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The Rise and Fall of Commodore
Andrew Leigh writes "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore by Brian Bagnall is fodder for anyone interested in the buried history of the personal computer. Whether you owned a Commodore computer or want to hear a new angle on the early stages of computer development, you'll find this book easy to pick up and almost impossible to put down. Bagnall has gone to a massive amount of effort in telling this tale, researching and interviewing the real personalities involved. It takes readers on an important and often emotional ride that will many times leave you shaking your head at how painfully it all went wrong." Read the rest of Andrew's review
On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore
author
Brian Bagnall
pages
557
publisher
Variant Press
rating
9
reviewer
Andrew Leigh
ISBN
0973864907
summary
Tells the story of Commodore through first-hand accounts by former Commodore engineers and managers
Before Commodore entered the home computer market, they were primarily a calculator manufacturer. The story begins in the mid 70's with the development of Chuck Peddle's famous 6502 chip, through to the release of the first personal computer, the Commodore PET. It then reveals how the VIC-20 became the first home computer to break the elusive one million barrier. Then comes the Commodore 64, and how the company made it the best selling computer of all time. The Commodore 128 is given plenty of coverage, along with the failed Commodore 16 and Plus/4 computers (which are probably better off forgotten). At this point, Commodore seems like it is losing its way, and the story cuts to the struggling company responsible for the original Amiga computer. You'll learn about the various Amiga models that followed, including the successful Amiga 500 and the pre-DVD CDTV and CD32 units. The hirings, firings, disagreements, discontent, resignations and celebrations that occurred during the company's run are given more than their fair share of coverage. It doesn't always show Commodore in the best light, which is what readers should demand from any history.
It's a sad truth, and the book describes this in an often bitter fashion, that the early history of computers seems to focus on Apple, IBM and Microsoft while Commodore's massive contributions to the industry are routinely ignored. The common misconception that Apple started the home computing industry is simply wrong. Commodore was the first to show a personal computer, the first to deliver low-cost computers to the masses, the first to sell a million computers, and the first to arrive with a true multimedia computer. Fortunately this book sets a lot of the record straight.
On The Edge delves deeply into the business strategies behind the company. Students of any business discipline will be well advised to heed the lessons about how not to run a company. One of the book's main characters and the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel, was an incredibly ruthless business man. Whether you love him or hate him, he was ultimately behind the incredible success of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 computers. The book outlines how he managed to be the first to sell his home computers to the mass market through department stores, driving prices down and annihilating most of the competition. It also amusingly tells how he would regularly lose his temper and have what employees referred to as "Jack Attacks" when things went wrong. Many people referred to him as the scariest man alive and he probably was. Jack Tramiel unfortunately does not publicly talk about the Commodore days, so Bagnall was not able to personally interview him, however family members and those close to him give their personal accounts of events.
The book also explains how Irving Gould, the money-man and venture capitalist behind Commodore, constantly interfered when things were seemingly running smoothly. It is widely recognized that Irving Gould and Medhi Ali (the CEO he instated at the time) ultimately caused the sad demise of Commodore through 1993-94, yet the details of how it happened have always been sketchy until now. Thomas Rattigan, former CEO of Commodore, was interviewed by Bagnall and gives his personal thoughts and experiences during his time with the company. He also talks about his untimely dismissal by Gould. The later sections of the book describe how numerous marketing mishaps and poor business sense led to a dwindling stock price and an eventual filing for liquidation. Bagnall accurately describes the heartbreaking end to a great company that deserved much more success and recognition.
This book certainly does not shy away from getting its metaphorical hands dirty with the technical details and manufacturing processes involved in building the Commodore computers. If anything, more detail would be welcome here, as the personalities interviewed obviously drove their designs by an enormous amount of passion. Bagnall has interviewed all the original key players involved on the technical side, including the humble and personable Chuck Peddle. You'll read how he built the MOS 6502 microprocessor, with the talented layout artist Bill Mensch. The chip was used by not only Commodore but rivals Apple, Atari, and Nintendo. Many other notable and significant technical pioneers have also been interviewed and give their experiences and opinions.
You'll learn why your 1541 floppy disk drive was so unbearably slow. You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee. You'll learn how exhausted coders had to take naps at their desks while code compiled on a mainframe. You'll also learn why those tedious "peek" and "poke" functions weren't built in as BASIC commands for easier usage on your C64.
Interestingly, Steve Wozinak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers, claims in his new book (titled "iWoz") that he invented the personal computer and provided Chuck Peddle with the idea for the first Commodore PET. When you read On The Edge, you'll find that it tells a different story. Chuck Peddle receives a great deal of coverage, and after reading about his efforts you will feel this is deservedly so. His efforts have gone largely unsung and On The Edge may well be the first step towards him earning the title of being the father of the personal computer.
Commodore Business Machines was a company that produced superior computers for the mass market. Their legacy deserves to be told and more importantly heard. Computing history didn't just involve the big players that still exist today. Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, and others all shaped the future. On The Edge is an experience that will change the way you view computing history and maybe even entice you to dust off that old Commodore computer that's been sitting in the cupboard. Bagnall tells it like it is and also leaves you thinking "what if?" many times. The great stories are filled with characters that anyone who works in the IT industry will recognize in their own workplace. It truly demonstrates the fragility and ad-hoc nature of not only Commodore itself, but the entire industry back then. It really makes you cringe in disbelief at how some stupid and insignificant decisions shaped the future as we know it now. No one could have known how important these decisions were back then.
At a hefty 557 pages, On The Edge is good value. Bagnall's informative and relaxed writing makes it a breeze to travel through decades at a blistering pace. It sheds some much needed light on a period of history clouded by revisionism.
You can purchase On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Before Commodore entered the home computer market, they were primarily a calculator manufacturer. The story begins in the mid 70's with the development of Chuck Peddle's famous 6502 chip, through to the release of the first personal computer, the Commodore PET. It then reveals how the VIC-20 became the first home computer to break the elusive one million barrier. Then comes the Commodore 64, and how the company made it the best selling computer of all time. The Commodore 128 is given plenty of coverage, along with the failed Commodore 16 and Plus/4 computers (which are probably better off forgotten). At this point, Commodore seems like it is losing its way, and the story cuts to the struggling company responsible for the original Amiga computer. You'll learn about the various Amiga models that followed, including the successful Amiga 500 and the pre-DVD CDTV and CD32 units. The hirings, firings, disagreements, discontent, resignations and celebrations that occurred during the company's run are given more than their fair share of coverage. It doesn't always show Commodore in the best light, which is what readers should demand from any history.
It's a sad truth, and the book describes this in an often bitter fashion, that the early history of computers seems to focus on Apple, IBM and Microsoft while Commodore's massive contributions to the industry are routinely ignored. The common misconception that Apple started the home computing industry is simply wrong. Commodore was the first to show a personal computer, the first to deliver low-cost computers to the masses, the first to sell a million computers, and the first to arrive with a true multimedia computer. Fortunately this book sets a lot of the record straight.
On The Edge delves deeply into the business strategies behind the company. Students of any business discipline will be well advised to heed the lessons about how not to run a company. One of the book's main characters and the founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel, was an incredibly ruthless business man. Whether you love him or hate him, he was ultimately behind the incredible success of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 computers. The book outlines how he managed to be the first to sell his home computers to the mass market through department stores, driving prices down and annihilating most of the competition. It also amusingly tells how he would regularly lose his temper and have what employees referred to as "Jack Attacks" when things went wrong. Many people referred to him as the scariest man alive and he probably was. Jack Tramiel unfortunately does not publicly talk about the Commodore days, so Bagnall was not able to personally interview him, however family members and those close to him give their personal accounts of events.
The book also explains how Irving Gould, the money-man and venture capitalist behind Commodore, constantly interfered when things were seemingly running smoothly. It is widely recognized that Irving Gould and Medhi Ali (the CEO he instated at the time) ultimately caused the sad demise of Commodore through 1993-94, yet the details of how it happened have always been sketchy until now. Thomas Rattigan, former CEO of Commodore, was interviewed by Bagnall and gives his personal thoughts and experiences during his time with the company. He also talks about his untimely dismissal by Gould. The later sections of the book describe how numerous marketing mishaps and poor business sense led to a dwindling stock price and an eventual filing for liquidation. Bagnall accurately describes the heartbreaking end to a great company that deserved much more success and recognition.
This book certainly does not shy away from getting its metaphorical hands dirty with the technical details and manufacturing processes involved in building the Commodore computers. If anything, more detail would be welcome here, as the personalities interviewed obviously drove their designs by an enormous amount of passion. Bagnall has interviewed all the original key players involved on the technical side, including the humble and personable Chuck Peddle. You'll read how he built the MOS 6502 microprocessor, with the talented layout artist Bill Mensch. The chip was used by not only Commodore but rivals Apple, Atari, and Nintendo. Many other notable and significant technical pioneers have also been interviewed and give their experiences and opinions.
You'll learn why your 1541 floppy disk drive was so unbearably slow. You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee. You'll learn how exhausted coders had to take naps at their desks while code compiled on a mainframe. You'll also learn why those tedious "peek" and "poke" functions weren't built in as BASIC commands for easier usage on your C64.
Interestingly, Steve Wozinak, one of the co-founders of Apple Computers, claims in his new book (titled "iWoz") that he invented the personal computer and provided Chuck Peddle with the idea for the first Commodore PET. When you read On The Edge, you'll find that it tells a different story. Chuck Peddle receives a great deal of coverage, and after reading about his efforts you will feel this is deservedly so. His efforts have gone largely unsung and On The Edge may well be the first step towards him earning the title of being the father of the personal computer.
Commodore Business Machines was a company that produced superior computers for the mass market. Their legacy deserves to be told and more importantly heard. Computing history didn't just involve the big players that still exist today. Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, and others all shaped the future. On The Edge is an experience that will change the way you view computing history and maybe even entice you to dust off that old Commodore computer that's been sitting in the cupboard. Bagnall tells it like it is and also leaves you thinking "what if?" many times. The great stories are filled with characters that anyone who works in the IT industry will recognize in their own workplace. It truly demonstrates the fragility and ad-hoc nature of not only Commodore itself, but the entire industry back then. It really makes you cringe in disbelief at how some stupid and insignificant decisions shaped the future as we know it now. No one could have known how important these decisions were back then.
At a hefty 557 pages, On The Edge is good value. Bagnall's informative and relaxed writing makes it a breeze to travel through decades at a blistering pace. It sheds some much needed light on a period of history clouded by revisionism.
You can purchase On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I absolutely LOVE this book. Why not buy it from the author?
How about the PET 2001? The first one, without the on-board tape drive?
I've still got one... sold the other for $15k in 1999.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You'll learn how millions of dollars worth of Amigas were scrapped because of a cheeky message placed in the ROM by a disgruntled employee.
Some Googling brought me back to Slashdot, and a previous story involving the Amiga:
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I'm ploughing through it in my spare time (up to 75% so far) and am enjoying it. Its style is quite casual - it's a bit of a rambling tale, all over the place. It also could have done with a bit of copy-editing (grammar, spelling, etc) but other than that, a fascinating insight on the birth of the home computer industry.
Marketing.
If Commodore owned KFC they would have marketed it as "a greasy warm dead bird in a cardboard bucket".
At the time take a look at the Amiga vs the IBM PC AT and the Mac as far a cost vs features.
The Amiga was so far ahead it makes your head hurt.
That is the proof that marketing is the most important thing in computers. If having the best product wins then the PC would have died the death that DOS deserved back then.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
*sniff* I miss Amigas.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Signed,
Vic20
And to top it off....
1 74/index.htm
Commodore's former chip fab facility is on the EPA's superfund site for extreme damage to the environment.
http://www.epa.gov/reg3hwmd/super/sites/PAD093730
I hope Medi Ali and Gould burn in hell for what they did. They ruined a perfectly good computer/OS AND dumped toxic waste!
ok...That was either the worst poem or the best rap song I've ever read.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Ah, the nostalgia.
/, and x.
I had a Commodore calculator, the kind you plugged into the wall. It had a single-line orange flourescent display that had an annoying hum (the more digits that were lit the louder it was). It did though have a single register memory key, which was somewhat novel. Otherwise it was limited mostly to just +, -,
I first played on PETs. I still remember the joy of discovering all the different variants of it that people had. Some had green screens, others amber, and I think I remember seeing one that had purple pixels. But the membrane-style keyboard was the most futuristic looking (and hardest to use).
Then I did all my "serious" programming on the C64 and wore out many 1541 disk drives. In fact my c64 still works, but unfortunately not the drive. Once you learned all those magic PEEK and POKE numbers you could play God, or so it seemed.
Then it was on to the Amiga 1000 and 2000. I had three floppy drives on the thing (thank goodness for the included schematics) before I could finally afford a newfangled hard drive. Eventually I upgraded it all the way to a Toaster Flyer system before the company folded up and I had to move on. Which was horrible, until Linux came along.
I remember seeing a C64 in the Smithsonian a few years back. That sure made me feel old.
I had a family member who worked at Commodore during the twilight years. The story I remember most was CEO Medhi Ali's weekly routine. He'd spend two days a week in Canada, two in the USA and three days in the West Indies to avoid paying taxes on his exorbitant salary in any of the countries. This is in the days before widespread cell phone usage and I remember having to manually route mail (SMTP addresses with a series of %) to my family member.
Uhh, the Amiga? Why is that not innovative? It took years for other platforms to be capable of similar things, for anywhere near the low cost.
... and then they built the supercollider.
At a recent get-together of a half-dozen or so ex-Commodore/Amiga engineers, we were discussing this book. The overall opinion, including of the one person who was interviewed for it, was that it was pretty good at covering the early Commodore days, the C64 and Tramiel issues, but the coverage of the post-Tramiel Amiga days (especially the later parts) was a bit spottier and had some factual problems. The author's main contacts are with the C64 and Atari ST/Tramiel crowd, so this isn't surprising.
I personally don't remember any large number of Amigas scrapped for the "they f***ed it up" message; in fact I'd seriously doubt that. And there were easter eggs in every version of the OS, usually far more extensive than that one.
Also, there were no "mainframes" at Commodore; the biggest iron was a Vax 11/780(if I remember right). And none of the software builds were done on that; all the Amiga SW was built on Sun-2's (early on) or on Amigas directly. By 1989ish, only a few libraries were still built on Suns - I think Workbench.lib was the last holdout, or close to. For AmigaOS 2.0, I ported AmigaDOS and all the remaining BCPL filesystems and commands to C and assembler built on Amigas. The "darkest before the dawn" story is likewise close, but not quite correct. (It is legendary, though.) However, while we weren't waiting for compiles, there were interludes in the 2.0-2.04 days when we did sleep in some offices and storage rooms on cots, and had a freezer full of frozen meals, plus lots of delivered pizza, italian, etc.
Admittedly, the employees were upset enough about the (mis)management by Mehdi Ali (much more so than Irving Gould) that at the "Deathbed Vigil" party when bankruptcy was declared, we burnt Mehdi Ali in effigy in my backyard.
The old offices are now QVC Studio Park; you can tour them. A few people at QVC know about this; when selling the C64-in-a-joystik a year or two ago, the host mentioned that the building used to house Commodore. It is truely absolutely huge....
Note: I haven't read the book yet, though others in the group discussing it had, and one was a major interviewee.
While I used other pc's the first one I ever personally owned was a C64. Later I sold it and bought an Amiga 500 which I used up until grad school. It sits in my closet and occasionally I will pull it out and play some of the games that were specific to the Amiga. Its still the only pc I own (no macs so I can't speak about them) that can access two seperate floppy drives and not grind every other system process to a halt.
At the risk of being modded a Troll, I used to be able to pick up my telephone handset, whistle into the mic and convince my 1660 modem that I was a carrier signal. Never lasted more than about 5 seconds though: frail humans need oxygen.
Yeah, I miss those Commodore 64 days, too. I once sat up until 5am trying to block-send an entire disk to a buddy of mine at 300 baud. The very last block failed. Freakin' DRM was alive back then, too.
I bought the Commodore 2400 (or was it 1200?) baud modem in 1989 for my Commodore 128. Wow, that was such an improvement over 300 baud! BBS text flowed line at a time on my screen, instead of character at a time.
All that hardware - computers, monitors, lots and lots of probably-broken floppy drives - is in the closet of our computer room.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Linus Torvalds first computer was a Vic-20.
c over/linus-9719.html
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.08.97/
He says the simplicity of the design of the Vic-20 enabled him to learn in a way that today is much more difficult. Read the last paragraph below.
-
IN 1981, LINUS WAS A toothy, pale-skinned kid with a blond cowlick living in a suburb of Helsinki, where the weather is cold year-round, save for a few 70-degree weeks in the summer. That year, 11-year-old Linus inherited a Commodore Vic-20 from his grandfather, a professor of statistics at the local university.
As the cathode ray tube's blue light cast a glow on his face, he sat in his bedroom, books lining the wall from floor to ceiling. Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Robin Hood and all the Tarzan books. On a shelf: a plastic model of the Wasa, a Swedish ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628. The Wasa, painted in meticulous detail and outfitted with working sails and rigging, took months to finish.
When the first computer arrived, the other projects fell by the wayside. Long past his bedtime, small fingers tapped the dark brown keys of the Vic-20 keyboard. His first achievement on the Vic-20 was the simplest computer program possible: a two-line "GOTO" program in Basic. Once he tried to impress his little sister, Sara, by programming the Commodore to repeat "Sara is the best."
Next he tapped out his first full-fledged video game written in machine code, in which a submarine sails through a moving underwater tunnel, remaining stationary as the operator controls its vertical movement. The craft's captain must stay alive by dodging the "large nasty fish" in the tunnel. As the game progresses, the tunnel constricts. This amused Linus for hours in his bedroom. He stored the program on an audiocassette and took it to school to play with friends.
In hindsight, Linus believes starting on a very simple computer gave him an advantage that today's whiz kids don't have. "Modern PCs are much more complex," he explains. "No kid sitting in front of a Pentium could ever understand all its parts thoroughly."
-
Jealous much? The fact that to this day it is still impossible for a PC, Mac or otherwise to display two screens with different resolutions *on the same display* is only the beginning of why your ignorance and snobbishness shows. Pre-emptive mutitasking, the Video Toaster/Flyer, Lightwave, and the genlocking abilities are other prime examples of why most of us are glad your opinion is just that. Heaven forbid we mention how it could boot a full multitasking OS with GUI in under 880k. Nah, not innovative at all...freakin' REVOLUTIONARY is more like it.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
As you say, when the Amiga came out (I had one of the first Amiga 1000s) it was far and away the most impressive personal computer on the market - processing power, graphics, sound, multi-tasking OS, etc. Five years later (or maybe less) Apple and the PC market had caught up and passed it and the Amigas that were being sold were only marginally better (woo-hoo, now it has a hard drive and more memory). Putting everything into the custom chipsets was a fantastic way of squeezing out that performance when it premiered, but it locked the hardware (and the tightly coupled software) into a time warp outside of Moore's Law.
I do have many fond memories on my C-64 (and my Amiga). I've still got a mostly working SX-64 in my closet, but I'm not sure the disk drive is in good shape - the last time I tried, I couldn't read most of the floppies I have.
I did learn to program in BASIC and 6502 assembly language on my C-64 and we wore out many joysticks playing Summer Games and M.U.L.E. on it.
My personal personal computer experience went like this:
TRS-80 Model 1, 4K RAM, Level 1 Basic (eventually upgraded to 16K RAM, Level 2 Basic, but I never had a disk drive for it)
C-64 (I skipped the Vic-20) with several 1541 disk drives
SX-64 (bought used from a friend who bought a C-128)
Amiga 1000
(started using Macs at my college job and a few PCs in school, but most schoolwork was done on a Vax and an IBM mainframe)
Packard Bell 486 (my first PC)
I've lost track of how many different PCs I've owned since then.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
The Commodore 64 had better graphics than the Apple II and it could be argued better than the Atari of that time.
The Commodore 64 had better sound than the any computer of that time.
The Amiga first mass market computer
1. with multi-tasking.
2. with stereo sound.
3. that supported sampled sound.
4. hardware accelerated video you could argue that the Atari 400/800 was first thanks to it's missile player graphics but Jay Miner was involved in the both.
5. The ability to sync the computers video with an external video source
Just about every innovation in personal computers was first seen on the Mac or the Amiga.
The PC didn't catch up the to the 1985 Commodore Amiga until around 1995 with the release of Windows 95.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What makes me smile about todays computers is that the PC versus the MAC was very similar to the Commodore versus the Atari. I was an Atari user, both the 800XL and 130XE. I always felt that these machines were MUCH better than the equivalent Commodore machines of the time. Especially with sound voices and graphics capability. Of course, looking back now, wow...I will NEVER enter another program into my computer from a magazine into a hex editor. Nothing describes disappointment like spending 7 days entering in hex code for a game I will refer to as Tekken 0.000321, only to discover you can't move forward or backward, only kick or punch...kind of like rock, paper, boredom. So, for nostalgic purposes only... Commodore sucks! Atari for life! (And now I want to go find an emulator for either and play Bruce Lee)
That is the proof that marketing is the most important thing in computers. If having the best product wins then the PC would have died the death that DOS deserved back then.
Where was the marketing for the IBM PC, then?
I hazily remember a TV commercial touting the PCjr, and the "How ya gonna do it? / Gonna PS/2 it!" jingle is still a brainworm fifteen years later -- but both of those models were failures.
IBM PC's didn't sell well because of good marketing; they sold well despite a lack of marketing, because they were IBM's.
I'l never forget that little beast. I remember saving up for months on my paper route until I was able to go into Service Merchandise, plunk down some $700 in cash, and walk out with a brand new Commodore 64, 1701 monitor, and 1541 hard drive. Hell, I still remember the days of the ol' VicModem running at a screaming 300 baud. When my friend got 1,200 baud, the speed difference was incredible.
I will definitely be getting this book. What wonderful nostalgia! "poke 53280,0" anyone?
One of the T-Shirts at ThinkGeek is of the exact setup that I mentioned above with the phrase "I Adore My 64". My shirt finally came in on Monday after being back-orderd for about a week.
I Adore My 64 (My apologies if someone already posted this, but I didn't see it.)
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
To chime in with everyone else: AMIGA FOREVER.
I can't claim I'm posting this from my 1000 or 2000 since I'm at work, but they both still run. In 1987 I was, to my knowledge, the only person on campus with a full-color, stereo, multithreading PC, at a fraction of the cost of the monochrome Macs and the VAX mainframe. When someone else got one, we cabled them together and played full-color, networked jet fighter games and people's heads exploded watching them.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Well, Peddle was only there for a short time. Jack Tramiel built Commodore up in the beginning, being Commdore's founder and everything.
He did do something in the early eighties which nearly killed Commodore. Tramiel went to war with TI in the so-called video game wars, furious that TI had undermined its calculator business in the eighties. The Commodore 64, which was selling well at $600 (supposedly close to 10x what it actually cost to build, even then) was repeatedly subjected to price cuts and a massive marketing campaign, which ultimately came close to destroying Commodore's cash flow.
At the end of the period, Irving Gould, Commodore's effective owner, fired Tramiel, who left and then went to Atari, which he basically saved from oblivion.
Commodore went bankrupt for the first time shortly afterwards. It recovered. And then went bust again.
Commodore's main problem at the end were a bunch of technical managers with agendas, and some lousy decisions made as a result of it. A case in point, the AGA chipset.
The AGA chipset was supposed to debut in an enhanced A3000 (the 3000 was a very respected, if expensive, 32-bit Amiga system), called the A3000+. Shortly before the A3000+ was supposed to be finished and shown to Commodore's international affiliates, there was a change of management, and the project cancelled. Instead, AGA was to be put first into a lower cost machine, called (IIRC) the A2200. Low cost consumer machines were suddenly considered Commodore's future direction, and they also designed an "A300", a replacement for the Commodore 64 based on old Amiga (ECS) technology, and an "A600", an AGA and standards compliant replacement to the A500.
All of which made some kind of sense, I suppose, but there was no replacement for the A3000.
After that, Commodore's managers decided to rename and reprice everything before announcing these wonderful machines to the public. The A2200 became the A4000. The replacement to the A3000. (This would be like Ford replacing the Lincoln Town Car with a design based upon the Escort.) It, and the A600, were delayed.
Meanwhile, the A300 was renamed (at the last moment) to the A600, and sold at the same price as the Amiga 500, which was abruptly dropped. The A600, as released, had some of the keyboard missing (so it couldn't play some Amiga games), and was no more powerful anywhere else. The machine did have a PCMCIA slot and a laptop hard drive interface, but these didn't really pacify anyone.
A few months afterwards, the AGA machines were released. Despite AGA, the A4000 was considerably less desirable than its "predecessor", and far more expensive than the A2000 it was supposed to replace. The A1200 was a good replacement for the A500, but was sold at a much higher price.
So in 1993 or so, you have Commodore:
If they hadn't had cashflow problems, it's tempting to speculate that all four machines would have been launched, and done so as replacements for the machines they were supposed to replace. As it was, they needed the money. That said, the A3000+ appears to have been killed by a manager of the type who wants to make an impression, rather than out of any technical or marketing awareness.
Tramiel can't really be blamed for all of this. He made one error, and he'd probably argue it wasn't an error to begin with, by the end of the "war" Commodore pretty much owned the home computer market, or was one of a top two (depending on country: ie Sinclair and Commodore in the UK owned the home computer market.) Irving Gould, who appointed a series of replacements for Tramiel and kept firing them until Medhi Ali, who was reponsible for the period where most of Commmodore's death was sealed. The PC fiasco. The numerous incompetent PHB-style heads of engineering. The mismanagement of the AGA transition.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
The 650x chip was a good chip, was in a lot of the 8 bit home computers that so many of us cut our teeth on, including the Apple II series, and the Atari 8 bit computers (also a Tramiel story).
For true pedants, the C64 had a MOS 6510, not a 6502. Same ABI, i think it jsut had interconnects for all the extra chips (video, SID audio chip)
The Amiga 500 did have an RCA composite out built in but only in black and white. The box he's referring to is the A520 RF modulator, this included both RF and colour composite plugs. I can't remember if the A500+ needed a modulator, but the 600 and 1200 both had colour composite built in.
The 23pin RGB port carries all the right signals to happily drive a VGA monitor, but at ~15KHz, 50/60Hz.
I hadn't thought about it, because having lived through it the importance of Commodore is obvious to me, but on consideration I realize it has sort of dropped off the PC history radar.
To put it very simply, even though I was a programmer of PDP-12's, -8's, and -11's, and very familiar with Apple ]['s because I was working in a research institution that was in the process of adopting them, my first home computer was a VIC-20. For the simple reason that... I could afford one. The base price was $300. I bought a bunch of add-ons and my total cost was about $600.
At the time, an Apple ][ cost something like $2000 if I recall correctly.
The only thing in the same price neighborhood as the VIC-20 was the Atari 400 with a full QUERTY keyboard--of membrane keys. Ugh. Practically unusable. The VIC-20 had what the time was a very nice keyboard with a very comfortable, responsive "feel" to it.
Commodore's VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were the Model T of the personal computer era. Aficionados scoffed at them as cheap junk, but they were real computers that ordinary families could afford.
Hey, at a time when standalone modems cost $500, the VIC-20 had a crude but usable modem for about $60. If I recall correctly instead of frequency-shift keying between two frequencies, it just used one of the frequencies and turned it on and off. Like the Apple color video output, it was a nonstandard signal which standards-compliant modems could nevertheless tolerate. I did some work from home with it, and it was my gateway into CompuServe.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You know, it's just the sheer sadness that drives people to still support Amiga. Fact is, that, conceptually speaking, the AmigaOS was far ahead of its time, and still is. The concept was and is very simple: A micro kernel, a multilayered driver system (resources, devices, and optionally, file handlers), and a real multitasking. I'm not saying this because I'm a fanboy, I'm saying this because I witnessed the advantages first hand, and still witness them. I still use an Amiga 600 for making music! Why? Because it's technically impossible to create music software for Windows or Linux that keeps the pace no matter what you're doing with the computer. On the Amiga, I can easily run my music, and do something else at the same time, without worrying about timing problems. And that's the problem: Timing. The AmigaOS was and is the only one that provides exact and predictable timing for all aspects of the operating system. Windows can't do it, by far, not even with DirectX, and Linux can't do it either, because neither is a real time OS, however AmigaOS is.
:-)
I gladly accept the design flaws in AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, or even 4.x if it provides me with the flexibility that I need. Perhaps I might even check out MorphOS, or any other of these efforts. Recently, I ran AROS off a live CD on my present main computer, which is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 machine with 2 GB of RAM. Even Amiga Emulators like UAE still provide some advantages over their host OS. And that is something, that only AmigaOS can do.
Amiga Inc. is currently working on AmigaOS 5 (AmigaOS 4 was implemented by Hyperion Entertainment), and AmigaOS 5 will be multiplatform. I don't know how they'll solve the kernel issue, perhaps they'll take a Linux or BSD kernel, or write their own; or run it on top of the other systems, who knows. All I care about is, that *I* as a user, or developer, do not have to care about timing issues. If it works, I'll be all over it.
I almost purchased an AmigaONE with AmigaOS 4, but unfortunately I was unemployed at the time and could not afford it. As it happened, a couple of months later, Eyetech (UK) stopped manufacturing the AmigaONE mainboards, and Hyperion halted development of AmigaOS 4 until a new hardware manufacturer has been found. However, that AmigaONE solution was very expensive; I hope they'll manage to reduce prices. I'm also unsure about the performance implications of AmigaOS 4. I hope it'll be as smooth as the old OSes. And if that shouldn't work out, perhaps AmigaOS 5 will be the cure, who knows.
And other projects like AROS and MorphOS look also promising.
To me, the loss of Amiga stifled my creativity. The Amiga was intended as a computer for creative people, and that's what it was. With its loss, an important tool went out the window.
The current operating systems, like Linux and Windows, can only partially compensate for that. And developers for these platforms have not the slightest clue about what creative people need. C*base for making music? Thanks, but no thanks.
This one has the music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_f3uIzEIxo
I fear the Y2038 bug
This is one of the most clueless posts I have ever read in Slashdot. A complete troll.
... closest competitor 32... Atari ... no competition at all. ... not the CPU) ... no competition at all.
.. but no...
.. And Jack Trammel (sp?) had the dubious honor of making Forbes higest paid executive the year before they went backrupt. He was just another Kenneth Lay.
The Amiga was light years ahead of everything else:
4096 colors
True Multitasking
A proper channel processor (i.e. channel commands were handled by one of the three chips Gary, Agnes, or Denise
A Proper Graphics Processor with built in real time animation in the hardware.
A Proper Sound Processor.
Quadraphonic Sound. Closest competitor. Mono. Atari and Apple.
True Multimedia... fully compatible with NTSC (in US) or PAL (Europe)
Many PCs today actually have inferior graphics and sound to an original Amiga!
The guys who developed Amiga were geniuses. Commodore (their sugar daddy) was, I'll admit completely incompetent in every way.
I knew Commodore and Amiga was going to go down at an Amiga User's group meeting when the 500 was announced... The Commodore marketing guy comes in and states flatly that the 500 will have no hard drive because "our customers have no interest in hard drives". We all jumped him, but he was simply too stupid to get it. The 500's form factor was really clever with the works in the keyboard... Had they put a 20 meg hard drive in that machine, and allowed Toys "R" Us to sell them... Commodore would be Microsoft today.
While Apple was giving Computers to schools (so kids knew and liked them) Commodore their demo machines at full price to their own dealers... Almost all simply had pictures of them! They shouldn't have bothered to even play... they brought no chips to the table.
(Cue jokes about Microsoft dumping toxic waste with every new Windows release.)
Virtually every manufacturing plant operating prior to 1980 or so is on the Superfund list. Dumping (or "storing") toxic waste was just part of doing business until then. Practically every company making anything at or before that time has at least one Superfund-listed plant somewhere. IBM has at least three. HP has four or so. Sun and Unisys each have one. Intel has two.
These days, companies have wised up. They've learned that China has no such legislation.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Actually the problem was that Commodore decide. They decided that it was a "Serious" computer and not a "Toy" ... They had the largest dealer network in the planet... The 64 and 128 were sold in every toy store in the world that was big enough to matter, but Commodore decided that would make them look like a "toy" so they refused to let their own dealer network sell the Amiga, and then they insisted on their demo units to the PC shops. The shops have a picture of an Amiga and take orders if you insisted, but they would steer you away if they could. The net result was that was then seeling the Amiga.
... no I don't need one... My "Game Machine" does everything I need. We're just going to buy the next generation "Amiga Game Machine" with the CD32 CD Drive and that new Office software.
If Commodore had just let Toys "R" Us sell the damn things, people would have never bought PCs because they would have said
Commodore got stuck in sementics and blew their golden opportunity.
My first computer was a VIC-20. I learned BASIC and assembly language on a VIC-20, then a C-64, then C and 68000 assembly on the Amiga. I remember them all fondly. But I realized that Commodore was doomed when I attended AmigaCon and asked at a Q & A session why the Amiga did not support multiple monitors like the PC or Mac. I was developing medical software for ophthalmology and neurology, and needed to display visual stimuli for the patient on one monitor and electrophysiological data on the other screen. The Commodore representatives laughed at me and said "Why would we want to do anything that the PC or Mac can do?" Indeed. Maybe because they'll be in business in 5 years and you will not with that attitude? This was the ultimate in "not invented here".
The nail in the coffin was one of Mehdi's final decisions:
AGA GFX chips were made under contract by HP (the Commodore ex-Mostek fab couldn't handle better than 2 micron). This required forecasting so they'd reserve fab time for us.
Some of us pushed hard for dropping all the non-AGA models and selling the A1200, A2400 (aka A4000), and A3000+ for Christmas.
In summer of '93, when told that (because he'd been unwilling to commit to production of enough AGA chipsets earlier) that Commodore could only make something like ~50K A1200's for Christmas, he basically said "well, we're going to sell our normal 300K units for Christmas, so make as many A1200's as we have chips for, and make the rest A600's". (Seriously paraphrased, with 13 years of mental bitrot, and I'm sure the numbers are off.)
Needless to say, 90% (or whatever) of the now-obsolete A600's didn't sell... And that ate up the rest of Commodore's capital in unsold inventory. The rest was a foregone conclusion.
If Commodore owned KFC they would have marketed it as "a greasy warm dead bird in a cardboard bucket".
At the time take a look at the Amiga vs the IBM PC AT and the Mac as far a cost vs features. The Amiga was so far ahead it makes your head hurt. That is the proof that marketing is the most important thing in computers. If having the best product wins then the PC would have died the death that DOS deserved back then.
There's a great irony here, too. Consider VIC-20's amazing marketing, all the way down to the packaging: "VIC-20! The FRIENDLY computer! With COLOR and MUSIC!" Worked amazingly.
Now, consider that Texas Instruments, a company which had two years earlier in 1979 released a 16-bit computer with sprite graphics, twice the color palette, 1/3rd more resolution in each dimension, three voice one noise sound, and more than twice the RAM of the VIC-20.
And when the VIC-20 was released, the TI-99/4 and TI-99/4A were going head to head in a price war against the VIC-20, less than half the machine that the TI-99/4A was. Commodore had a chip fab (MOS Techologies) to make custom ICs to cut costs. TI... well, TI literally invented the integrated circuit, arguably invented the microprocessor and microcomputer (though this is generally credited to Intel's 4004, TI had a calculator chip which predated it), and made more chips than Frito-Lay. Custom ICs weren't a problem for TI.
The TI-99/4A's box, sitting on the shelf at K-Mart beside the VIC-20, simply said "Texas Instruments Home Computer". No flashy claims. Hell, nowhere on the package does it even indicate that it's got a 16 bit processor! (I have a TI-99/4A box in front of me right now.) TI is/was used to marketing to engineers and other knowledgeable people who will research a purchase, rather than simply walking into K-Mart and impulse buying. And TI never bothered to integrate all the glue logic on the board with a custom IC the way Commodore did. TI never stooped to using cardboard RF shields to save a few cents, as was done with some VIC-20s and C-64s. Hell, TI never even bothered to stop using raised foil PC board interconnects and other expensive stuff that raised reliability. They sold a better designed, better built, and higher technology product... and expected consumers would be smart enough to spend the extra $20 (which was the difference when I got my first computer in 1983).
The VIC-20 outsold it 2:1.
Extremely ironic that between the VIC-20 and the Amiga (which I loved, by the way), Commodore forgot how to market their stuff to the unwashed masses.
Probably had something to do with Tramiel's departure (NB, haven't read the book yet).
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You really can't market the Amiga 500, with a picture on the box of a kid in open mouth glee playing games, along with the Amiga 2000, with business/multimedia production, at the same time successfully.
Was that the issue, though? I don't think so; it makes perfect sense to view one has a compatible "home" version of your office computer.
I worked in television broadcasting, and as late as the mid 1990s, it was Amiga 2000 in the office and Amiga 500 at home. That was me, that was co-workers, etc. A few were lucky and had the A4000 on their desk at work and the A3000 at home, you know. But bread and butter machines were the 500/2000 combination. I started out with an A1000 at home and an A2000 at work, eventually made the lateral move to the easier to expand A500. I still have every Amiga (and everything from its predecessor in my life, the TI-99/4A).
Now, TV was unique. We used them as character generators, using Broadcast Titler and other programs, along with a cheap genlock board: there's the little graphic on the corner of the screen beside the news anchor; there's the sports reporter's name at the bottom of the screen. The Video Toaster hardware/software for the Amiga was a boon, because when you connected it to a good VTR (a serious timecoded Betacam or 3/4" machine which could record one frame after a 7 second pre-roll), the Toaster Amiga would output this amazing frame of a 3D graphic, rewind the VTR, sync, record one frame in succession, and work on rendering the next one.
For people who grew up in the digital age, you just don't get how amazing it was that a small local station could make their own bumpers and 3D graphics. Just a few years before this, I was lugging a 3/4" portable VTR and a separate camera (before the Betacam camcorder!), bag of batteries, bag of BIG 3/4" cassettes, a Sun Gun, a mixer, and a mic boom. A one-person shoot was basically impossible, you needed a camera man and an audio/VTR operator, and you'd be running through a scrum with a bunch of cables attaching the cameraman to the VTR guy and then to the reporter. No wireless microphone, no VTR conveniently built into the back of the camera, no cute and tiny little Beta cassettes.
Fast forward to a camcorder: That's what the Amiga was like to broadcasters.
But that was for one little niche market. Offices in general? The Amiga lacked the software library, but it was pretty competent - I remember file compatibility with PC users wasn't an issue, as we had WordPerfect and Microsoft Multiplan and all that other stuff - hell, by virtue of the graphics capability, WYSIWYG word processing was restricted to Mac and Amiga until about 1990. I could read/write PC 3.5" diskettes, and I think I could read/write Mac disks. Never mind that with 1985 software and hardware, I could have WordPerfect and Multiplan open side by side, a huge 500k file being downloaded from a BBS at a whopping 1200 baud in the background, and cut and paste between them. Workbench 1.x was all point-and-click (in many respects blowing Windows out of the water for a full decade until Windows 95 came out), though there was powerful scripting provided. Workbench 2.x and 3.x were cleaner, slicker, more powerful. Reliability was still more than I've ever experienced on any DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 combination, about the same as Windows 95A, but not quite as crash-proof as Windows 95B.
I think that by 1985, the PC was pretty well entrenched, clones were already out, and "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". Besides, "who needs graphics for an office computer anyway?". Amiga offered far more bang for the buck, but I think purchasers were also skittish about the recent end of the Beta-vs-VHS wars, and IBM was already a known quantity.
But it was when Commodore got distracted by PC clones - I remember their very unremarkable offerings - that things really went downhill.
OMG, those things were mundane. They made Packard Bells look exciting.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Lisa and Macintosh didn't have preemptive multitasking. MacOS didn't have preemptive multitasking until OS X. AmigaOS was the first personal computer operating system to have preemptive multitasking. As for GUI systems, before Lisa, there were a number of projects developed at the Xerox research center at Palo Alto. The first (largely text-based) GUI system with mouse was developed in the early 1960ies (!!) (Google for it, there are some interesting videos; however, I can't recall the name of the project right now.) The Atari ST was the first GUI system that was available to the masses, followed by the Amiga 1000. Macintoshs were more than twice as expensive, and unaffordable to average households! Later it was claimed that the Amiga GUI was a Mac rip-off, but that's not true: The Amiga team started out in 1979, which was the year when the XC68000 processor came to market. And the Atari ST was a project started by Jack Tramiel to quickly bring an Amiga-like computer to the market before Commodore did. I recall that in 1983 and 1984, there were already rumors about a super-PC coming to market, made by Commodore, although the rumors were highly exaggerated. A friend in school told me about this, and said it would have 8-channel sound, millions of colors, etc. ;-) -- so the Amiga wasn't a surprise to me when it finally came.
Check for yourself:
http://mark0.net/var/154I.jpg
http://www.zock.com/8-Bit/1541.JPG
Bye!
SeqBox
Yeah, but that was slightly after the events involving Tramiel were finished, and was partially because Amstrad took over a flailing Sinclair which, while immune from Tramiel's price cuts (the Spectrum was the cheapest home computer in town and achieved a network-effect very quickly), had made some bad business decisions of its own after the Spectrum, the C5 being the one that pushed it over the edge.
Certainly, in 1984, people either owned Spectrums or Commodore 64s in Britain. Technically good rivals such as the 6809-based Dragon (a system based upon the same Motorola reference design as the Radio Shack CoCo) barely made a dent. TI flailed from 1981 to 1984 and ended up withdrawing from the market - I've only ever seen two TI99/4a's in my entire life, one of which was in a store, and that's two more than most people I know.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.