The Real Inside Story of How Commodore Failed (youtube.com)

dryriver writes: Everybody who was into computers in the 1980s and 1990s remembers Commodore producing amazingly innovative, capable and popular multimedia and gaming computers one moment, and disappearing off the face of the earth the next, leaving only PCs and Macs standing. Much has been written about what went wrong with Commodore over the years, but always by outsiders looking in -- journalists, tech writers, not people who were on the inside. In a 34 minute long Youtube interview that surfaced on October 9th, former Commodore UK Managing Director David John Pleasance and Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology talk very frankly about how Commodore really failed, and just how crazy bad and preventable the business and tech decisions that killed Commodore were, from firing all Amiga engineers for no discernible reason, to hiring 40 IBM engineers who didn't understand multimedia computing, to not licensing the then-valuable Commodore Business Machines (CBM) brand to PC makers to generate an extra revenue stream, to one new manager suddenly deciding to manufacture in the Philippines -- a place where the man had a lady mistress apparently. The interview is a truly eye-opening preview of an upcoming book David John Pleasance is writing called Commodore: The Inside Story . The book will, for the first time, chronicle the fall of Commodore from the insider perspective of an actual Commodore Managing Director.

Comments

Buttholes

[sexconker]

Did you perhaps mean to type "Hero to Zero"?

tl;dr

[Katatsumuri]

usual corporate insanity, with a touch of bad luck

Re:tl;dr

[Wizardess]

I cannot say I was "inside". I was pretty darned close, though, as the chief moderator of the Amiga conferences on the late lamented BIX, "BYTE Information Exchange". If I tried to write down everything I heard as Commododo went extinct I'd probably be sued for slander within seconds. I am pretty sure most of what I think I know is accurate. It's generally multiply sourced from the engineers and software people who were there to the end.

When the owner of a company decides to milk it for what he can get out of it as it disintegrates the results are ugly. The motivations varied from ugly to pathetic.

It will be REALLY interesting to see what David has to say about it.

{^_^} formerly long ago jdow@bix[MUNG].com. (Munged to protect the current holders of bix.com.)

Re:tl;dr

[The Cynical Critic]

Jack Tramiel isn't even mentioned by name a single time so you kind of failed right there. The whole interview is basically all about the time after Tramiel left (which according to his son was over an argument with Irving Gould over Gould using the company as his personal piggy bank) and how incompetent basically every single manager brought on after Tramiel's departure was.

Re:tl;dr

[phantomflanflinger]

It is a boring video though, not a good advert for the book. After 10 minutes I tried to hold down RUN STOP and hit RESTORE.

Re:tl;dr

[The Cynical Critic]

Is it just me or has people having the attention of a gold fish become worryingly common these days?

Re:tl;dr

[goose-incarnated]

Is it just me or has people having the attention of a gold fish become worryingly common these days?

It's the other way around: people with superior attention spans ignore the video in favour of reading.

Stupid people like to watch video. Smart people prefer to read. That 30m video has about 4m worth of content.

Re:tl;dr

[The Cynical Critic]

It's somehow not interesting you, yet you still take the time to write multiple post about how you couldn't be bothered to actually watch the video.

Right...

Re:tl;dr

[martyros]

It is a boring video though, not a good advert for the book. After 10 minutes I tried to hold down RUN STOP and hit RESTORE.

It is a bit unstructured (as one would expect from an informal chat after beers); but I think it's only boring if you're more interested in technical stuff than in business stuff. But basically, the short answer to why Commodore / Amiga failed (according to him) was poor, and sometimes deliberately malicious, business decisions. That's actually true for most businesses -- Microsoft wasn't bad technically, but they got where they were in the mid-90's in large part because of Bill Gates' ruthless business instincts.

If there's a lesson to be learned for geeks, it's that the business / strategic side of things matters at least as much as the technical side; and that if you want your project / company / technology to succeed, you need people that are good at both.

Re:tl;dr

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a transcript. I can read it in public transport, or during a break at work, without creating noise. I can read it at my own speed. I can easily reread something I didn't understand, or look it up, and resume from the same point without need to rewind. I can save it to an ebook reader. I can check what given word means if I don't understand it (not native speaker, so it's a big problem with speech).

It's essentially sequential vs random access memory. Videos are simply inconvenient, and unless they have something of value visually, I'm definitely not interested in watching a talking head for 30 minutes.

Re:tl;dr

[Rutulian]

Microsoft wasn't bad technically, but they got where they were in the mid-90's in large part because of Bill Gates' ruthless business instincts.

The latter part of your statement is correct, but Microsoft was definitely bad technically. Both Windows and Office in the 95/98 days were terrible products, that they succeeded in spite of, not because of. This was especially true around the time they were pushing their networking stuff for SMBs. It was a total joke compared to Novell, but they succeeded.

Re: tl;dr

[liefer]

What a silly and arrogant thing to say. There are benefits to both, of course, which is why universities use both (lectures and reading material)

Re: tl;dr

[goose-incarnated]

What a silly and arrogant thing to say. There are benefits to both, of course, which is why universities use both (lectures and reading material)

There is no benefit to listening to a talking head. Lectures are active (two-way), a talking head on youtube is passive (one-way).

The benefits of video exist only when the video is displaying information that cannot be easily understood with text-only: how to disassemble an iphone, for example. The linked video has, literally, a few minutes of information stretched out over 30m.

There is literally (once again), no reason to make this thing a video other than for people too stupid to read.

Re:tl;dr

[Ol Olsoc]

Is it just me or has people having the attention of a gold fish become worryingly common these days?

It's the other way around: people with superior attention spans ignore the video in favour of reading.

Stupid people like to watch video. Smart people prefer to read. That 30m video has about 4m worth of content.

And really smart people can read, or watch a video, or learn in any way needed.

Re: tl;dr

[Rutulian]

Uhhh...how about WordPerfect 5.2 for Windows? Lotus? Appleworks?

Re: tl;dr

[Bing Tsher E]

WordPerfect prior to Windows only succeeded because it's arcane user interface resulted in a culture of guru-experts. Every office had that woman who was a 'wiz' at WordPerfect because she knew all the secret key sequences. Said woman evangelized WordPerfect and kept her flock of users happy using it. The company that produced WordPerfect had exceptionally good customer support to teach and foster the development of their cadre-users out in the world.

Re:tl;dr

[Bing Tsher E]

Just at a much slower rate when it's dribbling out on a video.

I am serious. It's really fucking disgusting these days when you're searching online about how to do some specific thing on the computer, and the only thing you can find are narrated 'captures' of some rambling idiot clicking GUI buttons on a video on Youtube. For operations that could be summarized in several paragraphs.

It's called illiteracy. Literacy is a two-way thing. If you can't write coherently, you are BARELY LITERATE AT ALL.

Re:tl;dr

[stikves]

Windows etc was flawed. However they were less bad compared to their competition.

- For example, with all hype and features, OS/2 would crash on 3rd party hardware.

- Novell, while working great for DOS systems, was unusable for Windows. And their push for IPX was not scaling well for multi-site networks. And don't get me started for the newer Java based monstrosities.

- The office alternatives took a very long while to switch to Windows. By that time all new typesetters were pretty much used to Office.

Basically people underestimated Windows. It had flaws, it would get blue screens, connecting to the Internet would crash it. However it was the only consumer OS viable at the time (I was using Linux of course, however I was a minority).

Re:tl;dr

[richy freeway]

You wipe your ass with the face of a turd?

wtf is wrong with you?

Re: tl;dr

[sconeu]

The other main reason that WP succeeded prior to Windows was that it had drivers for EVERY PRINTER KNOWN TO MANKIND.

Once Windows showed up with a (somewhat) universal printing model, WP's advantage disappeared.

Re: tl;dr

[jwhyche]

Bow down before your microsoft gods! Resistance is annoying!

Re: tl;dr

[jwhyche]

how to disassemble an iphone, for example

I don't need a video for that. Just a hammer.

Re: tl;dr

[Darinbob]

Wysiwyg as a tool is not very good. It gets in the way of having a properly and consistently formatted document. Generally documents work better if you just get in the plain text first and then add formatting later. Even better if you have automatic formatting rules.

Re:tl;dr

[Skuld-Chan]

I think it has more to do with bad timing than luck though. I have an Amiga 4000 still (I used to use it back in the day to edit tape using Amilink and the VT-4000) it still works :) (at 25 years I've reworked the motherboard to replace various components etc), but even I thought (as a die hard) that the A4000 was a bit late to the scene - it was the first Amiga released to the public in 92 to support 8 bit color - most of the high color modes are almost useless hacks (they look very pretty, but outside of animation you can't do much else real time with them). Still the A4000 was the best tool for the job for at least another 2-5 years - with a lot of addons (like the Flyer).

From what I understand the AA chipset was slated to be released on the Amiga 3000+ as early as 89/90 - if they could have delivered 8 bit color then, and with the Amiga 4000 delivered the AAA chipset in 92 it would have been a major game changer for people who were into graphics workstations.

And bad management forcing stupid priorities (like CDTV, the Amiga 600 - on and on an on) on their research and development teams and engineering teams it really screwed up their timing and they were constantly releasing products that would have been revolutionary if they came along a year or two earlier.

Re:"A lady mistress"

[ContextSwitch]

She was his amiga.

Re:fuck that

[Master Moose]

https://downtimepublishing.com...

ESTIMATED DELIVERY Nov 2017 SHIPS TO Anywhere in the world

Just managed an order to New Zealand

Thanks

[hoover]

Thanks for the heads-up. I re-read Brian Bagnall's "On the Edge" about once a year which is also a fascinating read.

I pre-ordered with regular shipping to Germany (about 7 quid)

Still got my old C64 from the early 80s

[jools33]

Still got my old C64 from the early 80s and it still works, solid reliable hardware. Those days are long gone.

Re:Still got my old C64 from the early 80s

[The Cynical Critic]

The C64? Reliable? Maybe some of the last ones, but according many of the other engineers who worked there when the C64 was in production, including C128 hardware designer Bill Herd, it really was about getting as much hardware out the door quality be damned. In his talk at VCFMW 11 "Bil Herd: Tales from Inside Commodore" (an interesting talk you can find on youtube) he mentions a time when Commodore literally started shipping their own quality control rejects to stores for the Christmas season. The apparent idea behind this was that they were going to mostly be Christmas presents so people wouldn't even notice they were faulty until after Christmas by which time they'd come back to the store to replace them for working machines they'd have been able to produce by then.

Re:Still got my old C64 from the early 80s

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair a lot of machines from that era are dying now. Batteries became more and more common in the 80s, and of course they leak. ROMs are starting to die too, especially EPROMs. I had to replace a few when restoring an Amiga 4000 recently.

Capacitors commonly go, even good ones of that age. Storage media are a problem too - tapes are generally fairly reliable but the tape decks die, usually the drive belt. C64 floppy drives were unreliable even back in the day, so actually these days they are probably more reliable if they still work as they dodgy bits will have been replaced. Cartridges and partridge ports get dirty and corroded of course.

Keys are another common failure from that era. The carbon contacts gets dirty or wears out, and the pads corrode. They are likely to have come into contact with skin and skin oil. Chips also become unseated if they are socketed, a quick clean and re-seat fixes that.

Sometimes oscillators age too and go out of spec. It's usually fine, TVs are fairly tolerant.

Re:"A lady mistress"

[codeButcher]

Just as mystified by this. Does one get mistresses in other genders too? (Not that I would know, but one can try to learn from the basement...)

More like Nokia/Elop

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently they hired an ex IBM boss after Tramiel, who decided they should make PCs, hired a bunch of his friends from IBM and tried to make PCs in a market that was getting swamped by Chinese generic PCs.

Then there was a second chance, which was a licensing deal with a Chinese company, and a malicious German manager scuppered that to favor a German buyer who didn't have the resources to compete. That was the end of it.

I'm reminded of what Elop did to Nokia, the combination of a malicious CEO more loyal to an outside company, and a weak board unwilling to tackle the CEO.

Re: "A lady mistress"

[Jesus H Rolle]

A ladyboy could also be a mistress. Lady mistress means no penis.

Re:fuck that

[houghi]

They do ship to New Zealand and not to a country south of Germany? Weird.

Sounds depressing

[drinkypoo]

Anyone want to buy an a1200 with an aca1233n, quick before the fires eat my county?

Another take on the fall of Commodore

[teg]

Ars Technica published a story on the fall of Commodore as part of their History of Amiga series.

Reading this was a nice trip down memory lane, my first computer was a Commodore 64 and the second one a Commodore Amiga 500.

Skipped over : the impact of standard computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore would never have survived the comodisation and explosion of standard computing and office cimputing. At best it would have stayed a niche at worst it would have imploded as a game machine. See for example the Atari ST plateform, which separated from the tramiel/commodore fiasco, and yet what hapenned in 1993 ? They went the jaguar way and dropped personal machine - only hobbyist continued. That is why I think that while the video shows one side of the problem, this would not have been the end in a normal case, but due to the comodisation of coimnputing to office PC AND the console gamification so that personal computing game plateform could only go the first way (console) or the later (office general machine with games). This is the TRUE reason amiga and comodore failed : they missed the change in early in1990, kept doing those personal gaming machine (yes they were NOT used massively for office stuff) and even if they had done a good machine, they were on the way out anyway.

Re:Skipped over : the impact of standard computing

[tendrousbeastie]

I tend to agree with this in general. The computer market certainly did split in the 90s into the console market and the serious computer market. It wasn't really until near 2000 that PCs became gaming machines in the way they are now.

The Amiga sort of tried to be both at the same time - in Britain, where I am familiar with the Amiga, it utterly failed as a serious computer, and only really existed as games machine. It struggled against the Sega Megadrive/Genesis (Sonic was killing it in every way) and would have utterly failed had it had to compete against the PS1.

The fundamental trouble for the Amiga, in my opinion (I used one as my primary computer up to 2001, I did most of my first year university coursework on it), was the lack of modularity. Even in the early 90s you could swap out hardware in PCs to take advantage of new releases (e.g. the release of Soundblaster did not require you to by a whole new computer), and manufacturers/retailers could mix and match hardware to meet different needs.

But with the Amiga you were stuck with maybe 5 or 6 different computers (in the 90s - 600, 1200, 3000, 4000, CDTV, CD32) with a fixed and unchanging hardware. Had they been more modular, and had it therefore been possible to swap out the bitplane graphics system for a pixel based graphics by simply swapping out one card for another then things might have been different.

I know you could install a Piccaso card and other such graphics cards, but due to built in nature of the AGA and related hardware no mass consumer software would dare support anything else, and there was no real hardware abstraction layer to overcome this. Since none of it was abstracted through anything like OpenGL or DX or anything even remotely similar, no one would write software for any plugin card, preferring instead to target the bigger market for the built in hardware*.

* After Commodore's death there were some games that started to target plugin gfx cards (Doom and Quake clones, etc. such a Alien Breed 3d) but by then it was clearly too late, and the problem of a lack of a standardised abstraction for hardware was still present anyway.

So the Amiga was stuck with what was, by the early 90s, crappy bitplane based graphics and crappy 8 bit, 4-channel sound, and no way to move away from this. Without any standardised abstraction system to allow modular hardware (and without virtual, or at least protected, memory) it was just stuck with inadequate hardware.

Everyone says how Commodore failed because they didn't develop the hardware enough, and didn't release AAA or Hombré hardware like they should have, but it wouldn't have made a difference - they would have released some fantastic hardware which would have been top of the line for a year or two but which would have quickly been overtaken by the competitive market for modular hardware which PCs could take advantage of.

(First thing I did when I finally ditched my A1200 and got a PC was to go and buy a better graphics board so I could play Giants: Citizen Kabuto)

Are you joking?

[Viol8]

" Really the advent of Windows a very good graphical interface was the biggest advancement in placing PC's in the home"

The C64 was a home computer. You've head about the Amiga, right? Windows came about years after the Amiga, whose GUI still was a match for anything MS came up with up until Win 3.1 (and even then the Amiga was a proper virtual memory multitasking system unlike the lash up that was Windows until NT came along). The reason the Commodore lost wasn't technology - they were leagues ahead of the PC in software and hardware, it was purely utterly inept management.

Re:Are you joking?

[Shinobi]

AmigaOS did not support virtual memory by default until 4.0, though there were some 3rd party solutions that kinda-sorta added virtual memory functionality to Exec.

But even then, it wasn't until WinNT and 95 that Windows had anything comparative to what AmigaOS had in 1985 in terms of useful multitasking.

Re:Are you joking?

[SharpFang]

It was also stagnating technology. Amiga 500, and Amiga 1200 were strides ahead of PC where it came to multimedia. But Commodore squandered that edge, releasing what boiled down to repackaging of old products, rearranging slots on the motherboards and bundling built-in peripherals that had been supported for years as standalone external devices. PC caught up, overtook, and left Amiga in the dirt, because the CEO totally gutted the R&D division, redirecting the "savings" to his own, and owner's pockets.

Re:Are you joking?

[Ol Olsoc]

" Really the advent of Windows a very good graphical interface was the biggest advancement in placing PC's in the home"

The C64 was a home computer. You've head about the Amiga, right? Windows came about years after the Amiga, whose GUI still was a match for anything MS came up with up until Win 3.1 (and even then the Amiga was a proper virtual memory multitasking system unlike the lash up that was Windows until NT came along). The reason the Commodore lost wasn't technology - they were leagues ahead of the PC in software and hardware, it was purely utterly inept management.

Minor quibble - it wasn't until Windows 95 that the Windows PC was getting close. I had first a 500, then a 2000 and a 2500, then a 3000, which was my personal favorite, and my last Amiga was the 4000 with the Toaster.

They were amazing machines, far ahead of the competition for video and 3D work. Finally in either 1999 or 2000, I went to a Mac based nonlinear system, and since Newtek intelligently made their Lightwave 3D software multi-platform, I moved over pretty easily.

Working in video through the 1990's was definitely an experience, from the days of crash editing, to frame buffers, switchers and programmable edits, and it was really "exciting" to do a 3D transition to tape, with software that would load a animation frame into the buffer, then back the VTR to a calibrated point, then put it in record mode, and record exactly one frame, pause, and repeat the process. And heaven help you if you didn't calibrate it before each and every recording session. As well, on a really long animation, after the first day, the calibration was as likely to go bad as not. And just imagine the wear on the tape! One time the director asked why getting an animation to tape took so long, so I had him sit with me for a tiny part of a recording session. And it was damn sad to see how my gorgeous 3-D work was mushed up after going to videotape.

I miss my Amigas, but I don't miss a lot of the workflow in those days.

One can't help but wonder where we would be if Commodore was a well run company instead of being based on the KeyStone Cops management model.

Re:Are you joking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Call the management for what it was: Pure unadulterated corruption. From an old Ars article:
"Ali’s reign at Commodore can be characterized by three main aspects: costly strategic errors, cutting essential research and development (R&D), and increasing the CEO’s compensation. The latter was no small thing. In 1989, Ali received $1.38 million in salary. In 1990, that figure rose to $2 million (not including bonuses), and Irving Gould scored a 40 percent pay raise to $1.75 million. By comparison, the CEO of IBM, John Akers, received $713,000 in the same year."

Re:Are you joking?

[greythax]

The Amiga hardware was amazing. But what I miss the most was the software! I still have yet to find a text editor as solid and flexible as CygnusEd. The hex editor I used was beautiful, super fast (because it was written in assembly) and rock solid. When I had to make the inevitable change to windows, I was so disappointed in the quality of software, and the CONSTANT CRASHING! Sure, my Amiga gave me the guru every once in a while, usually when I did something that I knew was stupid, but windows elevated it to a whole new level.

And, honestly, if you released some of the unpolished, buggy software that I see even today as shareware for the Amiga, you would have been laughed out of the scene.

I need to stop before I get misty eyed :(

Re:Are you joking?

[matthewd]

The multitasking system on the Amiga was preemptive vs. the cooperative systems on 16-bit Windows and the original Mac OS.

Re:Are you joking?

[Ol Olsoc]

The Amiga hardware was amazing. But what I miss the most was the software! I still have yet to find a text editor as solid and flexible as CygnusEd.

Oh hell yeah. I'm really nostalgic now for the old Amiga. There were a few problems very early on, and I used to get th eold guru meditation screen, but the writers were apparently passionate enough to put stability at the top of their list. And, honestly, if you released some of the unpolished, buggy software that I see even today as shareware for the Amiga, you would have been laughed out of the scene.

After the early problems, the stability and quality of the ecosysterm was something that may never be matched again. MacOS comes fairly close, but the Windows ecosystem is remarkably unstable in all areas, and IMO is getting worse. There's been a new rash of update installed drivers that is playing hell with user's computers - again.

I need to stop before I get misty eyed :(

Re:Having used a Commodore their was more issues

[SlashDread]

"Really the advent of Windows a very good graphical interface"

OMG, how much of history (written by the winner) can you corrupt?

Windows was (and by my not so humble opinion, still is) a horrible GUI.

It was MILES behing the user friendly-ness of Amiga and Mac. KILOMETERS! Thats what you get when you STEAL said interface, and do said stealing badly of fears of copyright infringement on icons, and keyboard shortcuts. The Windows GUI was only surpassed as "worse" in the list of shitty GUI's by OS/2. And at least OS/2 was rather stable.

No. Windows "won" due to shady business practises like fucking over IBM (and the rest of the world hoping for apps that could run on choice of GUI) on Lanmanager/Windows/OS2 shared codebase, and the frustration it inflicted on application competition in Windows userspace land. Even choice of "microkernel" DOS (DR DOS vs MS DOS) was actively sabotaged.

Windows a great GUI. PUHLEASE.

Ex-Amiga developer here

[fyngyrz]

Here to Zero

Yes, that pretty much sums it up.

A company of mine used to develop for the Amiga. We did several different types of software and various bits of hardware. We were quite successful in the Amiga context right up until Commodore folded, at which point we switched to Windows and continued our run for many years. During the Amiga years we used to say:

If Commodore owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they would market it as "Lukewarm dead bird."

After the Amiga years, we'd just roll our eyes and twitch a bit.

Re: "A lady mistress"

[Custard Horse]

Sounds like some term from the 1800's.?

From the 1800's what?

The Amiga 1800 was the predecessor to the Amiga 2000

The Deathbed Vigil

[nctritech]

This one is hard to end up finding even if you're a Commodore guy. The Deathbed Vigil by Dave Haynie is basically a documentary about the last day the Commodore doors were open. It's almost entirely footage shot on-the-spot by Haynie of the staff and what they talked about and had to say during the last day.

If you watch it, you'll find that one of the employees was probably one of the nicest people ever, and even he was on the verge of saying that the head of the company was a piece of shit that was entirely to blame. It was pretty depressing, really. Everything went to hell after Tramiel left and management is entirely to blame. The engineers were the most dedicated people you could get.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge

[Jaegs]

If you are interested in the history of Commodore, and the tour de force that was Jack Tramiel, I'd suggest checking out Brian Bagnall's excellent book, Commodore: A Company on the Edge (https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0973864966).

I got it because I had a C-128 growing up, and thought it'd be interesting to read about the history of the company, but it was more than just nostalgia that kept me engaged in the book. It provides a fascinating history of not only Commodore, but the entire computer industry in the late 70s through the 1980s. I particularly liked the backstory of MOS Technology--the chip company behind most of the early home computers.

The author has recently written a follow up: Commodore: The Amiga Years (https://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Amiga-Years-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0994031025), which is on my reading list.

Re:When giants fall

[Bing Tsher E]

Commodore was a company that produced mass-market home computers in plastic cases to be sold in department stores to the public. They didn't embrace any of the common standards that were emerging. So they were a high volume operation, but only ankle deep in the technology. And to the degree the Amiga design was 'deep' it was deeply specialized.

The real downfall of Commodore was the Megahertz Wars of the PC clones. The Amiga was built around a cluster of specially designed ASIC components (named after 'girls' in the documentation). So as technology evolved so that processor speeds could ramp up, the 680x0 chip in the Amiga could be be sped up, but the associated ASIC parts were bound at a restricted speed.

The Amiga design was quaint and very successful for a fixed span of time. It couldn't scale going forward and the hardware ultimately was left in the dust.

Re:"A lady mistress"

[PPH]

"She".

3 main reasons [Re:The real reason CBM failed

[Tablizer]

There was an big internal battle about whether to split the lines into business computers and consumer computers. Tramiel felt more comfortable competing in the consumer realm, but many top engineers and board members felt the business market had better margins. Tramiel wanted to be a low-cost volume producer instead of the deal with complex higher-end systems. He wanted to crank out mass widgets, not be IBM. After all, that's why the C64 was successful. If low-price-high-volume got you where you are, why change your spots? This battle drained the company's focus.

Another problem is that they didn't initially give much thought to forward compatibility. A lot of software producers relied on undocumented features and glitches to get special effects, tease out speed, or work around design bugs. C64's architecture was designed with price in mind, such as getting a deal on components at the time of first release. Creating a future-friendly architecture was ranked behind such. If the next model didn't recreate these glitches and oddities, the old software wouldn't be compatible. Thus, they had problems engineering a next generation model compatible with C64 software.

They even released a computer with the C64 chip set and a newer chip-set, but it was pretty much 2 different computers in one box, making it more expensive yet not having software for the "new half". It failed. Without compatibility and the software it brings, people would have no reason to get the new model(s). Their price-first past caught up with them.

And third, Commodore was flaky about paying their bills. They built up a bad reputation such that suppliers became pickier about payment schedules and conditions, robbing Commodore of supply flexibility. It's yet another case of short-term thinking catching up. Tramiel's bill-flake reputation followed him to Atari.

Re:When giants fall

[Anonymous Coward]

The Amiga was built around a cluster of specially designed ASIC components (named after 'girls' in the documentation). So as technology evolved so that processor speeds could ramp up, the 680x0 chip in the Amiga could be be sped up, but the associated ASIC parts were bound at a restricted speed.

Damn, I hate rehashing this again in 2017 (I should just let it go!) but I'm a fuckwit so here we go...

As soon as the problem you're talking about started happening (and really, the limits started being felt right around the same time Commodore went out of biz in 1994), everyone and their dog worked around it. By 1997 my A3000 had not only a replaced CPU board (68060) but I was on its first graphics card (CV64, to be replaced with a Picasso 4 a few years later) and sound card too. My whole bus was full of basically-modern (for the time) I/O and I was blowing off the custom hardware as much as I could.

And it was awesome. (Though hacky.) It was so nice to come home from dark ages 486s and Pentiums running Windows at work, to a pleasantly-fast and capable computer.

The custom hardware didn't matter. It was the OS that was so damn fast and kept the machine more usable than the fastest x86 boxes that money could buy, until somewhere around the turn of the century.

The OS was the downfall too (no memory protection, and proprietary so it didn't get as much maintenance as we're all used to today) but it was, nevertheless, the attraction at the time. A "generic whitebox" Amiga would have been welcomed. I think some company even made one but I don't remember much about it, just that it was expensive and I already had my souped-up A3000 anyway, so I didn't bother.

My point, though, is that Commodore could have done that too. The Amiga hardware wasn't as dead-end as you make it out to be, because the 1990s users didn't care about the custom chips. (Granted, in the 1980s people did, but partly because it was so awesome compared to generic stuff.) Had Commodore stayed in the game, the custom ASICs wouldn't have been a problem; they would have simply been replaced. Overall, the platform could have kept up.

history of micros

[doom]

You kids aren't going far enough back in time. The biggest mystery in the history of microcomputers is how it is that IBM went with a Microsoft deal rather than making the obvious move of going with CP/M and Digital Research. Microsoft did languages, and had no expertise with Operating Systems-- Gates cut a deal with someone to buy an OS cheap-- and it later turned out to have been a pirated fork of CP/M, Microsoft had to do a re-write later. That got repackaged as MS-DOS, and that's where Gates got the muscle to push Windows and Office and so on... arguing the technical merits of Windows is pretty much besides the point.

This all explains the Microsoft business style-- they lived in terror that someone else would do to them what they'd done to IBM.

Re:history of micros

[RadioD00d]

Yes, but when Microsoft did it to IBM, IBM THANKED them for it. IBM's viewpoint at that time revolved around hardware. The operating system was (and still is, despite the ridiculous complexity) a way to get applications to communicate with the processor. IBM was still of the belief that the world was going to operate on 390's and (for the 'small business') things like the AS/400. Microsoft's offering was for 'toy' computers, that the geeks and hackers could play with in their basements, to learn some rudimentary programming before graduating to Cobol and Fortran on big iron....

Re:Having used a Commodore their was more issues

[jwhyche]

Personally the Commodore was too limited to ever be successful

I don't know what kind of crack you are smoking but you need to cut it out. The C64 was one of the most successful computers of all time. Ask someone who has ever had one to tell you how limited it was.