9 ms·

Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did [video]

88 points by mariuz 2y ago

Grustaf 2y ago
Commodores monumental incompetence killed the Amiga. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad.
- timbit42 2y ago
  It wasn't entirely incompetence. Commodore marketing was incompetent but the bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
  - Grustaf 2y ago
    Well I would include the blatant self-enrichment in incompetence, but perhaps that is too charitable
elmerfud 2y ago
The Amiga was dead before a Wolfenstein 3D came out on the PC. A lot of Amiga users failed to recognize it at the time but commodore surely and truly killed that thing off by his horrible mismanagement. When Wolfenstein 3D came around it was really just shifted from keeping it on life support hoping it would awake from its coma to palliative care.
- eurekin 2y ago
  What did the management specifically do? (500 user)
  - RiverCrochet 2y ago
    The Deathbed Vigil video provides a lot of interesting perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI
  - MalphasWats 2y ago
    in-fighting, power struggles & empire building. Then fell into bankruptcy.
    - timbit42 2y ago
      All by Irving Gould.
  - msh 2y ago
    They failed to evolve their product while the competition was rapidly improving. The orginal amiga was leaps in front of anything thing else you could get at remotely the same price point, for many features that mattered to games. But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance. The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      I wonder if they boxed themselves into a corner by putting so many features into ASICs. Custom chips take forever to design and iterate even today, I can only imagine how painful that was in the 80s. Couple that with a frugal management and I can see how they would be reluctant to sink resources into a fantastically expensive development process.
      - hapless 2y ago
        They absolutely did box themselves into a corner, and also, they had no god damn money The 1st gen products (500/1000) never caught on in the world's largest market. They were always struggling. The ASIC-based architecture did not help
      - fidotron 2y ago
        I think with hindsight the tragedy is the home computer market getting split between Commodore, Atari and possibly Acorn. The ST looks like a far more reasonable foundation from which to start building a computing legacy than the Amiga, which really was a one trick pony. Have an ARM in an ST running a pre emptive multitasking OS in 1990 . . . now that would have been an interesting machine.
        TheAmazingRace 2y ago
        They kinda already were getting there when Atari hired Eric R Smith to work on MiNT. MiNT also supported protected memory!! At least this is what I remember from my time playing around with it on my Atari (C-LAB) Falcon before I sadly sold it off. As a collector, I vastly prefer the ST lineup over the Amiga for this reason. The hardware was more "bog standard" and easier to understand than the custom chipset on the Amiga, even if the Amiga seemed cooler on paper back in the day.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rongenre 2y ago
    I had an A1000 - even worked in high school at a Commodore/Amiga dealer. What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead. And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.
    - timbit42 2y ago
      That Commodore didn't understand that software sells hardware was obvious back in the early 80's before they bought Commodore. The VIC-20 was incompatible with the PET, The CBM-II line was incompatible with the PET, the C64 was incompatible with the VIC-20, the Plus/4 was incompatible with the C64, the C128 was incompatible with the C64, although it had a compatibility mode. All the C64 compatibility mode did was ensure the C128 mode was rarely used. The only reasons Commodore was successful is that their hardware engineering was great and their products were inexpensive. Apple had weak hardware and high prices, Atari had great hardware and high prices. Jack Tramiel never used a computer until he was given an iPad. He never understood computers. He would have been just as successful selling bicycles.
  - timbit42 2y ago
    Commodore's bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
- idkdotcom 2y ago
  As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree. When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison. The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented. For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success. The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
- wccrawford 2y ago
  My parents called this before Wolfenstein even came out, though they did it with the Commodore 64 and 128. I really wanted a 128, and they insisted on an IBM compatible instead. I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
  - tfandango 2y ago
    Wow same here. My Dad could see which way the wind was blowing, I guess. It started my obsession with Sierra games though.
    - wccrawford 2y ago
      Oh man, those games alone would have made the switch worth it. I had never considered that aspect. :D
  - billyjobob 2y ago
    Your parents were wrong. Assuming you wanted to play games as well as run productivity software, the C128 was far superior to any PC in 1985. Yes the PC would eventually catch up in the 90s, but the C128 was discontinued by then.
    - wccrawford 2y ago
      That's correct in the short term, but my parents were focused on the long-term and that the computer was an investment for my future, rather than a tool/toy for a present. It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.
      - billyjobob 2y ago
        Apparently a typical PC is 1985 cost upwards of $5000. The C128 was $299. So for rich people yes it may have made sense to pay a 15x premium to get hold of tech “from the future, today”. But you could have easily had both. And for a child, both machines would be entirely obsolete by the time the child grew up and entered the workforce, so I would question how much advantage you were really buying.
- karmakaze 2y ago
  For PC games Commander Keen running on an EGA display was already enough for PC gaming to be good enough for me. I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead. It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
KingOfCoders 2y ago
I owned an Amiga 4k/040 (after an A500, later with a Retina Z3) at the time and was blown away by Wolfenstein that I played on the 386 (?) of the dad of a friend.
surfingdino 2y ago
I'd also add 3DStudio to the list of assassins. It was not even close to LightWave 3D, but it did not require a Video Toaster card and it ran on commodity PC hardware. Amiga never got software package that could outcompete Apple in the graphics, DTP departments either. Add to that the dead-end that was AmigaOS as well.
runjake 2y ago
At least from my standpoint, this is completely true. I was hardcore Amiga (AmigaOS and Amiga MINIX) up until 1992 and then Wolfenstein 3D came out and it got me to buy a PC. The OS experience was comparatively terrible, but that game was so good in its day. I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.
tombert 2y ago
People on here have provided good reasons to why the Amiga failed, and I don't really dispute any of them, but it still makes me very sad. I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up. That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.
- amiga061347 2y ago
  I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition. I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yeah, though people have explained to me that there were things in the Amiga that kind of "stayed primitive". While I think it's insanely cool how early they got preemptive multitasking, something that I think hurt them was the fact that by-design it didn't really support any kind of protected memory. The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.
timcobb 2y ago
I often wonder why these days, Doom looms so large over Wolf3D... at the time, Wolfenstein seemed nearly as big as Doom.
- timbit42 2y ago
  Neither impressed me. Quake did.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  The hype on usenet for DOOM was quite the thing to behold. It was super hyped because of Wolfenstein was so interesting. It even spawned two different usenet FAQs to track the madness. Wolf was also the first game I found out about motion sickness.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  Did it? People called FPS games Doom clones for several years. Not Wolf3D clones.
- giantrobot 2y ago
  I think the biggest reason is just the difference in exposure. Doom had a ton of pre-release because of Wolf3D but then had a buzz of its own. PC sales had also been steadily increasing so just in the time between the two games there were more PCs in consumer hands and pretty much all of them were capable of playing Doom. There were just more instances of Doom running than Wolf3D. Another aspect is Doom as an engine had longer legs. It got an official sequel not a year after its release as well as official "clones" in the form of Hexen. Hexen's own box advertised its relationship with Doom.
cowmix 2y ago
As someone who followed the development of the Amiga and then bought the Amiga 1000 (plus everything else I could afford with my paper route earnings) the first day it was available -- I do NOT yearn to relive those days. I loved it then and as documented everywhere, it was a head of its time. However, the instability of software and how much Commodore didn't iterate on the technology -- that's what killed the Amiga. I still have PTSD from all the insane amount of crashing and rebooting my setup did.
- timbit42 2y ago
  My Amigas rarely crashed. When an app crashed, I stopped using it.
  - cowmix 2y ago
    VideoScape 3D and Sculpt 4D where my bread and butter at the time. Although anything would crash. One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    A1000 era would be wb1.0/1.1 era. Before 1.2, AmigaOS was very unstable.
- pornel 2y ago
  Indeed, AmigaOS despite being ahead of its time in the '80s, was doomed to lose by the end of the '90s. The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation. In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related from a few months ago: How Doom didn't kill the Amiga https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
detritus 2y ago
For me it was Comanche ('92) that spelt out the demise of my beloved Amiga. I had a floppy disk demo that I played on my father's crappy, crappy PC at work and it completely destroyed anything you could achieve on the Amiga.
cess11 2y ago
I was a kid back then but as far as I understood the waves of computing DOS and Windows 3.0 was dominant in office settings at least a couple of years before Wolfenstein 3D was released, and such machines trickled into people's homes over those years and became part-time gaming stations and created pretty solid expectations in adults about how a computer should work and what to buy for their kids.
poulpy123 2y ago
I think that a good part of that killed Amiga and Atari was the fact that IBM PC were the "serious" computers, the one you bought for work, and the Amiga and Atari were less considered. I know that they had some success in their niche like music and publishing for Atari, and graphism and design for amiga, I even saw Atari on a warship. But at the end most of the money at the time was made in a professional setting, and neither Atari or Amiga managed to get a sizable part of it. I regret it because passing from GEM to DOS really felt a step backward
- timbit42 2y ago
  There were two reasons the IBM PC clones became dominant. The smaller reason is because IBM created it. The bigger reason is because everything but the BIOS was off-the-shelf parts and easy to copy. Apple had the same problem with Apple II clones where only a couple of companies managed to not lose when sued by Apple. IBM couldn't sue Compaq and others for their clean room BIOS replacements. If the IBM PC had custom chips, it would not have been easy, or even possible, to clone and would have remained an IBM-only product. If that had been the case, I suspect CP/M and GEM would have won out and Microsoft would be much smaller and still producing language compilers today. The only question is, which version of CP/M would have won out? I think Motorola's 68K series would have won over Intel's x86 series.
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    The problem with motorola winning the 80s was that no matter what they did, they were facing the same problem in the 90s, the 88k was going to flop hard. And early PowerPC would still have been 'so so' compared to the Pentium and onwards. That said, would the Pentium have happened without the PC industry - everything up to the 486 would likely have continued to develop as it did, even without the PC as they were strong embedded chips too.
- tverbeure 2y ago
  I remember reading magazines when the Amiga 1000 was introduced, and even then the general conclusion was: amazing hardware, but doesn’t run PC software.
tibbydudeza 2y ago
Intel 486DX2 along with faster VGA cards using the VLB (VESA Local Bus) simply clobbered the Amiga and it's ECS.
JanSolo 2y ago
The home-computer wars of the 1990s have always confused me. There's seems to be a kind of tribal-allegiance that computer-buyers participated in when they became computer-owners. I've never understood why it had to be PC vs Amiga or Nintendo vs Sega or whatever. My best guess is that a lot of the buyers were young kids who did'nt have the maturity yet to see the world in a more flexible way. I was certainly guilty of that back when I was a teen.
- weaksauce 2y ago
  computers were expensive and so was the software you ran on it. it was an investment and switching was starting from zero.
- mmcgaha 2y ago
  I think it was mostly because $1000 items were a bit harder to come by back then so kids would do a lot of reading and day dreaming before getting enough cash to pull the trigger. By the time they could actually afford a computer/monitor/printer/software they had talked themselves into how great the product was.
- timbit42 2y ago
  It was because there was a lot of difference between the systems then, unlike today where they are all the same technology with a different sticker on the front of the case. If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business. In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites. In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    What you said, but add that it was all brand spanking new to most people at the time. Novelty creates excitement, excitement creates cult brands.
erickhill 2y ago
Here we go again. Someone flagging a post they don't like without rhyme or reason. A post that the community is obviously passionate about and enjoying to share their experiences and recollections. How annoying.
mattgrice 2y ago
I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.
- ZFH 2y ago
  It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective. It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise. From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious. At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
  - nopakos 2y ago
    For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!
- timbit42 2y ago
  Over half of the Amigas sold worldwide were the 500 model and, in Europe, most people with an Amiga had the 500 or 1200 at home for gaming so you would see it when you visited. The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
aixpert 2y ago
Another thing that killed the amiga was it's lack of hackability and approachability. On the C64 you could start writing code right away, and instantly go into assembly with an extension
- timbit42 2y ago
  What extension are you referring to? It wasn't anything that came with the computer. The Amiga, and none of the other 16-bit systems had an assembler built in either. They had interpreted BASICs just like the 8-bit systems, except on disk instead of in ROM.
  - ChainOfFools 2y ago
    MS-DOS had debug.com built in from 1.0 onwards. a:\DEBUG < FOO.ASM -a (press enter until you reach the end of your source code at whatever address) (enter a blank opcode to mark end of assembly range) -g =100 voila, your (naturally, bug-free, right?) code assembles and runs. It's living about as close to the land as you can get when it comes to an assembler, but it did the job. from ms-dos 2.0 onwards debug was apparently re-entrant and could read its own binary from disk, "un"assemble it, assemble it again, and run another instance of itself from inside itself. When I first discovered this at 12 or so It felt I stumbled across a tiny doorway to some alternate dimension.
snakeyjake 2y ago
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because the Amiga was an architectural nightmare but everyone pretends to love it. There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues. When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps. How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course! I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes. The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed. But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out. edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.
- timbit42 2y ago
  You are not taking crazy pills. You just had a bad experience because you bought a low quality accelerator and video card for your Amiga. The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast. By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems. If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator. I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses. It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.

88 points by mariuz 2y ago

Grustaf 2y ago

Commodores monumental incompetence killed the Amiga. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad.

timbit42 2y ago
It wasn't entirely incompetence. Commodore marketing was incompetent but the bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
- Grustaf 2y ago
  Well I would include the blatant self-enrichment in incompetence, but perhaps that is too charitable

elmerfud 2y ago

The Amiga was dead before a Wolfenstein 3D came out on the PC. A lot of Amiga users failed to recognize it at the time but commodore surely and truly killed that thing off by his horrible mismanagement. When Wolfenstein 3D came around it was really just shifted from keeping it on life support hoping it would awake from its coma to palliative care.

eurekin 2y ago
What did the management specifically do? (500 user)
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  The Deathbed Vigil video provides a lot of interesting perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaTjwo1ywcI
- MalphasWats 2y ago
  in-fighting, power struggles & empire building. Then fell into bankruptcy.
  - timbit42 2y ago
    All by Irving Gould.
- msh 2y ago
  They failed to evolve their product while the competition was rapidly improving. The orginal amiga was leaps in front of anything thing else you could get at remotely the same price point, for many features that mattered to games. But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance. The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    I wonder if they boxed themselves into a corner by putting so many features into ASICs. Custom chips take forever to design and iterate even today, I can only imagine how painful that was in the 80s. Couple that with a frugal management and I can see how they would be reluctant to sink resources into a fantastically expensive development process.
    - hapless 2y ago
      They absolutely did box themselves into a corner, and also, they had no god damn money The 1st gen products (500/1000) never caught on in the world's largest market. They were always struggling. The ASIC-based architecture did not help
    - fidotron 2y ago
      I think with hindsight the tragedy is the home computer market getting split between Commodore, Atari and possibly Acorn. The ST looks like a far more reasonable foundation from which to start building a computing legacy than the Amiga, which really was a one trick pony. Have an ARM in an ST running a pre emptive multitasking OS in 1990 . . . now that would have been an interesting machine.
      - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
        They kinda already were getting there when Atari hired Eric R Smith to work on MiNT. MiNT also supported protected memory!! At least this is what I remember from my time playing around with it on my Atari (C-LAB) Falcon before I sadly sold it off. As a collector, I vastly prefer the ST lineup over the Amiga for this reason. The hardware was more "bog standard" and easier to understand than the custom chipset on the Amiga, even if the Amiga seemed cooler on paper back in the day.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rongenre 2y ago
  I had an A1000 - even worked in high school at a Commodore/Amiga dealer. What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead. And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.
  - timbit42 2y ago
    That Commodore didn't understand that software sells hardware was obvious back in the early 80's before they bought Commodore. The VIC-20 was incompatible with the PET, The CBM-II line was incompatible with the PET, the C64 was incompatible with the VIC-20, the Plus/4 was incompatible with the C64, the C128 was incompatible with the C64, although it had a compatibility mode. All the C64 compatibility mode did was ensure the C128 mode was rarely used. The only reasons Commodore was successful is that their hardware engineering was great and their products were inexpensive. Apple had weak hardware and high prices, Atari had great hardware and high prices. Jack Tramiel never used a computer until he was given an iPad. He never understood computers. He would have been just as successful selling bicycles.
- timbit42 2y ago
  Commodore's bankruptcy was primarily driven by Irving Gould to enrich himself. Mehdi Ali was his henchman. They pulled funding from R&D, preventing the chipset from keeping up with the industry.
idkdotcom 2y ago
As a proud commodore Amiga 500 owner starting in 1990 I agree. When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison. The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented. For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success. The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
wccrawford 2y ago
My parents called this before Wolfenstein even came out, though they did it with the Commodore 64 and 128. I really wanted a 128, and they insisted on an IBM compatible instead. I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
- tfandango 2y ago
  Wow same here. My Dad could see which way the wind was blowing, I guess. It started my obsession with Sierra games though.
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    Oh man, those games alone would have made the switch worth it. I had never considered that aspect. :D
- billyjobob 2y ago
  Your parents were wrong. Assuming you wanted to play games as well as run productivity software, the C128 was far superior to any PC in 1985. Yes the PC would eventually catch up in the 90s, but the C128 was discontinued by then.
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    That's correct in the short term, but my parents were focused on the long-term and that the computer was an investment for my future, rather than a tool/toy for a present. It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.
    - billyjobob 2y ago
      Apparently a typical PC is 1985 cost upwards of $5000. The C128 was $299. So for rich people yes it may have made sense to pay a 15x premium to get hold of tech “from the future, today”. But you could have easily had both. And for a child, both machines would be entirely obsolete by the time the child grew up and entered the workforce, so I would question how much advantage you were really buying.
karmakaze 2y ago
For PC games Commander Keen running on an EGA display was already enough for PC gaming to be good enough for me. I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead. It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).

KingOfCoders 2y ago

I owned an Amiga 4k/040 (after an A500, later with a Retina Z3) at the time and was blown away by Wolfenstein that I played on the 386 (?) of the dad of a friend.

surfingdino 2y ago

I'd also add 3DStudio to the list of assassins. It was not even close to LightWave 3D, but it did not require a Video Toaster card and it ran on commodity PC hardware. Amiga never got software package that could outcompete Apple in the graphics, DTP departments either. Add to that the dead-end that was AmigaOS as well.

runjake 2y ago

At least from my standpoint, this is completely true. I was hardcore Amiga (AmigaOS and Amiga MINIX) up until 1992 and then Wolfenstein 3D came out and it got me to buy a PC. The OS experience was comparatively terrible, but that game was so good in its day. I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.

tombert 2y ago

People on here have provided good reasons to why the Amiga failed, and I don't really dispute any of them, but it still makes me very sad. I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up. That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.

amiga061347 2y ago
I owned an Amiga 500 but had to switch to a PC when I saw the writing on the wall. For many years it was almost painful to think about the lost opportunity the world missed out on. If they had managed the platform better, we would probably see much better computers and operating systems sooner due to the increased competition. I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, though people have explained to me that there were things in the Amiga that kind of "stayed primitive". While I think it's insanely cool how early they got preemptive multitasking, something that I think hurt them was the fact that by-design it didn't really support any kind of protected memory. The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.

timcobb 2y ago

I often wonder why these days, Doom looms so large over Wolf3D... at the time, Wolfenstein seemed nearly as big as Doom.

timbit42 2y ago
Neither impressed me. Quake did.
sumtechguy 2y ago
The hype on usenet for DOOM was quite the thing to behold. It was super hyped because of Wolfenstein was so interesting. It even spawned two different usenet FAQs to track the madness. Wolf was also the first game I found out about motion sickness.
pseudalopex 2y ago
Did it? People called FPS games Doom clones for several years. Not Wolf3D clones.
giantrobot 2y ago
I think the biggest reason is just the difference in exposure. Doom had a ton of pre-release because of Wolf3D but then had a buzz of its own. PC sales had also been steadily increasing so just in the time between the two games there were more PCs in consumer hands and pretty much all of them were capable of playing Doom. There were just more instances of Doom running than Wolf3D. Another aspect is Doom as an engine had longer legs. It got an official sequel not a year after its release as well as official "clones" in the form of Hexen. Hexen's own box advertised its relationship with Doom.

cowmix 2y ago

As someone who followed the development of the Amiga and then bought the Amiga 1000 (plus everything else I could afford with my paper route earnings) the first day it was available -- I do NOT yearn to relive those days. I loved it then and as documented everywhere, it was a head of its time. However, the instability of software and how much Commodore didn't iterate on the technology -- that's what killed the Amiga. I still have PTSD from all the insane amount of crashing and rebooting my setup did.

timbit42 2y ago
My Amigas rarely crashed. When an app crashed, I stopped using it.
- cowmix 2y ago
  VideoScape 3D and Sculpt 4D where my bread and butter at the time. Although anything would crash. One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.
- snvzz 2y ago
  A1000 era would be wb1.0/1.1 era. Before 1.2, AmigaOS was very unstable.
pornel 2y ago
Indeed, AmigaOS despite being ahead of its time in the '80s, was doomed to lose by the end of the '90s. The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation. In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related from a few months ago: How Doom didn't kill the Amiga https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825

detritus 2y ago

For me it was Comanche ('92) that spelt out the demise of my beloved Amiga. I had a floppy disk demo that I played on my father's crappy, crappy PC at work and it completely destroyed anything you could achieve on the Amiga.

cess11 2y ago

I was a kid back then but as far as I understood the waves of computing DOS and Windows 3.0 was dominant in office settings at least a couple of years before Wolfenstein 3D was released, and such machines trickled into people's homes over those years and became part-time gaming stations and created pretty solid expectations in adults about how a computer should work and what to buy for their kids.

poulpy123 2y ago

I think that a good part of that killed Amiga and Atari was the fact that IBM PC were the "serious" computers, the one you bought for work, and the Amiga and Atari were less considered. I know that they had some success in their niche like music and publishing for Atari, and graphism and design for amiga, I even saw Atari on a warship. But at the end most of the money at the time was made in a professional setting, and neither Atari or Amiga managed to get a sizable part of it. I regret it because passing from GEM to DOS really felt a step backward

timbit42 2y ago
There were two reasons the IBM PC clones became dominant. The smaller reason is because IBM created it. The bigger reason is because everything but the BIOS was off-the-shelf parts and easy to copy. Apple had the same problem with Apple II clones where only a couple of companies managed to not lose when sued by Apple. IBM couldn't sue Compaq and others for their clean room BIOS replacements. If the IBM PC had custom chips, it would not have been easy, or even possible, to clone and would have remained an IBM-only product. If that had been the case, I suspect CP/M and GEM would have won out and Microsoft would be much smaller and still producing language compilers today. The only question is, which version of CP/M would have won out? I think Motorola's 68K series would have won over Intel's x86 series.
- NikkiA 2y ago
  The problem with motorola winning the 80s was that no matter what they did, they were facing the same problem in the 90s, the 88k was going to flop hard. And early PowerPC would still have been 'so so' compared to the Pentium and onwards. That said, would the Pentium have happened without the PC industry - everything up to the 486 would likely have continued to develop as it did, even without the PC as they were strong embedded chips too.
tverbeure 2y ago
I remember reading magazines when the Amiga 1000 was introduced, and even then the general conclusion was: amazing hardware, but doesn’t run PC software.

tibbydudeza 2y ago

Intel 486DX2 along with faster VGA cards using the VLB (VESA Local Bus) simply clobbered the Amiga and it's ECS.

JanSolo 2y ago

The home-computer wars of the 1990s have always confused me. There's seems to be a kind of tribal-allegiance that computer-buyers participated in when they became computer-owners. I've never understood why it had to be PC vs Amiga or Nintendo vs Sega or whatever. My best guess is that a lot of the buyers were young kids who did'nt have the maturity yet to see the world in a more flexible way. I was certainly guilty of that back when I was a teen.

weaksauce 2y ago
computers were expensive and so was the software you ran on it. it was an investment and switching was starting from zero.
mmcgaha 2y ago
I think it was mostly because $1000 items were a bit harder to come by back then so kids would do a lot of reading and day dreaming before getting enough cash to pull the trigger. By the time they could actually afford a computer/monitor/printer/software they had talked themselves into how great the product was.
timbit42 2y ago
It was because there was a lot of difference between the systems then, unlike today where they are all the same technology with a different sticker on the front of the case. If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business. In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites. In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  What you said, but add that it was all brand spanking new to most people at the time. Novelty creates excitement, excitement creates cult brands.

erickhill 2y ago

Here we go again. Someone flagging a post they don't like without rhyme or reason. A post that the community is obviously passionate about and enjoying to share their experiences and recollections. How annoying.

mattgrice 2y ago

I feel like Amiga was never really alive in the US. I never knew anyone who owned one, or a 520st. Schools were almost exclusively Apple IIe, later some IIgs before Mac SE and LC. And of course PC. IIgs was more comparable to a Commodore 128 but it ran all the Apple II software. Sometimes you'd see a Mac II or SE/30 in an administrator's office running a screensaver.

ZFH 2y ago
It's one of those rare cases where being in the US or Europe gives an uniquely skewed perspective. It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise. From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious. At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
- nopakos 2y ago
  For another data point, as kids in Greece we made fun of our friend who first switched to a PC, (we had Atari STs). Even after he got a Sound Blaster and a VGA card we still had better games like Kick Off and Dungeon Master. But one day he invited us to his house and showed as Wolfenstein. I distinctly remember the feeling. It was over!
timbit42 2y ago
Over half of the Amigas sold worldwide were the 500 model and, in Europe, most people with an Amiga had the 500 or 1200 at home for gaming so you would see it when you visited. The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.

aixpert 2y ago

Another thing that killed the amiga was it's lack of hackability and approachability. On the C64 you could start writing code right away, and instantly go into assembly with an extension

timbit42 2y ago
What extension are you referring to? It wasn't anything that came with the computer. The Amiga, and none of the other 16-bit systems had an assembler built in either. They had interpreted BASICs just like the 8-bit systems, except on disk instead of in ROM.
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  MS-DOS had debug.com built in from 1.0 onwards. a:\DEBUG < FOO.ASM -a (press enter until you reach the end of your source code at whatever address) (enter a blank opcode to mark end of assembly range) -g =100 voila, your (naturally, bug-free, right?) code assembles and runs. It's living about as close to the land as you can get when it comes to an assembler, but it did the job. from ms-dos 2.0 onwards debug was apparently re-entrant and could read its own binary from disk, "un"assemble it, assemble it again, and run another instance of itself from inside itself. When I first discovered this at 12 or so It felt I stumbled across a tiny doorway to some alternate dimension.

snakeyjake 2y ago

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because the Amiga was an architectural nightmare but everyone pretends to love it. There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues. When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps. How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course! I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes. The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed. But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out. edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.

timbit42 2y ago
You are not taking crazy pills. You just had a bad experience because you bought a low quality accelerator and video card for your Amiga. The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast. By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems. If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator. I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses. It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.