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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

by 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.
  - rusk 3y ago
    I’m wondering how this worked out so well for Apple 15 years later (A/UX notwithstanding of course) - perhaps unix was simply not mature enough at that stage
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Easy, Linux folks got a laptop/desktop that actually works out of the box, and they weren't really into Linux religion, rather whatever does POSIX would do. A lesson taken by Microsoft years later, as Project Astoria ashes got repurposed as WSL. A/UX failed due to management, and politics between IBM and Apple.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      It worked out well for NeXT. But it took a long time, NeXTSTEP was released at the end of the 80s. So it took them more than a decade and reverse take-over of Apple, together with the much more affordable Apple hardware.

by rusk 3y ago

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.
- rusk 3y ago
  I’m wondering how this worked out so well for Apple 15 years later (A/UX notwithstanding of course) - perhaps unix was simply not mature enough at that stage
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Easy, Linux folks got a laptop/desktop that actually works out of the box, and they weren't really into Linux religion, rather whatever does POSIX would do. A lesson taken by Microsoft years later, as Project Astoria ashes got repurposed as WSL. A/UX failed due to management, and politics between IBM and Apple.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    It worked out well for NeXT. But it took a long time, NeXTSTEP was released at the end of the 80s. So it took them more than a decade and reverse take-over of Apple, together with the much more affordable Apple hardware.