Steve Jobs insisted on the idea of [the 1980 Apple III having] no fan or air vents – in order to make the computer run quietly. Jobs would later push this same ideology onto almost all Apple models he had control of – from the Apple Lisa and Macintosh 128K to the iMac.
Bad as Bernie Madoff... and noone shot him either. What is wrong with ol' fashion vigilante justice = rope + tree? America slumbers under cosmopolitan legalism.... way too feminized & pussified a culture.
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
It's called lying, and American Law specifically allows partners of the NSA to issue any form of false statement to the public, their shareholders, their investors, or any other non-governmental entity. In other words, once any individual or corporation gets in bed with the NSA, you can never again believe a word they say.
Taking the highlighted section above at face value, logically that would mean that they were legally able to claim "We have never had any involvement with the NSA" when the complete opposite was the case.
While this may come across as smartassery in other situations, I've no doubt that in this case some weasel of a lawyer could- and would- use this in defending a company caught in flagrante with the NSA. This renders *any* company that *might* plausibly be involved with the NSA (including virtually all American ones) as suspicious.
You missed a step in the P3 -> Core, which was the Pentium M. Intel was pretty much forced to build it, because power hungry P4's sucked in laptops.
I remember at the time (mid-2000s?) *before* the original Core line came out, at least one article in Personal Computer World magazine extolled the virtues of the Pentium M. They quite seriously suggested it was worth considering for use in a desktop system. (IIRC, there were desktop motherboards that supported the Pentium M, the only issue was that you had to take more care with the heatsink and cooling than you would with a Pentium 4- or something like that).
Thought I'd point out that technically, AmigaOS is still around- in fact, last time I heard it's being "actively" developed (*) and sold, albeit as a very niche product targeted at diehard hobbyists. (**)
As I commented, though even several years back:-
Really, the Amiga OS nowadays is just a plaything for a few very hardcore hobbyists willing to pay for overpriced, underpowered custom hardware that isn't even directly compatible with the original Amiga anyway. Amiga OS (and the original hardware) was fantastic in its day, and beat the living heck out of MS-DOS and early Windows, but that was a long time ago. Anyone for whom Amiga OS/hardware compatibility was essential or even useful would have been forced to give up and migrate elsewhere by the late-90s at most. For that reason, even if one *could* upgrade it to a modern OS, it'd make more sense just to write a new OS from scratch- the "classic" core would just end up being legacy baggage that would please the Amiga obsessives because they could call it Amiga OS, but have little real world use beyond muddying the design.
(Sorry, didn't want that to sound like a dismissal of the genuinely innovative Amiga OS, but things have moved on too far now).
Also, the rights to the various Amiga and Commodore IPs (names, hardware and software all separate) have been split up, passed around like a bad game of pass the parcel, sublicensed and disputed; I won't go into the details because (a) I can't be bothered and (b) I'm not sure myself!:-)
But... yeah. Technically, last time I heard you can still buy a "modern" AmigaOne and run the new versions of AmigaOS on it.
(*) Though that may be for values of "active" comparable to the rate of flow of glass in medieval windows. And yes, I know that's possibly a myth.:-)
(**) To be fair, this is mentioned on Slashdot at regular intervals, so it's possible that many of you are aware of this anyway.
The rights to the Amiga name, to manufacture the hardware and to the OS
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2710941&cid=39268663
The H.A.M. (Hold and Modify) demo showing 4096 colors was pretty impressive at a time when most PCs were stuck with 256 colors
HAM was around almost two years before VGA debuted (with the PS/2 in April 1987)! (*)
The downside was that it was hard to use for animated graphics, since the colour of most pixels were modified shades of the one to their left, meaning one had to take into account surrounding pixels when moving an object to avoid miscoloured streaking. Few action games used it, though I'm still convinced more games could have exploited HAM if the problem had been analysed methodically and restrictions on the use of base colours and general shading worked out to minimise artifacts and keep calculations workable.
Possibly this wasn't really considered because in Europe (where the Amiga was popular), most 16-bit games were also written for the Atari ST (***) and this would have made them harder to adapt. Hence most used the regular 32-colours-from-4096 or occasionally, the sort-of-64-colour "halfbrite" modes.
(*) AFAICT the best widespread PC adaptor around when the Amiga launched was EGA (i.e. 16 colours from 64). IBM *did* apparently have a graphics adaptor comparable to VGA in 1984, but the card alone was four times the price the Amiga cost when it launched the following year(!)
(**) HAM gave 12-bit colour using only 6 bits per pixel. One could either choose from 16 "base colours" (chosen from a palette of 4096 RGB colours) or choose to modify the red, green or blue component of the pixel to its immediate left, meaning that it could take up to 3 pixel positions to get an exact value; this led to fringing, which could be minimsed by choosing the base colours wisely (and by dynamically changing the base colours on every line with software assistance).
(***) Apparently there was a program for the Atari ST that gave it a software-assisted 512 colour display, but I don't know how restricted *that* was; apparently there were timing issues.
I was long gone by the C65 time but heard about it. I was under the impression that this was an attempt to keep the engineers busy while they looked for someone to buy the company. The person designing the C65 was a chip designer so it may have been even worse off then my bunch of miscreants were in 84.
Yes- Dave Haynie, who was still there at that time made a comment a while back that pretty much confirms this, saying that the C65 (which he didn't think was a good idea either) was essentially driven by one guy and that "it was strange times at Commodore near the end"
Let me clarify: it might have reducing the pricing pressure that resulted in the low-end Amiga models that we actually received. The A500 and A600 would no longer have been Commodore's entry level computer models. And as such, with more upward flexibility in pricing, they could have had better specifications.
The Amiga 500 had a bloody great specification for its time. The Amiga's problem later on was that C= rested on their laurels too long and didn't invest enough in developing it until the PC had caught up (even if the latter's architecture and OS was still horrid) and the Mega Drive and SNES matched it for 2D parallax gaming.
In particular, the A600 might have come with a faster processor, more memory and a full keyboard.
As I mentioned, the A600 was (AFAIK) meant to be the A300, a cost-reduced budget machine. If it had been something else it wouldn't have meaningfully been the same machine. More importantly, it only really existed due to the past success of the A500 years previously; any high-end "A600" in your alternate past-future wouldn't be analogous to the one we saw, except in name!
Speculating as to what the A600 might have been therefore isn't just pointless, it's meaningless; like asking whether Germany would have won WWII if the Roman Empire had never existed. Europe- if not world history- would likely be totally different, a state analogous to Germany might not even exist, the politics would be totally different, and it's unlikely that the Nazis would have risen in *that* place at *that* time in that situation, so even WWII itself wouldn't have existed though other conflicts would have.
Perhaps. But one reason why such a series would remain successful would due to software momentum. Remember, Commodore's super-budget computers were really popular in places like central Europe. If the Amiga doesn't have a large base of software written in Hungarian, but the 8-bit series did, do you think that they'd be more apt to purchase a used A500 or a new C512?
They probably wouldn't have been able to afford a new C512. And (if it was cheaper but less capable as implied), C= would have been foregoing many people who bought- and *were* able to afford- the Amiga in Western Europe (making it the most popular computer of its era) for lower-value sales in Eastern Europe. And I'm not convinced that they wouldn't have preferred a used A500 unless the C512 was really close in spec.
Anyway, this is all getting rather academic and speculative, so we'll just have to disagree on this one.:-)
We made over a Billion dollars, whether obsolete or not.
I'm not sure what aspect of my comment this relates to, so I'll just say that (assuming you *are* Bil Herd and not an imposter!)
there wasn't any disparagement towards the C64 or C128's success (or any other Commodore machine's) intended. It's simply that I don't believe that releasing the C65 (i.e. a semi-new 8-bit machine) would have made any commercial sense by 1991, regardless of how good it was.
Then again, since your article on the 1985 C128 refers to that machine as "one last 8 bit computer", it's possible that I misunderstood what you meant anyway.
Oh, I know, the Amiga lasted longer over there too...basically because of the anti-console bias that Uncle Clive encouraged with his advertising and the UK government encouraged with their duties and tariffs on US/Japanese machines to protect Uncle Clive from the likes of Commodore and Nintendo.
Also, you say "I know the Amiga lasted longer over there too" then give one of the reasons as "duties and tariffs on US/Japanese machines to protect Uncle Clive from the likes of Commodore and Nintendo". Er, that'd be Commodore that made the Amiga, right?
As I said elsewhere, Nintendo gave the impression of not being that bothered about Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.
Tape? TAPE? Why weren't floppy drives popular? Over here the good games were on floppy!
Because they were bloody expensive. I'm aware that the US market was pretty much disk-based by the mid 80s, and I guess if you factor the cost of a disk drive into being an essential item, it'd explain why the NES seemed so much cheaper.
Yeah, tapes were ******* horrible, but they were cheap.
I had an Atari 8-bit that *did* have a disk system because Dixons (retail chain) were selling them very cheaply, and it was bloody brilliant. I later got a program that transferred most of my tape games to disk and I *really* wish I'd bought that earlier, but that said... disks were expensive, and tapes weren't.
Yep. And again, while you were playing Dizzy, Americans were playing Ultima, Wizardry and Earl Weaver.
Never played Dizzy myself at the time- it was never released for the Atari 8-bit computers for some reason- and didn't like the look of it when I tried it later on, but I picked up a *lot* of good budget games. The likes of Ultima were available on import, and later on via UK distributors, and then there were full-price (by UK standards) games like Mercenary that presented one with a wireframe world to explore, and was later distributed in the US.
Yes I know, because I was the one who first pointed out that reduced manufacturing cost was the entire rationale behind the chipset's development(!) (See this post earlier in our discussion).
Note also in the post that you just replied to, I said...
but then it'd have just been a redesigned C64 and probably not have had the manufacturing cost savings.
In other words, I'm not claiming that C64 compatibility would have been a good move, just that the only way to ensure the C16's success in the US would have defeated the whole point of the exercise!
Commodore was a victim of their own success with the C64 in that respect...
But the C16 did best in less affluent countries (did well in Mexico).
I know that too, but how much of that success was due to it being sold off at a very low price? Did they continue manufacturing it (including the C116) for those markets after it had flopped in North America and the initial stock had been sold off?
The Amiga 500 and its peripherals were simply too expensive for many people.
Yes, I know- I was one of those people; I didn't get an Amiga until the early 1990s.
So there was definitely a market for a cheap, entry-level home computer below the Amiga.
Yes, it was called the Commodore 64! (Or its rivals like the ZX Spectrum, or the Atari XL/XE, which I owned).
And while I did agree that a C65-like machine would have filled a gap in the market, that isn't what you were claiming originally; you were saying that a C65 would have rendered the low-end Amigas unnecessary.
And there is a good chance that the Commodore 8-bit series, if it kept going, would have morphed into an 8/16-bit system like the Apple II series did with the IIgs.
Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't. But I doubt that it would have been as good as the Amiga if it had morphed, piece-by-piece into a 16-bit system, and I doubt that system would have worked out any cheaper than the Amiga 500 by the end of the decade if it was comparable in power to the latter.
The Amiga was better than the PC partly because it was designed from the ground up (both hardware and OS) unlike the PC, which was built from off-the-shelf parts, used a 16-bit knockoff of a famous 8-bit OS and had lots of complex kluges plastered on to workaround the workarounds for the workarounds for the limitations of the original design.
As for the IIGS, yes, from what I heard it sounded like a very nice machine, and IMHO Apple should have based the Mac OS around that hardware instead of having two separate lines. But it wasn't a cheap machine (mind you, neither was the Apple II). Maybe I'm biased because I owned an Amiga and never owned a C64, but I think it's pretty clear that while an improved (8-bit) C64 would have been worthwhile in the mid-80s, it would have been a poor choice to rely on that instead of the Amiga for the long term.
The C64's good years are quite noticeable, 84 to 87. From the crash of 84, when people who still wanted to do electronic gaming almost had to jump to more expensive than a game console 8-bit computers, till the ascendancy of the NES.
It lasted quite a long time in the UK- albeit having to share the market with the massive selling ZX Spectrum. Over here, the NES wasn't particularly successful (at least not compared to the US.)
In fact, the NES was outsold here by the Sega Master System- possibly because that was well-marketed, whereas AFAICT Nintendo didn't much care about Europe- but neither console dominated the UK gaming market, which remained mainly home computer based during the late 8-bit and early-16 bit eras. It wasn't until the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES came along that the UK *really* went for console gaming in a big way. (Come to think of it, the Atari VCS wasn't as big here either).
The NES may have been cheaper than the C64 (which AFAIK was aleady very cheap in the US) but I'll bet the difference was quickly made up by the cost of the games! Mind you, here in the UK, we had "budget games"- mainly sold on tape- which were £1.99 to £2.99 (double that to get the price in today's terms), and even our "full price" games weren't as expensive as those in the US, which seemed to be quite expensive- so maybe you guys were already used to paying big money for your games!
Having said that, had the C128 been a better successor to the C64, then things could have turned out much different. A successful 8-bit series through the late '80s might have eliminated the need to keep a budget entry model in the Amiga lineup. If we had a C256 and C512, the A500+ and A600 might never have been released.
Honestly? I think that would have been a major mistake.
Having a vastly improved higher-end 8-bit machine would have been good in the mid-80s, but it would still have been utterly misguided to rely on it as a replacement for a mass-market 16/32-bit machine; they'd have been hammered at the end of the decade as people moved towards true 16-bit models.
To have an 8-bit machine remotely competitive with what the Amiga 500 was- or even the Atari ST- they'd have ended up having to redesign the whole thing anyway (pointless duplication) and then have it hobbled with an 8-bit CPU. And even if it was bloody good, it would still be perceived as an 8-bit machine.
The A500 Plus was just an A500 with a slightly enhanced chipset and revised OS onboard, not really a new machine. The A600 was stupid, sure, because it was another example of something being repurposed or repositioned to where it made no sense- it was originally meant as the A300, a cost-reduced budget model, but was sold as the A500's replacement until the latter's true successor came along six months later (i.e. the A1200). But neither of these have much relevance to the hypothetical "C256" or "C512" anyway.
The C16 family was a good idea gone bad. Ideally, they should have released the C16 as a compatible successor to the VIC20
AFAIK, in the US, the C64 itself had become the de facto successor to the Vic 20 anyway, purely because it was being sold so cheaply there.
I also understand that this meant C= weren't actually making much money on them, and this is why Tramiel was forced out (i.e. he won the 8-bit computer market, but it was mostly a pyrrhic victory.) But that wasn't the end-buyer's problem...
At any rate, I think that by the time the C16 came out in late-1984, compatibility with the Vic 20 wouldn't have been that big a selling point- the latter was yesterday's machine by then. C64 compatibility *would* have ensured its success, but then it'd have just been a redesigned C64 and probably not have had the manufacturing cost savings.
Yes, the Plus/4 was pointless, totally overlapping the C64 market without compatibility. As I said, the chipset was never intended for a midrange machine like that originally. Even the C16 was probably too close to the C64's forced-down price to really have a chance of success; the only clear gap in the market below the C64 (that would warrant an entirely different architecture being launched) was for something like the C116, i.e. the original plan. But I don't know if that would have sold in the US anyway.
The Atari STe line had the same problem with games, very few took advantage of the improved graphics and digital sound available on the newer machine.
The STe was clearly designed to close the gap between the "vanilla" ST (and STFM) and the Amiga, which had come down in price by that point. It might have worked... had Atari directly replaced the STFM with the STE at the same price when it launched.
Problem was that- almost certainly due to Jack Tramiel's penny-pinching short-sightedness- they charged more for the STe and continued to sell it alongside the STFM. So anyone buying an ST because it was cheap would get the STFM, and anyone who had a bit more to spend would have gone for the Amiga, whose superior power was already taken advantage of by existing software.
Hence there was no reason to buy an STe, so no-one bought an STe, so no-one developed software to take advantage of it, so there was no reason to buy an STe.... vicious circle.
Had the STe become the base model, there would eventually have been enough in circulation to make it worth supporting. They didn't, and it flopped. The STe *did* eventually replace the STFM circa mid-1991, but too little, too late- the ST's terminal decline had already started by then.
I called it "Commode-odor". I was an Atari fan, but most of my friends had C=64s. A few years later, though, I got an Amiga.
Assuming you mean the 8-bit Atari 400 and 800 (and its compatible redesigns, the XL and XE series), I did pretty much the same thing- was an Atari fanboy, but ended up with an Amiga. When one knows a little more about the "Commodore" Amiga and "Atari", it all seems a bit silly.
The major irony is that the Amiga developers included a number of ex-Atari staff- most significantly Jay Miner- who had worked on the 400/800 and the VCS/2600 before that. It represented (some have argued) a continued thread of architectural design that the 400/800 had significantly improved upon from the VCS, and had the same state-of-the-art custom chipset approach as its predecessors. (Indeed, just as happened with the 400 and 800, the Amiga was originally meant to be a console, before it evolved into a computer).
Also worth noting that "Amiga" was originally an independent company and it was only later bought by Commodore (after some legal wrangling with Atari, who'd had some involvement with them).
Meanwhile, Jack Tramiel had left Commodore (after falling out with the management), bought Atari Inc's computer and console division (i.e. the one that brought us the VCS and 400/800), which formed his new Atari Corp. The latter was a very different company to Atari Inc. (very obviously a much more shoestring operation). The Atari ST was designed by a different team after Tramiel had sacked most of the old Atari Inc. engineers, and very much reflected the "new" Atari; affordable, but much more off-the-shelf parts.
Atari Corp continued selling the XL and XE (cost-reduced versions of the 400 and 800), but they didn't design it; they merely milked the profits from a design they'd inherited while they focused on *their* Atari ST.
So... which was really the "true" successor to the Atari 400 and 800? By any measure, it was the "Commodore" Amiga. Who cares who made it? I briefly owned an ST because I couldn't afford an Amiga, but I ended up selling it and buying the latter a year later.
Spreading out into bizarre orphan architectures like the C16, C116, Plus/4, B128, C264 and all the other useless cruft they came up with.
While they (like Tramiel's Atari Corp. did later on) probably did too many overlapping things at once, it's only fair to point out that the apparently pointless introduction of a new, C64-incompatible architecture for the C16, C116 and Plus/4 family did supposedly start out for sensible reasons. According to the WP article, Jack Tramiel was paranoid that (as they'd done in many other industries), the Japanese would swoop in and undercut everyone with ultra-cheap consumer-oriented machines. That's why the chipset is inferior in many ways to the older C64 design; its original purpose was to be much *cheaper* than the C64 to manufacture, and apparently, the rubber-keyed (i.e. low cost) C116 was closest to the original intent.
However, the perceived threat to the home computer market never materialised (*), Tramiel left Commodore and the management was left with a chipset they didn't know what to do with. Presumably, for political and business reasons it was better for management to launch *something* rather than write off the chipset, but this would explain why the decision didn't seem to make sense- by the time the machines came out, the chipset's raison d'etre was past and management had to do something, so shoved it in some would-be midrange machines that overlapped with the established C64.
(*) Ironically, the Japanese took over the US market another way, by launching the NES and everyone buying them for gaming instead of home computers.
C-128 was in 1985, the Acorn BBC had 20, 40 & 80 column modes (and a teletext mode) in 1981.
Yes, this is correct. Technically, I guess it could depend how one interprets
[The] first home computer with 40 and 80 column displays, dual processors, three operating systems, 128k memory via MMU and one heck of a door stop.
Was the BBC truly a "home computer"? I'd say yes, though it overlapped the educational market too, but one could argue the point.
And perhaps it could have meant "(40 and 80 column displays) BOOLEAN-AND (dual processors) AND (three operating systems) AND (128k memory via MMU)".
That said, this is probably overanalysing. The BBC Micro wasn't that successful outside the UK, and the US tech industry (well, the US in general!) tends to assume that itself == the worldwide situation. So my suspicion is that Herd probably wasn't aware of it, or at least of it being a "home computer" (if it was).
The C65 should have been what made it to market, not the weird 128 with its obsolete the day it left the factory CP/M mode running at half the speed of its competitors.
Whatever the merits or demerits of the two machines is irrelevant; the C128 came out in 1985, whereas the C65 wasn't developed circa 1990-91.
C64 diehards have an obsession with the C65 and Commodore's perceived mistake in abandoning it, but despite the latter's numerous crap decisions, I'm sorry to say that in this case they were absolutely right.
The C64 was still selling as a budget option circa 1991 (*) viable due to sheer momentum. The 16/32-bit Amiga was not only established as the successor, it had already taken over (in Europe, at least) and was already nearing *its* own commercial peak(!)
Trying to release a (sort of) new 8-bit format by that point, even a very good one, would have made absolutely no sense, flopped horribly and stood on the low-end Amiga models' toes, mudding the waters pointlessly.
They could have sold it as cheaply as the C64 (i.e. the high manufacturing costs of a new machine selling at the same price as a "wringing the last profit from established cash cow model"), but what would the point of that have been?
The C128 at least came to market when there was still *possibly* a gap in the market for a high-end 8-bit machine between the C64 and the new (but still very expensive) Amiga.
(*) Apparently C= were still making them when they went bankrupt circa mid-1994(!)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple are loathe to break the smoothness of their cases with something so practical as a vent hole
Plus ca change...
Steve Jobs insisted on the idea of [the 1980 Apple III having] no fan or air vents – in order to make the computer run quietly. Jobs would later push this same ideology onto almost all Apple models he had control of – from the Apple Lisa and Macintosh 128K to the iMac.
Bad as Bernie Madoff ... and noone shot him either. What is wrong with ol' fashion vigilante justice = rope + tree? America slumbers under cosmopolitan legalism .... way too feminized & pussified a culture .
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
It's called lying, and American Law specifically allows partners of the NSA to issue any form of false statement to the public, their shareholders, their investors, or any other non-governmental entity. In other words, once any individual or corporation gets in bed with the NSA, you can never again believe a word they say.
Taking the highlighted section above at face value, logically that would mean that they were legally able to claim "We have never had any involvement with the NSA" when the complete opposite was the case.
While this may come across as smartassery in other situations, I've no doubt that in this case some weasel of a lawyer could- and would- use this in defending a company caught in flagrante with the NSA. This renders *any* company that *might* plausibly be involved with the NSA (including virtually all American ones) as suspicious.
I remember Intel doing something like this back in the days of the 386, except without the energy savings.
Actually it was Pentium [wikipedia.org] which was a precursor for these processors.
Near enough... he was saving mental energy by settling for the approximately correct answer.
The TV is a display, why the fuck do you have a display on your remote?
"Yo Dawg".
You missed a step in the P3 -> Core, which was the Pentium M. Intel was pretty much forced to build it, because power hungry P4's sucked in laptops.
I remember at the time (mid-2000s?) *before* the original Core line came out, at least one article in Personal Computer World magazine extolled the virtues of the Pentium M. They quite seriously suggested it was worth considering for use in a desktop system. (IIRC, there were desktop motherboards that supported the Pentium M, the only issue was that you had to take more care with the heatsink and cooling than you would with a Pentium 4- or something like that).
Really, the Amiga OS nowadays is just a plaything for a few very hardcore hobbyists willing to pay for overpriced, underpowered custom hardware that isn't even directly compatible with the original Amiga anyway. Amiga OS (and the original hardware) was fantastic in its day, and beat the living heck out of MS-DOS and early Windows, but that was a long time ago. Anyone for whom Amiga OS/hardware compatibility was essential or even useful would have been forced to give up and migrate elsewhere by the late-90s at most. For that reason, even if one *could* upgrade it to a modern OS, it'd make more sense just to write a new OS from scratch- the "classic" core would just end up being legacy baggage that would please the Amiga obsessives because they could call it Amiga OS, but have little real world use beyond muddying the design.
(Sorry, didn't want that to sound like a dismissal of the genuinely innovative Amiga OS, but things have moved on too far now).
Also, the rights to the various Amiga and Commodore IPs (names, hardware and software all separate) have been split up, passed around like a bad game of pass the parcel, sublicensed and disputed; I won't go into the details because (a) I can't be bothered and (b) I'm not sure myself! :-)
:-)
But... yeah. Technically, last time I heard you can still buy a "modern" AmigaOne and run the new versions of AmigaOS on it.
(*) Though that may be for values of "active" comparable to the rate of flow of glass in medieval windows. And yes, I know that's possibly a myth.
(**) To be fair, this is mentioned on Slashdot at regular intervals, so it's possible that many of you are aware of this anyway. The rights to the Amiga name, to manufacture the hardware and to the OS http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2710941&cid=39268663
The H.A.M. (Hold and Modify) demo showing 4096 colors was pretty impressive at a time when most PCs were stuck with 256 colors
HAM was around almost two years before VGA debuted (with the PS/2 in April 1987)! (*)
The downside was that it was hard to use for animated graphics, since the colour of most pixels were modified shades of the one to their left, meaning one had to take into account surrounding pixels when moving an object to avoid miscoloured streaking. Few action games used it, though I'm still convinced more games could have exploited HAM if the problem had been analysed methodically and restrictions on the use of base colours and general shading worked out to minimise artifacts and keep calculations workable.
Possibly this wasn't really considered because in Europe (where the Amiga was popular), most 16-bit games were also written for the Atari ST (***) and this would have made them harder to adapt. Hence most used the regular 32-colours-from-4096 or occasionally, the sort-of-64-colour "halfbrite" modes.
(*) AFAICT the best widespread PC adaptor around when the Amiga launched was EGA (i.e. 16 colours from 64). IBM *did* apparently have a graphics adaptor comparable to VGA in 1984, but the card alone was four times the price the Amiga cost when it launched the following year(!)
(**) HAM gave 12-bit colour using only 6 bits per pixel. One could either choose from 16 "base colours" (chosen from a palette of 4096 RGB colours) or choose to modify the red, green or blue component of the pixel to its immediate left, meaning that it could take up to 3 pixel positions to get an exact value; this led to fringing, which could be minimsed by choosing the base colours wisely (and by dynamically changing the base colours on every line with software assistance).
(***) Apparently there was a program for the Atari ST that gave it a software-assisted 512 colour display, but I don't know how restricted *that* was; apparently there were timing issues.
I was long gone by the C65 time but heard about it. I was under the impression that this was an attempt to keep the engineers busy while they looked for someone to buy the company. The person designing the C65 was a chip designer so it may have been even worse off then my bunch of miscreants were in 84.
Yes- Dave Haynie, who was still there at that time made a comment a while back that pretty much confirms this, saying that the C65 (which he didn't think was a good idea either) was essentially driven by one guy and that "it was strange times at Commodore near the end"
Anyway, thanks for all the interesting feedback!
Let me clarify: it might have reducing the pricing pressure that resulted in the low-end Amiga models that we actually received. The A500 and A600 would no longer have been Commodore's entry level computer models. And as such, with more upward flexibility in pricing, they could have had better specifications.
The Amiga 500 had a bloody great specification for its time. The Amiga's problem later on was that C= rested on their laurels too long and didn't invest enough in developing it until the PC had caught up (even if the latter's architecture and OS was still horrid) and the Mega Drive and SNES matched it for 2D parallax gaming.
In particular, the A600 might have come with a faster processor, more memory and a full keyboard.
As I mentioned, the A600 was (AFAIK) meant to be the A300, a cost-reduced budget machine. If it had been something else it wouldn't have meaningfully been the same machine. More importantly, it only really existed due to the past success of the A500 years previously; any high-end "A600" in your alternate past-future wouldn't be analogous to the one we saw, except in name!
Speculating as to what the A600 might have been therefore isn't just pointless, it's meaningless; like asking whether Germany would have won WWII if the Roman Empire had never existed. Europe- if not world history- would likely be totally different, a state analogous to Germany might not even exist, the politics would be totally different, and it's unlikely that the Nazis would have risen in *that* place at *that* time in that situation, so even WWII itself wouldn't have existed though other conflicts would have.
Perhaps. But one reason why such a series would remain successful would due to software momentum. Remember, Commodore's super-budget computers were really popular in places like central Europe. If the Amiga doesn't have a large base of software written in Hungarian, but the 8-bit series did, do you think that they'd be more apt to purchase a used A500 or a new C512?
They probably wouldn't have been able to afford a new C512. And (if it was cheaper but less capable as implied), C= would have been foregoing many people who bought- and *were* able to afford- the Amiga in Western Europe (making it the most popular computer of its era) for lower-value sales in Eastern Europe. And I'm not convinced that they wouldn't have preferred a used A500 unless the C512 was really close in spec.
:-)
Anyway, this is all getting rather academic and speculative, so we'll just have to disagree on this one.
We made over a Billion dollars, whether obsolete or not.
I'm not sure what aspect of my comment this relates to, so I'll just say that (assuming you *are* Bil Herd and not an imposter!) there wasn't any disparagement towards the C64 or C128's success (or any other Commodore machine's) intended. It's simply that I don't believe that releasing the C65 (i.e. a semi-new 8-bit machine) would have made any commercial sense by 1991, regardless of how good it was.
Then again, since your article on the 1985 C128 refers to that machine as "one last 8 bit computer", it's possible that I misunderstood what you meant anyway.
Secret papers show extent of senior royals' veto over bills.
Oh, I know, the Amiga lasted longer over there too...basically because of the anti-console bias that Uncle Clive encouraged with his advertising and the UK government encouraged with their duties and tariffs on US/Japanese machines to protect Uncle Clive from the likes of Commodore and Nintendo.
Hmm... because Commodore didn't advertise like that in the US?
Also, you say "I know the Amiga lasted longer over there too" then give one of the reasons as "duties and tariffs on US/Japanese machines to protect Uncle Clive from the likes of Commodore and Nintendo". Er, that'd be Commodore that made the Amiga, right?
As I said elsewhere, Nintendo gave the impression of not being that bothered about Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.
Tape? TAPE? Why weren't floppy drives popular? Over here the good games were on floppy!
Because they were bloody expensive. I'm aware that the US market was pretty much disk-based by the mid 80s, and I guess if you factor the cost of a disk drive into being an essential item, it'd explain why the NES seemed so much cheaper.
Yeah, tapes were ******* horrible, but they were cheap.
I had an Atari 8-bit that *did* have a disk system because Dixons (retail chain) were selling them very cheaply, and it was bloody brilliant. I later got a program that transferred most of my tape games to disk and I *really* wish I'd bought that earlier, but that said... disks were expensive, and tapes weren't.
Yep. And again, while you were playing Dizzy, Americans were playing Ultima, Wizardry and Earl Weaver.
Never played Dizzy myself at the time- it was never released for the Atari 8-bit computers for some reason- and didn't like the look of it when I tried it later on, but I picked up a *lot* of good budget games. The likes of Ultima were available on import, and later on via UK distributors, and then there were full-price (by UK standards) games like Mercenary that presented one with a wireframe world to explore, and was later distributed in the US.
And would have raised its BOM costs.
Yes I know, because I was the one who first pointed out that reduced manufacturing cost was the entire rationale behind the chipset's development(!) (See this post earlier in our discussion).
Note also in the post that you just replied to, I said...
but then it'd have just been a redesigned C64 and probably not have had the manufacturing cost savings.
In other words, I'm not claiming that C64 compatibility would have been a good move, just that the only way to ensure the C16's success in the US would have defeated the whole point of the exercise!
Commodore was a victim of their own success with the C64 in that respect...
But the C16 did best in less affluent countries (did well in Mexico).
I know that too, but how much of that success was due to it being sold off at a very low price? Did they continue manufacturing it (including the C116) for those markets after it had flopped in North America and the initial stock had been sold off?
The Commodore 64 was still selling well into the late '80s outside of Canada and the US.
Yes, I'm well aware of that- I live in the UK and already said that myself elsewhere!
The Amiga 500 and its peripherals were simply too expensive for many people.
Yes, I know- I was one of those people; I didn't get an Amiga until the early 1990s.
So there was definitely a market for a cheap, entry-level home computer below the Amiga.
Yes, it was called the Commodore 64! (Or its rivals like the ZX Spectrum, or the Atari XL/XE, which I owned).
And while I did agree that a C65-like machine would have filled a gap in the market, that isn't what you were claiming originally; you were saying that a C65 would have rendered the low-end Amigas unnecessary.
And there is a good chance that the Commodore 8-bit series, if it kept going, would have morphed into an 8/16-bit system like the Apple II series did with the IIgs.
Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn't. But I doubt that it would have been as good as the Amiga if it had morphed, piece-by-piece into a 16-bit system, and I doubt that system would have worked out any cheaper than the Amiga 500 by the end of the decade if it was comparable in power to the latter.
The Amiga was better than the PC partly because it was designed from the ground up (both hardware and OS) unlike the PC, which was built from off-the-shelf parts, used a 16-bit knockoff of a famous 8-bit OS and had lots of complex kluges plastered on to workaround the workarounds for the workarounds for the limitations of the original design.
As for the IIGS, yes, from what I heard it sounded like a very nice machine, and IMHO Apple should have based the Mac OS around that hardware instead of having two separate lines. But it wasn't a cheap machine (mind you, neither was the Apple II). Maybe I'm biased because I owned an Amiga and never owned a C64, but I think it's pretty clear that while an improved (8-bit) C64 would have been worthwhile in the mid-80s, it would have been a poor choice to rely on that instead of the Amiga for the long term.
The C64's good years are quite noticeable, 84 to 87. From the crash of 84, when people who still wanted to do electronic gaming almost had to jump to more expensive than a game console 8-bit computers, till the ascendancy of the NES.
It lasted quite a long time in the UK- albeit having to share the market with the massive selling ZX Spectrum. Over here, the NES wasn't particularly successful (at least not compared to the US.)
In fact, the NES was outsold here by the Sega Master System- possibly because that was well-marketed, whereas AFAICT Nintendo didn't much care about Europe- but neither console dominated the UK gaming market, which remained mainly home computer based during the late 8-bit and early-16 bit eras. It wasn't until the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES came along that the UK *really* went for console gaming in a big way. (Come to think of it, the Atari VCS wasn't as big here either).
The NES may have been cheaper than the C64 (which AFAIK was aleady very cheap in the US) but I'll bet the difference was quickly made up by the cost of the games! Mind you, here in the UK, we had "budget games"- mainly sold on tape- which were £1.99 to £2.99 (double that to get the price in today's terms), and even our "full price" games weren't as expensive as those in the US, which seemed to be quite expensive- so maybe you guys were already used to paying big money for your games!
Having said that, had the C128 been a better successor to the C64, then things could have turned out much different. A successful 8-bit series through the late '80s might have eliminated the need to keep a budget entry model in the Amiga lineup. If we had a C256 and C512, the A500+ and A600 might never have been released.
Honestly? I think that would have been a major mistake.
Having a vastly improved higher-end 8-bit machine would have been good in the mid-80s, but it would still have been utterly misguided to rely on it as a replacement for a mass-market 16/32-bit machine; they'd have been hammered at the end of the decade as people moved towards true 16-bit models.
To have an 8-bit machine remotely competitive with what the Amiga 500 was- or even the Atari ST- they'd have ended up having to redesign the whole thing anyway (pointless duplication) and then have it hobbled with an 8-bit CPU. And even if it was bloody good, it would still be perceived as an 8-bit machine.
The A500 Plus was just an A500 with a slightly enhanced chipset and revised OS onboard, not really a new machine. The A600 was stupid, sure, because it was another example of something being repurposed or repositioned to where it made no sense- it was originally meant as the A300, a cost-reduced budget model, but was sold as the A500's replacement until the latter's true successor came along six months later (i.e. the A1200). But neither of these have much relevance to the hypothetical "C256" or "C512" anyway.
The C16 family was a good idea gone bad. Ideally, they should have released the C16 as a compatible successor to the VIC20
AFAIK, in the US, the C64 itself had become the de facto successor to the Vic 20 anyway, purely because it was being sold so cheaply there.
I also understand that this meant C= weren't actually making much money on them, and this is why Tramiel was forced out (i.e. he won the 8-bit computer market, but it was mostly a pyrrhic victory.) But that wasn't the end-buyer's problem...
At any rate, I think that by the time the C16 came out in late-1984, compatibility with the Vic 20 wouldn't have been that big a selling point- the latter was yesterday's machine by then. C64 compatibility *would* have ensured its success, but then it'd have just been a redesigned C64 and probably not have had the manufacturing cost savings.
Yes, the Plus/4 was pointless, totally overlapping the C64 market without compatibility. As I said, the chipset was never intended for a midrange machine like that originally. Even the C16 was probably too close to the C64's forced-down price to really have a chance of success; the only clear gap in the market below the C64 (that would warrant an entirely different architecture being launched) was for something like the C116, i.e. the original plan. But I don't know if that would have sold in the US anyway.
"Modern Country Band" is the name of my Mumford and Sons cover band.
Was "Trust Fund Wurzels" already taken?
The Atari STe line had the same problem with games, very few took advantage of the improved graphics and digital sound available on the newer machine.
The STe was clearly designed to close the gap between the "vanilla" ST (and STFM) and the Amiga, which had come down in price by that point. It might have worked... had Atari directly replaced the STFM with the STE at the same price when it launched.
Problem was that- almost certainly due to Jack Tramiel's penny-pinching short-sightedness- they charged more for the STe and continued to sell it alongside the STFM. So anyone buying an ST because it was cheap would get the STFM, and anyone who had a bit more to spend would have gone for the Amiga, whose superior power was already taken advantage of by existing software.
Hence there was no reason to buy an STe, so no-one bought an STe, so no-one developed software to take advantage of it, so there was no reason to buy an STe.... vicious circle.
Had the STe become the base model, there would eventually have been enough in circulation to make it worth supporting. They didn't, and it flopped. The STe *did* eventually replace the STFM circa mid-1991, but too little, too late- the ST's terminal decline had already started by then.
I called it "Commode-odor". I was an Atari fan, but most of my friends had C=64s. A few years later, though, I got an Amiga.
Assuming you mean the 8-bit Atari 400 and 800 (and its compatible redesigns, the XL and XE series), I did pretty much the same thing- was an Atari fanboy, but ended up with an Amiga. When one knows a little more about the "Commodore" Amiga and "Atari", it all seems a bit silly.
The major irony is that the Amiga developers included a number of ex-Atari staff- most significantly Jay Miner- who had worked on the 400/800 and the VCS/2600 before that. It represented (some have argued) a continued thread of architectural design that the 400/800 had significantly improved upon from the VCS, and had the same state-of-the-art custom chipset approach as its predecessors. (Indeed, just as happened with the 400 and 800, the Amiga was originally meant to be a console, before it evolved into a computer).
Also worth noting that "Amiga" was originally an independent company and it was only later bought by Commodore (after some legal wrangling with Atari, who'd had some involvement with them).
Meanwhile, Jack Tramiel had left Commodore (after falling out with the management), bought Atari Inc's computer and console division (i.e. the one that brought us the VCS and 400/800), which formed his new Atari Corp. The latter was a very different company to Atari Inc. (very obviously a much more shoestring operation). The Atari ST was designed by a different team after Tramiel had sacked most of the old Atari Inc. engineers, and very much reflected the "new" Atari; affordable, but much more off-the-shelf parts.
Atari Corp continued selling the XL and XE (cost-reduced versions of the 400 and 800), but they didn't design it; they merely milked the profits from a design they'd inherited while they focused on *their* Atari ST.
So... which was really the "true" successor to the Atari 400 and 800? By any measure, it was the "Commodore" Amiga. Who cares who made it? I briefly owned an ST because I couldn't afford an Amiga, but I ended up selling it and buying the latter a year later.
Spreading out into bizarre orphan architectures like the C16, C116, Plus/4, B128, C264 and all the other useless cruft they came up with.
While they (like Tramiel's Atari Corp. did later on) probably did too many overlapping things at once, it's only fair to point out that the apparently pointless introduction of a new, C64-incompatible architecture for the C16, C116 and Plus/4 family did supposedly start out for sensible reasons. According to the WP article, Jack Tramiel was paranoid that (as they'd done in many other industries), the Japanese would swoop in and undercut everyone with ultra-cheap consumer-oriented machines. That's why the chipset is inferior in many ways to the older C64 design; its original purpose was to be much *cheaper* than the C64 to manufacture, and apparently, the rubber-keyed (i.e. low cost) C116 was closest to the original intent.
However, the perceived threat to the home computer market never materialised (*), Tramiel left Commodore and the management was left with a chipset they didn't know what to do with. Presumably, for political and business reasons it was better for management to launch *something* rather than write off the chipset, but this would explain why the decision didn't seem to make sense- by the time the machines came out, the chipset's raison d'etre was past and management had to do something, so shoved it in some would-be midrange machines that overlapped with the established C64.
(*) Ironically, the Japanese took over the US market another way, by launching the NES and everyone buying them for gaming instead of home computers.
C-128 was in 1985, the Acorn BBC had 20, 40 & 80 column modes (and a teletext mode) in 1981.
Yes, this is correct. Technically, I guess it could depend how one interprets
[The] first home computer with 40 and 80 column displays, dual processors, three operating systems, 128k memory via MMU and one heck of a door stop.
Was the BBC truly a "home computer"? I'd say yes, though it overlapped the educational market too, but one could argue the point.
And perhaps it could have meant "(40 and 80 column displays) BOOLEAN-AND (dual processors) AND (three operating systems) AND (128k memory via MMU)".
That said, this is probably overanalysing. The BBC Micro wasn't that successful outside the UK, and the US tech industry (well, the US in general!) tends to assume that itself == the worldwide situation. So my suspicion is that Herd probably wasn't aware of it, or at least of it being a "home computer" (if it was).
Edit; sorry, should read "The C65 wasn't developed until circa 1990-91".
The C65 should have been what made it to market, not the weird 128 with its obsolete the day it left the factory CP/M mode running at half the speed of its competitors.
Whatever the merits or demerits of the two machines is irrelevant; the C128 came out in 1985, whereas the C65 wasn't developed circa 1990-91.
C64 diehards have an obsession with the C65 and Commodore's perceived mistake in abandoning it, but despite the latter's numerous crap decisions, I'm sorry to say that in this case they were absolutely right.
The C64 was still selling as a budget option circa 1991 (*) viable due to sheer momentum. The 16/32-bit Amiga was not only established as the successor, it had already taken over (in Europe, at least) and was already nearing *its* own commercial peak(!)
Trying to release a (sort of) new 8-bit format by that point, even a very good one, would have made absolutely no sense, flopped horribly and stood on the low-end Amiga models' toes, mudding the waters pointlessly.
They could have sold it as cheaply as the C64 (i.e. the high manufacturing costs of a new machine selling at the same price as a "wringing the last profit from established cash cow model"), but what would the point of that have been?
The C128 at least came to market when there was still *possibly* a gap in the market for a high-end 8-bit machine between the C64 and the new (but still very expensive) Amiga.
(*) Apparently C= were still making them when they went bankrupt circa mid-1994(!)