4 ms·

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]
- chuckadams 2y ago
  The custom chipsets in the Amiga went from being its secret weapon to its biggest liability. Amiga simply could not afford to keep them competitive with commodity PC hardware, especially not while Irving Gould was busy looting Commodore of every penny it was once worth.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Anything is a liability if you don't invest in it. The Amiga was unchanged basically from the launch in 1985 to Amiga 1200 in 1992. That's 7 years of thumb fiddling and the 1200 was basically a small bandaid on a gushing wound. Reacting not acting. They never believed in themselves. The IBM PC was launched in 1981 with 4.77MHz and 7 years later you could buy 40MHz PCs with wider buses.
    - msh 2y ago
      So much this! Put way better than in my comment.
- js8 2y ago
  But was it Amiga's chipset the noncompetitive part? My recollection from that era was that graphics/sound capabilities of the era were far ahead of the PC, but PC had better CPUs, which was a problem of Intel vs Motorola. Anyway, in the early 90s my father wisely chose PC over Amiga to replace our aging ZX Spectrum. The reason - PC was open and easier to upgrade. Maybe that's what actually killed Amiga and Atari ST.
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    The Amigas were open and easy to upgrade as well. The exception was graphical capabilities for the "home computer" models like the A500/600/1200 - they are quite compact and the available solutions consequently suffered limitations.
  - timbit42 2y ago
    Motorola was ahead in the beginning with a better architecture and more performance, but didn't have as much money as Intel had from PC clones to pour into improving it and eventually fell behind Intel in performance. IBM wanted to use the Motorola 68000 in the IBM PC but didn't because the support chips for the 68000 weren't ready yet and they didn't want to wait a year.
- daneel_w 2y ago
  Upvoted. These are indeed the real reasons. Commodore didn't give the hardware development team the resources and go-aheads that they needed in order to keep the Amiga competitive, mainly as a gaming machine and incidentally as an extremely popular demo platform. And it wouldn't have had to be "insane" upgrades to at least buy Commodore more time in the race to figure out the platform's future shape: * A few more (and ideally also a bit wider) sprites. * 8 channels of sound, with actual panning. The low sample rates were "OKish". * Chunky mode, or at least hardware chunky-to-planar like the CD32 has. * Bumping e.g. the 14 MHz EC020 in the A1200 to the 25 or 33 MHz variant. * More chipmem and an equal amount of real on-board fastmem.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    >The low sample rates were "OKish". 56kHz (ECS) != low. Other than this, most was taken care of in the chipsets that management cancelled, such as Ranger (it was even finished!), or AA/AAA.
    - daneel_w 2y ago
      Yeah, it's technically available, just not feasible for doing much else. Nobody really made use of productivity/DBLPAL/etc. modes just to get the higher DMA period rates beyond ~29 KHz. None of the trackers support it (DigiBooster might be the exception) and you forfeit so many CPU cycles per raster line.
      - snvzz 2y ago
        >tracker support Fair. PS3M is how I used it. >and you forfeit so many CPU cycles per raster line. Only if you use more than 2 colors and have no fast ram at all.
- hedora 2y ago
  Other companies have made the same mistake as Amiga, before and after. They spent a ton of R&D getting ahead on things that would be commoditized in a few years. Later, their sound card had to be better than the best of a half-dozen PC variants, and so did the video card, CPU, monitor, keyboard, disk drive, etc, etc. Sure, they could have bought commodity versions of some of those (and probably did), but then they’d have to be the best at choosing commodity components, and there were 100’s of strong competitors doing just that for PCs. Now that moore’s law is slowing down, and everything has long-moved into system on chips, vertical integration seems to make sense again (look at Apple). Android was trying to create an ecosystem of interchangeable hardware vendors (like Microsoft did with DOS, and, later, Windows), but it basically failed because driver compatibility is so poor in that space, and key components, like cell modems are locked behind anticompetitive OEM licensing agreements. Android succeeded at other things, but it’s definitely not the case that you can assemble components into something with better specs than a flagship android for half the price, even if you had access to a pick + place / IC soldering machine. It was/is that way for desktop PCs.
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.

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]
chuckadams 2y ago
The custom chipsets in the Amiga went from being its secret weapon to its biggest liability. Amiga simply could not afford to keep them competitive with commodity PC hardware, especially not while Irving Gould was busy looting Commodore of every penny it was once worth.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Anything is a liability if you don't invest in it. The Amiga was unchanged basically from the launch in 1985 to Amiga 1200 in 1992. That's 7 years of thumb fiddling and the 1200 was basically a small bandaid on a gushing wound. Reacting not acting. They never believed in themselves. The IBM PC was launched in 1981 with 4.77MHz and 7 years later you could buy 40MHz PCs with wider buses.
  - msh 2y ago
    So much this! Put way better than in my comment.
js8 2y ago
But was it Amiga's chipset the noncompetitive part? My recollection from that era was that graphics/sound capabilities of the era were far ahead of the PC, but PC had better CPUs, which was a problem of Intel vs Motorola. Anyway, in the early 90s my father wisely chose PC over Amiga to replace our aging ZX Spectrum. The reason - PC was open and easier to upgrade. Maybe that's what actually killed Amiga and Atari ST.
- daneel_w 2y ago
  The Amigas were open and easy to upgrade as well. The exception was graphical capabilities for the "home computer" models like the A500/600/1200 - they are quite compact and the available solutions consequently suffered limitations.
- timbit42 2y ago
  Motorola was ahead in the beginning with a better architecture and more performance, but didn't have as much money as Intel had from PC clones to pour into improving it and eventually fell behind Intel in performance. IBM wanted to use the Motorola 68000 in the IBM PC but didn't because the support chips for the 68000 weren't ready yet and they didn't want to wait a year.
daneel_w 2y ago
Upvoted. These are indeed the real reasons. Commodore didn't give the hardware development team the resources and go-aheads that they needed in order to keep the Amiga competitive, mainly as a gaming machine and incidentally as an extremely popular demo platform. And it wouldn't have had to be "insane" upgrades to at least buy Commodore more time in the race to figure out the platform's future shape: * A few more (and ideally also a bit wider) sprites. * 8 channels of sound, with actual panning. The low sample rates were "OKish". * Chunky mode, or at least hardware chunky-to-planar like the CD32 has. * Bumping e.g. the 14 MHz EC020 in the A1200 to the 25 or 33 MHz variant. * More chipmem and an equal amount of real on-board fastmem.
- snvzz 2y ago
  >The low sample rates were "OKish". 56kHz (ECS) != low. Other than this, most was taken care of in the chipsets that management cancelled, such as Ranger (it was even finished!), or AA/AAA.
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    Yeah, it's technically available, just not feasible for doing much else. Nobody really made use of productivity/DBLPAL/etc. modes just to get the higher DMA period rates beyond ~29 KHz. None of the trackers support it (DigiBooster might be the exception) and you forfeit so many CPU cycles per raster line.
    - snvzz 2y ago
      >tracker support Fair. PS3M is how I used it. >and you forfeit so many CPU cycles per raster line. Only if you use more than 2 colors and have no fast ram at all.
hedora 2y ago
Other companies have made the same mistake as Amiga, before and after. They spent a ton of R&D getting ahead on things that would be commoditized in a few years. Later, their sound card had to be better than the best of a half-dozen PC variants, and so did the video card, CPU, monitor, keyboard, disk drive, etc, etc. Sure, they could have bought commodity versions of some of those (and probably did), but then they’d have to be the best at choosing commodity components, and there were 100’s of strong competitors doing just that for PCs. Now that moore’s law is slowing down, and everything has long-moved into system on chips, vertical integration seems to make sense again (look at Apple). Android was trying to create an ecosystem of interchangeable hardware vendors (like Microsoft did with DOS, and, later, Windows), but it basically failed because driver compatibility is so poor in that space, and key components, like cell modems are locked behind anticompetitive OEM licensing agreements. Android succeeded at other things, but it’s definitely not the case that you can assemble components into something with better specs than a flagship android for half the price, even if you had access to a pick + place / IC soldering machine. It was/is that way for desktop PCs.

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.