6 ms·

Gail Wellington, former Commodore executive, has died

106 points by erickhill 1y ago

peterburkimsher 1y ago
@dang - black bar time?
- sgt 1y ago
  yes
asdefghyk 1y ago
I read the linked page and googled here name. I found a very detailed and intesting page ( to me ) at Commodore International Historical Society Link below ) Gail Wellington: far more than just a herder of CATS and ... https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-far-more-than-just-a-herder-of-cats-and-mother-of-cdtv/ https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f... Looks to be an excellent page, excellent information about Commodore computer history too.
- rasz 1y ago
  >The CDTV was a brilliant product for its time. It was a 1985 computer selling $300 retail in 1991 packaged with $300 retail CD-ROM. Commodore got the crazy idea to try and sell this "the whole is less than the sum of its parts" at $1000 because black case and remote control! Nobody got fooled. Zero effort went into trying to cost optimize it, or even make it a desirable product. It was as ridiculous as Philips mega flop CD-I shipping similarly bad internals at same price point.
  - Findecanor 1y ago
    I think there was at least one iteration of the CDTV with somewhat lower-cost internals though.
    - gbraad 1y ago
      Never seen a CDTV-CR in real. I have an original with keyboard, mouse, diskdrive and remote. I did like the device. Somehow the CD playback sounded better than my Sony CD player, but very clunky with the caddy and somewhat unintuitive interface.
    - rasz 1y ago
      I think that was after Gail Wellington was fired, and didnt exit prototype stage.
  - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
    Unfortunately I concur with this assessment. Commodore was too busy phoning it in towards the end and effectively wasting the talents of Gail, as well as others in engineering, like Dave Haynie.
    - detourdog 1y ago
      Obviously they lost focus if they laid Gail off.
    - flopsamjetsam 1y ago
      I feel like they just wanted to coast on the previous success, and not having to put more capital in to bring the platform back up to the lead.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    Sad. I was an Amiga user from roughly 1989 through 1994. Commodore barely updated the Amiga platform for most of its life. The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.
    - jimt1234 1y ago
      One of my biggest regrets in my "journey" with computers is walking away from Commodore when Amiga was released. I felt it was superior to anything else I had seen, and I knew the Commodore 64 inside-out, but I just felt like PCs were for grown ups, and I needed to grow up. I needed to skate to where the puck was going, and that wasn't Commodore. I guess I was right, but I still regret it because all the dudes I knew that stuck with Commodore, with the new Amiga platform - well, they all seemed to be having more fun. I learned macros for Lotus 1-2-3, which was more practical (I made $$$ as a teenager teaching stiffs about macros), but my Amiga friends were making cool drum beats and sample-based music and remixes on their Amigas - totally impractical, but also fun as shit back then. So yeah, they were all having fun with their Amigas, while I became Alex P. Keaton.
      - aaronbaugher 1y ago
        I stayed with Commodore, but with my 128, since I couldn't afford an Amiga. I envied my PC friends their VGA graphics, but yeah, the Commodores were a lot of fun. And I learned to program on it, which none of my friends were doing with their PCs. Once they went to PC, it seemed like they just used them to run software, and weren't interested in tinkering.
        neom 1y ago
        For me anyways: Amiga was learn what a computer can do, PC was learn how a computer works. PC was also my path to linux and linux changed my circumstances in life drastically. I get what the comment above you is saying, but I don't think the Amiga was more fun at the end of the day, PC ended up being much more challenging as a power user (therefore fun).
      - vidarh 1y ago
  - toyg 1y ago
    But still, 3 years later, the Playstation did the same thing and it was a fantastic success. CDTV was simply a bit early (hence the price) and a bit confused about what it wanted to be. It cost like a development machine but it was a fundamentally end-user one; it provided continuity for Amiga developers but only a hard reset for Amiga users. It also debuted in harsh economic times.
    - rasz 1y ago
      Commodore wanted $1000 for a 1985 computer combined with single speed CDROM barely able to play 160×100@12Hz CDXL video and called it multimedia! It cost less to just buy external SCSI CDROM and SCSI controller + A500. Playstation was a $350/$299 toy with a computing power delivering 3D experience only available in top end Arcades a year prior (Namco System 22). 60fps 3D gaming plus 320x240@30Hz ~MJPEG video playback. You couldnt buy anything with similar 3d power for a couple of years, closest would be $3000 top of the line 1997 PC (P200, dx5/glide).
      - erickhill 1y ago
        Can't help being a little nitpicky, but the CDTV was an A500, not A1000. So it was 1987 tech inside a stereo box + CD player, not 1985. But at the end of the day it really didn't matter. I remember seeing a CDTV at a store and it wasn't even in the computer section. It was in the stereo department sitting in the middle of the sales floor in just a stack of boxes. You had to know what it was all about when you saw it. The sales guys didn't know what to do with it, sadly.
        rasz 1y ago
        >A500, not A1000 Not a single technical improvement, hardly any non cost reduction difference between them. Would be like arguing breadbin vs C64c are different computers so cant call C64c 1982 tech.
        erickhill 1y ago
        The A500 came with a Kickstart ROM. The A1K required a floppy disk. The 500 could also use a 1MB Agnus chip and one could easily update trapdoor RAM. It wasn't light-years advanced over the A1K but it was a good step in the right direction and vastly more affordable. Hence why it was the best-selling Amiga and the A1K "did OK" but didn't set any sales records. "Not a single technical improvement" is ridiculous.
tomhow 1y ago
Further info: https://cdtvland.com/2025/05/16/in-memory-of-gail-wellington/ https://cdtvland.com/2025/05/16/in-memory-of-gail-wellington... https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-far-more-than-just-a-herder-of-cats-and-mother-of-cdtv/ https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBP257fGu8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBP257fGu8Q
api 1y ago
Had a number of things gone differently Commodore might have been Apple. Both the C64 and the Amiga were way ahead of their time both in terms of raw performance and, for the C64, price/performance at least when it first came out. I learned to program on a C64 and still fondly remember it as an amazing gateway machine into computing. Was great for games too, better than most consoles of the day. Unfortunately the 64, like all those 8-bit machines, was a technical dead end, and by the time the Amiga got momentum PC clones were eating the entire industry. PC clones killed everything but Apple, which barely clung to life through the 90s, and some Unix workstations in the high end market. It just wasn’t possible to compete with the price cuts and CPU performance gains that came with volume and scaling. (I remember in the early 90s a lot of doubts about whether x86 could be made as fast as Sparc or Alpha or other things, but Intel and later AMD did it… especially when it came to price/performance.) In retrospect Amiga might have competed there had it gone higher end and been a Unix-like OS underneath.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  > (I remember in the early 90s a lot of doubts about whether x86 could be made as fast as Sparc or Alpha or other things, but Intel and later AMD did it… especially when it came to price/performance.) And now Apple is in the process of beating x86 to a pulp with ARM.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Going full circle using a team with Alpha heritage.
  - api 1y ago
    The thing that made x86 take over the world was the immense scale and volume it got from the PC clone and small PC-based server (NT and early Linux) market. It allowed huge R&D investments and let x86 eat more expensive workstation and server CPUs from the bottom up, eventually conquering the server and then cloud. ARM got the same thing from the mobile phone market, allowing it to eat x86 from the bottom up in exactly the same way. It went from phones and IoT, to laptops and small servers, and now to large cloud servers. ARM does have a small advantage from its ISA being much easier to decode, especially with a wide decoder, but x86 engineers have shown that they can stay competitive.
gdubs 1y ago
Our first computer was a Tandy from RadioShack. When I got really into computer animation I learned about the Amiga and The Video Toaster, which included Lightwave, which generated images for some of the best 90s television science fiction shows. It also, notably, was created by Brad Carvey who's brother Dana Carvey, who wore a Video Toaster t-shirt as Garth in Wayne's World 2. Anyway, we finally, maybe, had enough money to buy an Amiga and drove a couple hours down to New York City to B&H Photo back when it was basically one shop, and there it was. But the guy's at the shop said, "you don't want to buy this - Commodore is going under." So, never did get to actually use the Amiga but, I felt like I did. Subscribed to the magazines and all. It really was a magical machine.
sombragris 1y ago
Just wanted to state that I cannot access the article; Cloudflare throws my Firefox into an endless catpcha cycle.
cebert 1y ago
I hadn’t heard of Gail Wellington before, but I read her more detailed bios that tomhow posted. I wish I could have met Gail, she has an incredible story. I can’t imagine how challenging it would have been for a woman to pursue engineering, take time off to form a family, and then return and rise like she did at Commodore. It’s evident that she possessed a lot of grit.
pcherna 1y ago
We said goodbye to Gail today. She was a true pioneer and a fierce fighter for her team and for doing the right thing. Those of us who worked with her were truly blessed.

106 points by erickhill 1y ago

peterburkimsher 1y ago

@dang - black bar time?

sgt 1y ago
yes

asdefghyk 1y ago

I read the linked page and googled here name. I found a very detailed and intesting page ( to me ) at Commodore International Historical Society Link below ) Gail Wellington: far more than just a herder of CATS and ... https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-far-more-than-just-a-herder-of-cats-and-mother-of-cdtv/ https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f... Looks to be an excellent page, excellent information about Commodore computer history too.

rasz 1y ago
>The CDTV was a brilliant product for its time. It was a 1985 computer selling $300 retail in 1991 packaged with $300 retail CD-ROM. Commodore got the crazy idea to try and sell this "the whole is less than the sum of its parts" at $1000 because black case and remote control! Nobody got fooled. Zero effort went into trying to cost optimize it, or even make it a desirable product. It was as ridiculous as Philips mega flop CD-I shipping similarly bad internals at same price point.
- Findecanor 1y ago
  I think there was at least one iteration of the CDTV with somewhat lower-cost internals though.
  - gbraad 1y ago
    Never seen a CDTV-CR in real. I have an original with keyboard, mouse, diskdrive and remote. I did like the device. Somehow the CD playback sounded better than my Sony CD player, but very clunky with the caddy and somewhat unintuitive interface.
  - rasz 1y ago
    I think that was after Gail Wellington was fired, and didnt exit prototype stage.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  Unfortunately I concur with this assessment. Commodore was too busy phoning it in towards the end and effectively wasting the talents of Gail, as well as others in engineering, like Dave Haynie.
  - detourdog 1y ago
    Obviously they lost focus if they laid Gail off.
  - flopsamjetsam 1y ago
    I feel like they just wanted to coast on the previous success, and not having to put more capital in to bring the platform back up to the lead.
- icedchai 1y ago
  Sad. I was an Amiga user from roughly 1989 through 1994. Commodore barely updated the Amiga platform for most of its life. The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.
  - jimt1234 1y ago
    One of my biggest regrets in my "journey" with computers is walking away from Commodore when Amiga was released. I felt it was superior to anything else I had seen, and I knew the Commodore 64 inside-out, but I just felt like PCs were for grown ups, and I needed to grow up. I needed to skate to where the puck was going, and that wasn't Commodore. I guess I was right, but I still regret it because all the dudes I knew that stuck with Commodore, with the new Amiga platform - well, they all seemed to be having more fun. I learned macros for Lotus 1-2-3, which was more practical (I made $$$ as a teenager teaching stiffs about macros), but my Amiga friends were making cool drum beats and sample-based music and remixes on their Amigas - totally impractical, but also fun as shit back then. So yeah, they were all having fun with their Amigas, while I became Alex P. Keaton.
    - aaronbaugher 1y ago
      I stayed with Commodore, but with my 128, since I couldn't afford an Amiga. I envied my PC friends their VGA graphics, but yeah, the Commodores were a lot of fun. And I learned to program on it, which none of my friends were doing with their PCs. Once they went to PC, it seemed like they just used them to run software, and weren't interested in tinkering.
      - neom 1y ago
        For me anyways: Amiga was learn what a computer can do, PC was learn how a computer works. PC was also my path to linux and linux changed my circumstances in life drastically. I get what the comment above you is saying, but I don't think the Amiga was more fun at the end of the day, PC ended up being much more challenging as a power user (therefore fun).
    - vidarh 1y ago
- toyg 1y ago
  But still, 3 years later, the Playstation did the same thing and it was a fantastic success. CDTV was simply a bit early (hence the price) and a bit confused about what it wanted to be. It cost like a development machine but it was a fundamentally end-user one; it provided continuity for Amiga developers but only a hard reset for Amiga users. It also debuted in harsh economic times.
  - rasz 1y ago
    Commodore wanted $1000 for a 1985 computer combined with single speed CDROM barely able to play 160×100@12Hz CDXL video and called it multimedia! It cost less to just buy external SCSI CDROM and SCSI controller + A500. Playstation was a $350/$299 toy with a computing power delivering 3D experience only available in top end Arcades a year prior (Namco System 22). 60fps 3D gaming plus 320x240@30Hz ~MJPEG video playback. You couldnt buy anything with similar 3d power for a couple of years, closest would be $3000 top of the line 1997 PC (P200, dx5/glide).
    - erickhill 1y ago
      Can't help being a little nitpicky, but the CDTV was an A500, not A1000. So it was 1987 tech inside a stereo box + CD player, not 1985. But at the end of the day it really didn't matter. I remember seeing a CDTV at a store and it wasn't even in the computer section. It was in the stereo department sitting in the middle of the sales floor in just a stack of boxes. You had to know what it was all about when you saw it. The sales guys didn't know what to do with it, sadly.
      - rasz 1y ago
        >A500, not A1000 Not a single technical improvement, hardly any non cost reduction difference between them. Would be like arguing breadbin vs C64c are different computers so cant call C64c 1982 tech.
        erickhill 1y ago
        The A500 came with a Kickstart ROM. The A1K required a floppy disk. The 500 could also use a 1MB Agnus chip and one could easily update trapdoor RAM. It wasn't light-years advanced over the A1K but it was a good step in the right direction and vastly more affordable. Hence why it was the best-selling Amiga and the A1K "did OK" but didn't set any sales records. "Not a single technical improvement" is ridiculous.

tomhow 1y ago

Further info: https://cdtvland.com/2025/05/16/in-memory-of-gail-wellington/ https://cdtvland.com/2025/05/16/in-memory-of-gail-wellington... https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-far-more-than-just-a-herder-of-cats-and-mother-of-cdtv/ https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBP257fGu8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBP257fGu8Q

api 1y ago

Had a number of things gone differently Commodore might have been Apple. Both the C64 and the Amiga were way ahead of their time both in terms of raw performance and, for the C64, price/performance at least when it first came out. I learned to program on a C64 and still fondly remember it as an amazing gateway machine into computing. Was great for games too, better than most consoles of the day. Unfortunately the 64, like all those 8-bit machines, was a technical dead end, and by the time the Amiga got momentum PC clones were eating the entire industry. PC clones killed everything but Apple, which barely clung to life through the 90s, and some Unix workstations in the high end market. It just wasn’t possible to compete with the price cuts and CPU performance gains that came with volume and scaling. (I remember in the early 90s a lot of doubts about whether x86 could be made as fast as Sparc or Alpha or other things, but Intel and later AMD did it… especially when it came to price/performance.) In retrospect Amiga might have competed there had it gone higher end and been a Unix-like OS underneath.

LoganDark 1y ago
> (I remember in the early 90s a lot of doubts about whether x86 could be made as fast as Sparc or Alpha or other things, but Intel and later AMD did it… especially when it came to price/performance.) And now Apple is in the process of beating x86 to a pulp with ARM.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  Going full circle using a team with Alpha heritage.
- api 1y ago
  The thing that made x86 take over the world was the immense scale and volume it got from the PC clone and small PC-based server (NT and early Linux) market. It allowed huge R&D investments and let x86 eat more expensive workstation and server CPUs from the bottom up, eventually conquering the server and then cloud. ARM got the same thing from the mobile phone market, allowing it to eat x86 from the bottom up in exactly the same way. It went from phones and IoT, to laptops and small servers, and now to large cloud servers. ARM does have a small advantage from its ISA being much easier to decode, especially with a wide decoder, but x86 engineers have shown that they can stay competitive.

gdubs 1y ago

Our first computer was a Tandy from RadioShack. When I got really into computer animation I learned about the Amiga and The Video Toaster, which included Lightwave, which generated images for some of the best 90s television science fiction shows. It also, notably, was created by Brad Carvey who's brother Dana Carvey, who wore a Video Toaster t-shirt as Garth in Wayne's World 2. Anyway, we finally, maybe, had enough money to buy an Amiga and drove a couple hours down to New York City to B&H Photo back when it was basically one shop, and there it was. But the guy's at the shop said, "you don't want to buy this - Commodore is going under." So, never did get to actually use the Amiga but, I felt like I did. Subscribed to the magazines and all. It really was a magical machine.

sombragris 1y ago

Just wanted to state that I cannot access the article; Cloudflare throws my Firefox into an endless catpcha cycle.

cebert 1y ago

I hadn’t heard of Gail Wellington before, but I read her more detailed bios that tomhow posted. I wish I could have met Gail, she has an incredible story. I can’t imagine how challenging it would have been for a woman to pursue engineering, take time off to form a family, and then return and rise like she did at Commodore. It’s evident that she possessed a lot of grit.

pcherna 1y ago

We said goodbye to Gail today. She was a true pioneer and a fierce fighter for her team and for doing the right thing. Those of us who worked with her were truly blessed.