last attempt, was one one hand meant to provide a clean break by moving to a PA-RISC core (chosen to allow for Windows NT compatibility but in retrospect might just have deferred their death) in a dual-chip pair that'd combine the CPU, DMA, an upgraded blitter that was closer to a basic GPU (transforms, texture mapping, gouraud shading, z-buffering), a 64-bit RISC-like copper replacement, 16-bit sound, with a display controller on the other chip. But to avoid breaking backwards compatibility, they also planned putting an entire AGA Amiga on a chip, and recompile AmigaOS, so they could end up with sort-of reverse of what we got with the PowerPC expansion boards or the older Janus Bridgeboards (putting an x86 CPU straddling both a Zorro and ISA buses, letting you run PC software at full speed in a window on the Amiga), of having the new CPU run the OS, and using the embedded 68k Amiga-on-a-chip to run legacy software. A valiant attempt, but of course way too late - Commodore ran out of money before completing even the chipset before Hombre in their pipeline. Hombre would've been a big break, though, with what looks like they had something resembling an actual plan for a very broad range of uses from the start instead of their usual haphazard Darwinist "survival of whatever nearly ready design still happens to please the right executives" Commodore usually practices. It ranged from putting it on a high end graphics card, to set-top boxes, CD32 like entertainment systems, all the way up to high-end machines running AmigaOS and WindowsNT and based around a machine concept from David Haynie (Acutiator, going back to '91) that planned for exchangable modules for everything including the CPU, with the ability to even adapt the bus control account for different CPU requirements. It's an agonisingly fascinating "what if" of alternative hardware, while at the same time in retrospect having some serious flaws (PA-RISC...) and probably being way too ambitious for Commodore even at its peak given the amount of discipline shepherding a project that ambitious over the line without some executive ego trip derailing it would've taken...
    - api 3y ago
      Side note: I feel like dark mode has taken hold in part because of really good LCD screens with great contrast. Dark mode would look horrible on CRTs or even first-generation LCDs.
      - retrac 3y ago
        Dark mode is fine on CRTs. They have excellent contrast; they are like OLED displays in that regard where the unlighted regions are truly not lit. CRTs have a harder time with black on white. The Mac's choice of black on white was unusual for the time, it was usually only seen on high end systems like workstations, with really good monitors with high refresh rates. (White on black was standard with computer displays thru the 70s into the 90s -- think of serial terminals and DOS PCs.)
- wk_end 3y ago
  I grew up with Windows (and to a lesser extent - at my dad's office, or in the school computer lab, Macs), but I remembered hearing about how incredible and ahead-of-its-time the Amiga was. Given that reputation, when I finally got WinUAE setup, I couldn't believe how awful Workbench 1.0 looked. "Well", I told myself, "I guess it was from the mid-80s. You can only expect so much. It's not bad compared to Windows 1.0..." So...you can imagine my dismay when Workbench 2.0 (1990) and 3.0 (1992) looked...it wasn't garish anymore; it was incredibly drab, but still awful. Compared to their contemporaries - Windows 3.0 and 3.1, respectively, to say nothing of MacOS at the time - there was no contest. If you were doing anything besides playing games or video work with the Toaster I couldn't imagine buying an Amiga at that point, given what else was on the market.
nradov 3y ago
I had an Amiga and it was great at the time. But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped. There wasn't a clear path forward to take advantage of hardware advancements while maintaining software backward compatibility. By contrast the Apple Macintosh hardware architecture was much more limited. But it was also easier to extend without redesigning everything from scratch.
- Diederich 3y ago
  > But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped. That's interesting. If you have a moment could you expand on that? Thanks.
  - Finnucane 3y ago
    For instance, the video management that made it such a perfect fit for the broadcast video of the day made it difficult to later accommodate higher resolution computer displays.
    - toyg 3y ago
      I don't think the problems were particularly insurmountable; with the advantage they had, they could have redesigned everything twice over and still be competitive (which tbf they did, to an extent: the CD32 stuff they pushed towards the end was pretty cool). It's just that Commodore leadership was fundamentally extractive, and saw personal computers more as consumer widgets than platforms. The financial side of things was a bit shambolic, and they trusted the wrong money.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      It later revs of the OS (3.x), it did support graphics cards ("retargetable graphics.") These were only usable for applications that did not access the hardware directly, of course. And then you're obviously not taking advantage of any of the custom chips.
- 3y ago
LocalH 3y ago
It's funny, because the Amiga's heritage is far closer to Atari than Commodore, in both technical aspects and involved personnel. In another universe, it was Atari who could have been Apple.
- toyg 3y ago
  Didn't Jobs and Woz intern at Atari or something...?
  - rasz 3y ago
    Jobs sold Atari an arcade board designed by Wozniak, then lied to Wozniak Atari paid him only half the money, as you do to your "best friend".
    - toyg 3y ago
      Jobs was a complete piece of work. The fact that our society empowers these psychological types is depressing.
rasz 3y ago
Commodore could never have been Apple. Very beginning of Commodore involved fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Acceptance_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Acceptance_Corporatio... "one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/ "Commodore was one of the Atlantic subsidiaries directly implicated in this scheme, but the commission was unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Tramiel or Kapp despite heavy suspicion." Commodore founder Tramiel didnt care one bit if he sold typewriters, calculators or cow hides as long as he could make money by screwing people over 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... The moment C-64 was released whole* (except one person) design team was "let go" and subsequently founded Ensoniq. Tramiel replacements were even worse because on top of not knowing a first thing about product they also didnt know how to make money.

by api 3y ago

JKCalhoun 3y ago

I felt that the Amiga needed someone with a sense of design directing the computer's UI. Despite its more advanced capabilities it still always looked like a kit-car to the Apple's Lotus Elan offerings in the 90's.

icedchai 3y ago
Amiga OS 1.x was definitely rather amateurish looking (blue and orange color scheme.) The 2.x series and above looked much more professional (gray scale, more of a beveled 3D look, etc.)
- retrac 3y ago
  The reason for that is interesting, IMO. The Amiga was intended as a home computer. And in 1985, a home computer might have a TV for display, or a very fuzzy low-quality colour monitor. For some reason, yellow/orange/red/white on blue is particularly legible on poor-quality monitors and TVs. (Many DOS applications of the era were white or yellow on blue, for the same reason. And early Windows had similarly horrible schemes.) By the late 1980s, colour monitors were nearly as good as a B&W one for showing crisp text and lines, and so grey/black on white.
  - nradov 3y ago
    The way that the Amiga engineers used interlaced video modes to support CRT displays with low refresh rates was also not a good look. In the early models that was the only way to get VGA equivalent screen resolution, but the flickering was so bad that some people literally wore sunglasses and configured the desktop with low-contrast colors in order to reduce eye strain. It was one of several design decisions that probably seemed like a good idea at the time but made the product look shoddy and held it back from mainstream adoption.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Nobody I know used interlace other than very occasionally for still images. VGA resolutions were not common at that time, so they were not what my circle compared against anyway. When I visited one of my dads business associates who ran a software company, for example, the vast majority of PC's in their offices had monochrome text screens. A handful had EGA graphics cards and colour screens. I remember playing Zaxxon on one of them and finding it hysterical that the graphics and sound on their most expensive machines was worse even than on my C64. The Amiga looked like sci-fi technology in comparison with what most people actually had in their offices or homes until several years in. Ironically if anything the significantly better graphics contributed to it being pigeonholed as a game machine despite the original Amiga looking like an office machine and being way too expensive for games. The problem was not so much the original or enhanced graphics chips, which were groundbreaking in 85 and maybe even until ~'88 or so, but that AGA in 92 was way too little, several years too late as an upgrade to still justify the price premium on the Amiga. 7 years at that time was an eternity for the graphics capabilities to stand still. Had AGA started a couple of years earlier, maybe Commodore would have lived long enough to complete their next two upgrade projects (AAA[1] and Hombre[2]), but with the chaos of Commodore at that time it's no surprise they didn't pull that off. I feel like Commodore was still in the 8-bit mindset of thinking they had time to milk their existing designs for much longer than they actually could. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
      - stormking 3y ago
        They never understood how to build a product line or a roadmap. To them, the Amiga was a on/off kind of thing, a product they acquired once and planned to sell for some years. They would have happily sold some new, completely incompatible home computer, afterwards.
        vidarh 3y ago
        The fascinating thing is that they were sort-of understanding they couldn't really do that anymore towards the end, but too late. Hombre, their last attempt, was one one hand meant to provide a clean break by moving to a PA-RISC core (chosen to allow for Windows NT compatibility but in retrospect might just have deferred their death) in a dual-chip pair that'd combine the CPU, DMA, an upgraded blitter that was closer to a basic GPU (transforms, texture mapping, gouraud shading, z-buffering), a 64-bit RISC-like copper replacement, 16-bit sound, with a display controller on the other chip. But to avoid breaking backwards compatibility, they also planned putting an entire AGA Amiga on a chip, and recompile AmigaOS, so they could end up with sort-of reverse of what we got with the PowerPC expansion boards or the older Janus Bridgeboards (putting an x86 CPU straddling both a Zorro and ISA buses, letting you run PC software at full speed in a window on the Amiga), of having the new CPU run the OS, and using the embedded 68k Amiga-on-a-chip to run legacy software. A valiant attempt, but of course way too late - Commodore ran out of money before completing even the chipset before Hombre in their pipeline. Hombre would've been a big break, though, with what looks like they had something resembling an actual plan for a very broad range of uses from the start instead of their usual haphazard Darwinist "survival of whatever nearly ready design still happens to please the right executives" Commodore usually practices. It ranged from putting it on a high end graphics card, to set-top boxes, CD32 like entertainment systems, all the way up to high-end machines running AmigaOS and WindowsNT and based around a machine concept from David Haynie (Acutiator, going back to '91) that planned for exchangable modules for everything including the CPU, with the ability to even adapt the bus control account for different CPU requirements. It's an agonisingly fascinating "what if" of alternative hardware, while at the same time in retrospect having some serious flaws (PA-RISC...) and probably being way too ambitious for Commodore even at its peak given the amount of discipline shepherding a project that ambitious over the line without some executive ego trip derailing it would've taken...
  - api 3y ago
    Side note: I feel like dark mode has taken hold in part because of really good LCD screens with great contrast. Dark mode would look horrible on CRTs or even first-generation LCDs.
    - retrac 3y ago
      Dark mode is fine on CRTs. They have excellent contrast; they are like OLED displays in that regard where the unlighted regions are truly not lit. CRTs have a harder time with black on white. The Mac's choice of black on white was unusual for the time, it was usually only seen on high end systems like workstations, with really good monitors with high refresh rates. (White on black was standard with computer displays thru the 70s into the 90s -- think of serial terminals and DOS PCs.)
wk_end 3y ago
I grew up with Windows (and to a lesser extent - at my dad's office, or in the school computer lab, Macs), but I remembered hearing about how incredible and ahead-of-its-time the Amiga was. Given that reputation, when I finally got WinUAE setup, I couldn't believe how awful Workbench 1.0 looked. "Well", I told myself, "I guess it was from the mid-80s. You can only expect so much. It's not bad compared to Windows 1.0..." So...you can imagine my dismay when Workbench 2.0 (1990) and 3.0 (1992) looked...it wasn't garish anymore; it was incredibly drab, but still awful. Compared to their contemporaries - Windows 3.0 and 3.1, respectively, to say nothing of MacOS at the time - there was no contest. If you were doing anything besides playing games or video work with the Toaster I couldn't imagine buying an Amiga at that point, given what else was on the market.

nradov 3y ago

I had an Amiga and it was great at the time. But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped. There wasn't a clear path forward to take advantage of hardware advancements while maintaining software backward compatibility. By contrast the Apple Macintosh hardware architecture was much more limited. But it was also easier to extend without redesigning everything from scratch.

Diederich 3y ago
> But the engineers played some tricks to extract maximum performance at minimum cost which left them kind of trapped. That's interesting. If you have a moment could you expand on that? Thanks.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  For instance, the video management that made it such a perfect fit for the broadcast video of the day made it difficult to later accommodate higher resolution computer displays.
  - toyg 3y ago
    I don't think the problems were particularly insurmountable; with the advantage they had, they could have redesigned everything twice over and still be competitive (which tbf they did, to an extent: the CD32 stuff they pushed towards the end was pretty cool). It's just that Commodore leadership was fundamentally extractive, and saw personal computers more as consumer widgets than platforms. The financial side of things was a bit shambolic, and they trusted the wrong money.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    It later revs of the OS (3.x), it did support graphics cards ("retargetable graphics.") These were only usable for applications that did not access the hardware directly, of course. And then you're obviously not taking advantage of any of the custom chips.
3y ago

LocalH 3y ago

It's funny, because the Amiga's heritage is far closer to Atari than Commodore, in both technical aspects and involved personnel. In another universe, it was Atari who could have been Apple.

toyg 3y ago
Didn't Jobs and Woz intern at Atari or something...?
- rasz 3y ago
  Jobs sold Atari an arcade board designed by Wozniak, then lied to Wozniak Atari paid him only half the money, as you do to your "best friend".
  - toyg 3y ago
    Jobs was a complete piece of work. The fact that our society empowers these psychological types is depressing.

rasz 3y ago

Commodore could never have been Apple. Very beginning of Commodore involved fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Acceptance_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Acceptance_Corporatio... "one of the biggest financial scandals in Canada at that time" https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/irving-gould-commodore/ "Commodore was one of the Atlantic subsidiaries directly implicated in this scheme, but the commission was unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Tramiel or Kapp despite heavy suspicion." Commodore founder Tramiel didnt care one bit if he sold typewriters, calculators or cow hides as long as he could make money by screwing people over 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... The moment C-64 was released whole* (except one person) design team was "let go" and subsequently founded Ensoniq. Tramiel replacements were even worse because on top of not knowing a first thing about product they also didnt know how to make money.