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Although Rattigan was only at Commodore for a year, his creation of the Amiga 500 and 2000 extended the life of Commodore by many years with sales of the Amiga

Although Rattigan was only at Commodore for a year, his creation of the Amiga 500 and 2000 extended the life of Commodore by many years with sales of the Amiga 500 making up more than half of all Amigas sold.

amichail 2y ago
AmigaOS was too complicated for hobby programming though.
- nradov 2y ago
  Huh? Amiga probably had a higher proportion of hobby programmers than any other platform at the time.
  - amichail 2y ago
    Coding GUI apps was a nightmare.
    - mrandish 2y ago
      Sure but at least it shipped with an OS that had a GUI and multitasking in an era when the vast majority of personal computers had neither. Let's not forget how early this was. Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented. Everyone was still figuring out what a GUI OS should be. It wasn't until years later when Unix-based workstation OSes migrated down to consumer desktops that things started stabilizing. Before that we were pioneers roughing it on the frontier. I had an Amiga 1000 and did hobby programming on it starting in 85. At the time everything friends and I wrote only used the OS to open a custom screen because all the fun was experimenting with graphics. Most of the apps for the first couple years either used the CLI or just put up a window with a few drop downs and otherwise rendered their own UX inside it.
      - amichail 2y ago
        I think I would have been better off with a PC, Turbo Pascal, and no GUI programming to distract me from more interesting hobby coding.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        > Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for the next decade. The one thing it didn’t have was multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder. The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather than what ended up being AmigaOS.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Writing GUI apps on using base OS interfaces on anything was a nightmare. Still is. What made it nicer was having IDEs with GUI designers. Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.
      - igouy 2y ago
        > Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications. Huh? There have been Smalltalk language implementations based on MS Win controls (as-if they were MS VB programs). http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html Also Digitalk Smalltalk for MS Win and OS/2. Also IBM Smalltalk. ~ There have been Smalltalk language implementations that emulated native widget Look & Feel (various MS Win, OS/2, Motif/CDE, MacOS). Obviously putting a lot of effort into providing "native-looking" applications. Common-place to copy a Smalltalk app from a Mac to a MS Win PC and switch the emulation from MacOS to MSWin.
  - os2warpman 2y ago
    I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my recollection was that even by the time of the introduction of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000) Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms of users by the mid-to-late 80s. It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab). Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal. It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death. Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers. Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me. In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story. I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.
    - sillywalk 2y ago
      > EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform. Actually, there is one company still around called Tune Tracker Systems[0]. They make radio-automation software, starting out on BeOS and are now on Haiku. [0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com https://www.tunetrackersystems.com
    - compsciphd 2y ago
      3-7 million is somewhat proportional to the # of TI 99/4a (my first computer) which sold 2.5Million or so, but many of those were probably on the fire sale, and at least some of them probably went to backup parts for people that already had it. While the 99/4a is remembered somewhat fondly by those who had it (speech synthesizer, expansion modules for p-code, forth and others), it wasn't a system that had a huge amount of development done for it, and died a pretty quick death.
    - 1y ago
- appstorelottery 2y ago
  AMOS filled that gap.
TheAmazingRace 2y ago
Irving Gould really did Rattigan dirty for no good reason. Big egos really can bring a company down. Steve Jobs also had a massive ego, but somehow managed to use it to bolster Apple in their hour of need.
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  Yup. If you had to point to the singular "bad guy" at Commodore, it was Irving. I interviewed with him when I was interviewing to be the CTO and recognized pretty quickly that he was the kind of executive that didn't like people who worked for him to be more competent than he was. Had a great discussion with a 4 star general who was friends with my Dad about people like that.
  - rhet0rica 2y ago
    That sounds genuinely fascinating. Can you post more about your experience meeting Gould?
    - ChuckMcM 2y ago
      Pretty standard stuff, a bit about my background, what I thought of Commodore and the people I had met so far, If I could change one thing at Commodore what would it be (I responded with my belief that the Amiga was the future of Commodore and some stuff about "workstation for the masses", I was at Sun at the time). What was memorable to me wasn't so much what he asked or we talked about as it was about his body language when I expressed approval or how impressed I was by things others on his staff had done. You would expect "pride" but I got "irritation?" I had very little experience dealing with people like that and it was confusing. Later research and observations led me to believe he was irritated by people that excelled.
      - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
        This is quite a neat story. Thanks for sharing! I also heard that Bobby Kotick of Activision infamy was planning to buy Commodore back in the early 90s, only to be rebuffed by Irving and Co. Although I'm not a personal fan of Bobby, I'm sure his leadership would have been a sorry sight better than the dumpster fire at Commodore back then.
rob74 2y ago
That might be true, but creating the Amiga 500 and 2000 was also a no-brainer: the original Amiga (later retconned to A1000) had a detachable keyboard (= expensive), but limited expansion capabilities, so launching two new models, a cheaper all-in-one design and a more expensive version with detachable keyboard and a larger case with more expansion capabilities was pretty obviously the way to go. What all the Commodore CEOs unfortunately failed to do was invest adequately into R&D to keep the Amiga competitive. Instead, they treated the existing lineup as a cash cow for far too long. The new models which hit the market from 1990 onwards were too little too late and couldn't fend off the eventual insolvency...

amichail 2y ago

AmigaOS was too complicated for hobby programming though.

nradov 2y ago
Huh? Amiga probably had a higher proportion of hobby programmers than any other platform at the time.
- amichail 2y ago
  Coding GUI apps was a nightmare.
  - mrandish 2y ago
    Sure but at least it shipped with an OS that had a GUI and multitasking in an era when the vast majority of personal computers had neither. Let's not forget how early this was. Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented. Everyone was still figuring out what a GUI OS should be. It wasn't until years later when Unix-based workstation OSes migrated down to consumer desktops that things started stabilizing. Before that we were pioneers roughing it on the frontier. I had an Amiga 1000 and did hobby programming on it starting in 85. At the time everything friends and I wrote only used the OS to open a custom screen because all the fun was experimenting with graphics. Most of the apps for the first couple years either used the CLI or just put up a window with a few drop downs and otherwise rendered their own UX inside it.
    - amichail 2y ago
      I think I would have been better off with a PC, Turbo Pascal, and no GUI programming to distract me from more interesting hobby coding.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      > Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for the next decade. The one thing it didn’t have was multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder. The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather than what ended up being AmigaOS.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Writing GUI apps on using base OS interfaces on anything was a nightmare. Still is. What made it nicer was having IDEs with GUI designers. Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.
    - igouy 2y ago
      > Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications. Huh? There have been Smalltalk language implementations based on MS Win controls (as-if they were MS VB programs). http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html Also Digitalk Smalltalk for MS Win and OS/2. Also IBM Smalltalk. ~ There have been Smalltalk language implementations that emulated native widget Look & Feel (various MS Win, OS/2, Motif/CDE, MacOS). Obviously putting a lot of effort into providing "native-looking" applications. Common-place to copy a Smalltalk app from a Mac to a MS Win PC and switch the emulation from MacOS to MSWin.
- os2warpman 2y ago
  I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my recollection was that even by the time of the introduction of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000) Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms of users by the mid-to-late 80s. It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab). Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal. It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death. Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers. Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me. In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story. I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.
  - sillywalk 2y ago
    > EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform. Actually, there is one company still around called Tune Tracker Systems[0]. They make radio-automation software, starting out on BeOS and are now on Haiku. [0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com https://www.tunetrackersystems.com
  - compsciphd 2y ago
    3-7 million is somewhat proportional to the # of TI 99/4a (my first computer) which sold 2.5Million or so, but many of those were probably on the fire sale, and at least some of them probably went to backup parts for people that already had it. While the 99/4a is remembered somewhat fondly by those who had it (speech synthesizer, expansion modules for p-code, forth and others), it wasn't a system that had a huge amount of development done for it, and died a pretty quick death.
  - 1y ago
appstorelottery 2y ago
AMOS filled that gap.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago

Irving Gould really did Rattigan dirty for no good reason. Big egos really can bring a company down. Steve Jobs also had a massive ego, but somehow managed to use it to bolster Apple in their hour of need.

ChuckMcM 2y ago
Yup. If you had to point to the singular "bad guy" at Commodore, it was Irving. I interviewed with him when I was interviewing to be the CTO and recognized pretty quickly that he was the kind of executive that didn't like people who worked for him to be more competent than he was. Had a great discussion with a 4 star general who was friends with my Dad about people like that.
- rhet0rica 2y ago
  That sounds genuinely fascinating. Can you post more about your experience meeting Gould?
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    Pretty standard stuff, a bit about my background, what I thought of Commodore and the people I had met so far, If I could change one thing at Commodore what would it be (I responded with my belief that the Amiga was the future of Commodore and some stuff about "workstation for the masses", I was at Sun at the time). What was memorable to me wasn't so much what he asked or we talked about as it was about his body language when I expressed approval or how impressed I was by things others on his staff had done. You would expect "pride" but I got "irritation?" I had very little experience dealing with people like that and it was confusing. Later research and observations led me to believe he was irritated by people that excelled.
    - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
      This is quite a neat story. Thanks for sharing! I also heard that Bobby Kotick of Activision infamy was planning to buy Commodore back in the early 90s, only to be rebuffed by Irving and Co. Although I'm not a personal fan of Bobby, I'm sure his leadership would have been a sorry sight better than the dumpster fire at Commodore back then.

rob74 2y ago

That might be true, but creating the Amiga 500 and 2000 was also a no-brainer: the original Amiga (later retconned to A1000) had a detachable keyboard (= expensive), but limited expansion capabilities, so launching two new models, a cheaper all-in-one design and a more expensive version with detachable keyboard and a larger case with more expansion capabilities was pretty obviously the way to go. What all the Commodore CEOs unfortunately failed to do was invest adequately into R&D to keep the Amiga competitive. Instead, they treated the existing lineup as a cash cow for far too long. The new models which hit the market from 1990 onwards were too little too late and couldn't fend off the eventual insolvency...