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Too little too late indeed. There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. Considering Apple users had to wait even longer (

Too little too late indeed. There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. Considering Apple users had to wait even longer (and less popular Acorn Archimedes / RiscOS is still struggling with "cooperative" MT, today), I think Commodore — or more accurately: the Amiga team — was way ahead of its time (also in terms of hardware) launching Amiga in 1985.

wkat4242 3y ago
The funny thing is that the Amiga was actually developed by Atari engineers and the ST by commodore ones (ok I oversimplify the situation a little bit there but the history is really weird)
- rusk 3y ago
  Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore and it was the founder of commodore left to try to repeat his success by reviving Atari. Basically commodore corporate was a big hot mess and both of these entities spun out of that. Atari was essentially otherwise a dead duck already. The acquisition of Amiga wasn’t enough to keep C= afloat and ultimately the product line was taken on by a German vendor …
  - timbit42 3y ago
    > Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore This is false.
    - rusk 3y ago
      > This is false This is vacuous
  - Gormo 3y ago
    > Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore Amiga Inc. was founded in 1982 by engineers leaving Atari, at a time when Atari was still all-in on the aging 2600, and did yet not have a replacement product in the pipeline. So you identified the right problem at the wrong company. Amiga's initial goal was to create a chipset for a next-generation console. While they were working on that, they generated revenue by selling 2600 peripherals (like the Joyboard [1]), but eventually got funding from Atari and negotiated a contract to license their new architecture as the basis for future Atari products. In '84, Jack Tramiel left Commodore and acquired Atari, which Warner had put up for sale following the crash of '83. Tramiel brought a bunch of Commodore engineers over to a newly reconstituted Atari, and they became the core of the ST team. This severed Amiga's relationship with Atari, and simultaneously left Commodore without an engineering team to design their next-generation products. After a bunch of lawsuits and back-and-forth negotiations, Commodore managed to acquire Amiga, and the rest was history. So it's pretty valid to say that the Amiga was designed by Atari engineers and the ST was designed by Commodore engineers. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard
    - rusk 3y ago
      Corrected and clarified. Thank you!
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      Ah, the Joyboard, origin of Amiga's Guru Meditation error.
    - EvanAnderson 3y ago
      What happened with Commodore/Amiga and Atari/ST is an amazing bit of history. It really happened, of course, but it seems like it could have been the plot for a show like "Halt and Catch Fire".
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Also at a given point, they were actually trying to compete into the UNIX workstation market, as a couple of Amiga engineering folks were really into UNIX. Thankfully that never materialized as such, otherwise AmigaOS wouldn't turned out as special as it was, rather yet another clone, SGI style.
smallstepforman 3y ago
Its a pity Amiga team chose the 68000 instead of the 68010, since the the Pro Amiga would have had protected virtual memory.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  Their original goal was a gaming console, not a general-purpose computer. One huge mistake was not to take Sun's hand and make the 3000/UX the low end option to Sun's workstation lineup.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    We always hear the Commodore / Sun 3000UX rumor. I'm skeptical. Sun already had their own 680x0 line of workstations (the Sun 3 series), which started about 5 years before the A3000 was released. Why would they need Commodore? They were basically done with 68K by that point, just like all the other Unix workstation vendors.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      Good point. It could be a stopgap. At the time the 3000 was launched, Sun was divesting from their 68K line in favor of the SPARC line, but the 3000 would fill a niche at a lower price point than Sun had with their own Sun/3 series (which were eye-wateringly expensive).
      - icedchai 3y ago
        I wonder if they would've ported SunOS 4.x to the Amiga, or gone with modifications to Commodore's Unix, which was SysV based. I had a used Sun 3/60 for a while, back in the 90's.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    It would have been yet another UNIX clone like SGI, without the features that make AmigaOS special in first place. NeXTSTEP was great, because their UNIX support was a means to bring software into the platform, and have a checkmark for DoD deals, not the way to develop NeXTSTEP applications.
lproven 3y ago
> There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. The thing is, that's only part of the story. There's a generation of techies who are about 40 now who don't remember this stuff well, and some of the older ones have forgotten with time but don't realise. I had some greybeard angrily telling me that floppy drives were IDE recently. Senile idiot. Anyway. Preemptive multitasking is only part of the story. Lots of systems had it. Windows 2.0 could do preemptive multitasking -- but only of DOS apps, and only in the base 640kB of RAM, so it was pretty useless. It sounds good but it's not. Because the other key ingredient is memory protection. You need both, together, to have a compelling deal. Amiga and Windows 2.x/3.x only had the preemption part, they had no hardware memory management or protection to go with it. (Windows 3.x when running on a 386 and also when given >2MB RAM could do some, for DOS apps, but not much.) Having multiple pre-emptive tasks is relatively easy if they are all in the same memory space, but it's horribly horribly unstable. Also see: microkernels. In size terms, AmigaOS was a microkernel, but a microkernel without memory protection is not such a big deal, because the hard part of a microkernel is the interprocess communication, and if they can just do that by reading and writing each other's RAM it's trivially easy but also trivially insecure and trivially unstable. RISC OS had pre-emptive multitasking too... but only of text-only command-line windows, and there were few CLI RISC OS apps so it was mostly useless. At least on 16-bit Windows there were lots of DOS apps so it was vaguely useful, if they'd fit into memory. Which only trivial ones would. Windows 3 came along very late in the DOS era, and by then, most DOS apps didn't fit into memory on their own one at a time. I made good money optimising DOS memory around 1990-1992 because I was very good at it and without it most DOS apps didn't fit into 500-550kB any more. So two of them in 640kB? Forget it. Preemption is clever. It lets apps that weren't designed to multitask do it. But it's also slow. Which is why RISC OS didn't do it. Co-op is much quicker which is also why OSes like RISC OS and 16-bit Windows chose it for their GUI apps: because GUI apps strained the resources of late-1980s/very-early-1990s computers. So you had 2 choices: • The Mac and GEM way: don't multitask at all. • The 16-bit Windows and RISC OS way: multitask cooperatively, and hope nothing goes wrong. Later, notably, MacOS 7-8-9 and Falcon MultiTOS/MiNT/MagiC etc added coop multitasking to single-tasking GUI OSes. I used MacOS 8.x and 9.x a lot and I really liked them. They were extraordinarily usable to an extent Mac OS X has never and will never catch up with. But the good thing about owning a Mac in the 1990s was that at least one thing in your life was guaranteed to go down on you every single day.

wkat4242 3y ago

The funny thing is that the Amiga was actually developed by Atari engineers and the ST by commodore ones (ok I oversimplify the situation a little bit there but the history is really weird)

rusk 3y ago
Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore and it was the founder of commodore left to try to repeat his success by reviving Atari. Basically commodore corporate was a big hot mess and both of these entities spun out of that. Atari was essentially otherwise a dead duck already. The acquisition of Amiga wasn’t enough to keep C= afloat and ultimately the product line was taken on by a German vendor …
- timbit42 3y ago
  > Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore This is false.
  - rusk 3y ago
    > This is false This is vacuous
- Gormo 3y ago
  > Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore Amiga Inc. was founded in 1982 by engineers leaving Atari, at a time when Atari was still all-in on the aging 2600, and did yet not have a replacement product in the pipeline. So you identified the right problem at the wrong company. Amiga's initial goal was to create a chipset for a next-generation console. While they were working on that, they generated revenue by selling 2600 peripherals (like the Joyboard [1]), but eventually got funding from Atari and negotiated a contract to license their new architecture as the basis for future Atari products. In '84, Jack Tramiel left Commodore and acquired Atari, which Warner had put up for sale following the crash of '83. Tramiel brought a bunch of Commodore engineers over to a newly reconstituted Atari, and they became the core of the ST team. This severed Amiga's relationship with Atari, and simultaneously left Commodore without an engineering team to design their next-generation products. After a bunch of lawsuits and back-and-forth negotiations, Commodore managed to acquire Amiga, and the rest was history. So it's pretty valid to say that the Amiga was designed by Atari engineers and the ST was designed by Commodore engineers. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard
  - rusk 3y ago
    Corrected and clarified. Thank you!
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Ah, the Joyboard, origin of Amiga's Guru Meditation error.
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    What happened with Commodore/Amiga and Atari/ST is an amazing bit of history. It really happened, of course, but it seems like it could have been the plot for a show like "Halt and Catch Fire".
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Also at a given point, they were actually trying to compete into the UNIX workstation market, as a couple of Amiga engineering folks were really into UNIX. Thankfully that never materialized as such, otherwise AmigaOS wouldn't turned out as special as it was, rather yet another clone, SGI style.

smallstepforman 3y ago

Its a pity Amiga team chose the 68000 instead of the 68010, since the the Pro Amiga would have had protected virtual memory.

rbanffy 3y ago
Their original goal was a gaming console, not a general-purpose computer. One huge mistake was not to take Sun's hand and make the 3000/UX the low end option to Sun's workstation lineup.
- icedchai 3y ago
  We always hear the Commodore / Sun 3000UX rumor. I'm skeptical. Sun already had their own 680x0 line of workstations (the Sun 3 series), which started about 5 years before the A3000 was released. Why would they need Commodore? They were basically done with 68K by that point, just like all the other Unix workstation vendors.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    Good point. It could be a stopgap. At the time the 3000 was launched, Sun was divesting from their 68K line in favor of the SPARC line, but the 3000 would fill a niche at a lower price point than Sun had with their own Sun/3 series (which were eye-wateringly expensive).
    - icedchai 3y ago
      I wonder if they would've ported SunOS 4.x to the Amiga, or gone with modifications to Commodore's Unix, which was SysV based. I had a used Sun 3/60 for a while, back in the 90's.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It would have been yet another UNIX clone like SGI, without the features that make AmigaOS special in first place. NeXTSTEP was great, because their UNIX support was a means to bring software into the platform, and have a checkmark for DoD deals, not the way to develop NeXTSTEP applications.

lproven 3y ago

> There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. The thing is, that's only part of the story. There's a generation of techies who are about 40 now who don't remember this stuff well, and some of the older ones have forgotten with time but don't realise. I had some greybeard angrily telling me that floppy drives were IDE recently. Senile idiot. Anyway. Preemptive multitasking is only part of the story. Lots of systems had it. Windows 2.0 could do preemptive multitasking -- but only of DOS apps, and only in the base 640kB of RAM, so it was pretty useless. It sounds good but it's not. Because the other key ingredient is memory protection. You need both, together, to have a compelling deal. Amiga and Windows 2.x/3.x only had the preemption part, they had no hardware memory management or protection to go with it. (Windows 3.x when running on a 386 and also when given >2MB RAM could do some, for DOS apps, but not much.) Having multiple pre-emptive tasks is relatively easy if they are all in the same memory space, but it's horribly horribly unstable. Also see: microkernels. In size terms, AmigaOS was a microkernel, but a microkernel without memory protection is not such a big deal, because the hard part of a microkernel is the interprocess communication, and if they can just do that by reading and writing each other's RAM it's trivially easy but also trivially insecure and trivially unstable. RISC OS had pre-emptive multitasking too... but only of text-only command-line windows, and there were few CLI RISC OS apps so it was mostly useless. At least on 16-bit Windows there were lots of DOS apps so it was vaguely useful, if they'd fit into memory. Which only trivial ones would. Windows 3 came along very late in the DOS era, and by then, most DOS apps didn't fit into memory on their own one at a time. I made good money optimising DOS memory around 1990-1992 because I was very good at it and without it most DOS apps didn't fit into 500-550kB any more. So two of them in 640kB? Forget it. Preemption is clever. It lets apps that weren't designed to multitask do it. But it's also slow. Which is why RISC OS didn't do it. Co-op is much quicker which is also why OSes like RISC OS and 16-bit Windows chose it for their GUI apps: because GUI apps strained the resources of late-1980s/very-early-1990s computers. So you had 2 choices: • The Mac and GEM way: don't multitask at all. • The 16-bit Windows and RISC OS way: multitask cooperatively, and hope nothing goes wrong. Later, notably, MacOS 7-8-9 and Falcon MultiTOS/MiNT/MagiC etc added coop multitasking to single-tasking GUI OSes. I used MacOS 8.x and 9.x a lot and I really liked them. They were extraordinarily usable to an extent Mac OS X has never and will never catch up with. But the good thing about owning a Mac in the 1990s was that at least one thing in your life was guaranteed to go down on you every single day.