"By late 1983 Tramiel had crushed his enemies, seen them driven before him and heard the lamentations of their dealerships. ".... wait.. isnt this a Conan reference?
I wish there was a chrome extension that would highlight cultural references on a page and link to source. Nothing more frustrating then having that feeling of unknown familiarity.
Yes we need a Part 2, it was a very enjoyable reading! The YouTube channel “Nostalgia Nerd” [1] could scratch that itch in the meantime - look for the “Amiga Story” documentary (made up of 2 videos, about one hour each), it’s well done. On the same channel there are also several longer videos about the various Atari product lines (ST, Jaguar etc).
Yeah I grew up with A500. I loved that machine. It came with a paper BASIC reference manual. It was years before I worked out what it’s purpose was. Once I did though, I was hooked,
I tried AMOS basic, though this was a little difficult because of patchy intel. No YouTube tutorials to learn from. Only books from the library or AmigaFormat magazines. Blitz basic was easier and I had some better tutorials. I progressed to writing my own games.
When I finally moved to PC I picked up rudimentary C++ to write a game, I managed but but it was difficult. Then pascal at school. Java at university. Now it’s my day job. JavaScript was learned on the job.
On the side I’ve learned groovy, scala, kotlin, go, rust.
I’ve now been a software dev for 16 years professionally and have started a consultancy this year.
All pretty much thanks to the Amiga. That machine was an Xmas present, I almost got a Nintendo instead. I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been!
what a great article - fantastic 10m read on a specific part of the computer business.....part that is arguably responsible for where the compute industry is today.
These are the people that were superior to Apple at the time - both in technology and business acumen. Then they imploded...
I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years.
The 500, 2000, and even 3000 were all refinements of the same original system. The basic platform hardly changed at all until the Amiga 1200 and 4000 in 1993, when they added AGA graphics. And it was too little, too late.
> I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the technology languish for years.
EVERYBODY lacked business acumen. Motorola, MOSTEK, TI (although they were better than most), Apple, Radio-Shack (Tandy), Tramiel, Commodore, Amiga and Intel. What a mess! It's a wonder that they ever got out of the swamp.
I guess MS, ARM and Intel all turned out doing OK. And, Steve Jobs grew up and returned (in greater numbers with a turtle-neck!) and became an incredible intuitive design-evaluator and huckster (is that what you call the person who starts a new religion?), but having lived through so much of this (including Compaq and Star (the Dallas one - not the Xerox one - but that counts too!), [EDIT: I forgot about ComputerLand and their sinister hand in all of this - and of course Garry Kildall missing the IBM meeting - I'm not even getting into the software stack with zip-zip-zimmerman] and the origins of Dell and the ending of Compaq (and Tandem and DEC and HP!), everything seems to chaotic and random.
I know that we all (probably) like to feel like we are the gladiators on the field, and winning from strategy and planning and cunning and intelligence and skill - but in retrospect - everything seems so random to me.
The expandability of the original Amiga platform is what kept the ecosystem so vibrant that there almost wasn't a need to update the platform for so long - so many expansions that the Mac people could only dream about. Video Toaster, to name but one. I started with an A1000 that I hacked a 20MB hard drive into, along with the usual RAM expansions. I moved on to a fully-loaded A2000 system with a 68030 CPU, 1GB of hard drive space, 64MB of RAM, ethernet card (coax), an Apple Mac emulator card, a PC card that ran PC software on the card, a PBX card to hook up to interface with the phone line, and just so much more - while the Mac was still pushing black and white graphics and 512KB RAM (and very, very difficult to expand the RAM).
I later got an A1200, and then an A4000 as well. While the platform updates were great, those weren't what really made the Amiga shine - it was the multitasking OS that the Mac and PC didn't really have - they were nowhere near Amiga OS, which was pretty amazing. Through AREXX any application could control any other application, which is something Windows and OSX still don't really do. I mean to some extent it's sort of possible now, but not as easily as it was with Amiga OS.
If Commodore was still around and had not gone out of business, I'd absolutely be using Amigas today. (yes, I know it sort of still exists, but it isn't really funded or widely used)
The Amiga OS really was amazing. I learned a ton on that system. I taught myself C, wrote a BBS program, connected my BBS to UUCP news and email, etc. I started off with an Amiga 500, added a Supra 2 meg expansion and a hard drive. A couple years later, I moved on to an Amiga 3000, added more RAM, more HD's, a multi serial board, etc. I remember workbench 2.0 being such a huge upgrade.
It was really cool for the time, but I always felt Commodore let it stagnate. In the late 80's, they could've kept up. By 1993, 486's were common, lots of folks had super VGA, soundblaster cards, etc. Amigas needed a LOT of expansion to keep up.
I still play around with Amiga emulators. I have a MIST box, and am hoping to get a Vampire standalone board.
I lusted for a video toaster - though I was like 7yrs old at the time.
I had an amiga 1000 my dad got and the preemptive multi-tasking is what really set the amiga apart. The engineering was next level: 512K with double-sided, double density disks was enough for anyone.
> Through AREXX any application could control any other application, which is something Windows and OSX still don't really do. I mean to some extent it's sort of possible now, but not as easily as it was with Amiga OS.
AppleScript was introduced in System 7.1.1 back in 1993. Maybe ARexx scripting was much better, I don't know.
(Support for scriptable Macintosh applications actually arrived in 1991, but there was no built-in scripting language for it.)
AREXX was around in 1987. It was amazing. Pretty much every application had an "AREXX port" to allow scripting. And I used it extensively. The closest I've seen to anything like it is OLE on Windows, but it's not very accessible or pervasive like AREXX was in every application.
Maybe with great management the Amiga could have become something like the Mac, but that's the best hope.
If Microsoft had released Word and a spreadsheet for it perhaps it would have had a chance. The Amiga did get Word Perfect though which may have been a bigger word processor at the time. It had Pro Write as well which was a very good word processor that even had real time spell checking.
The Amiga was such a great machine. But it was probably doomed to be marginal by the time the Amiga 500 came out.
"Commodore's phones rang off the hook. They had 50 calls a day from people wanting to sell the PET. Distribution couldn't keep up with demand. The PET's success was partly due to it's built-in BASIC interpreter. Commodore outsourced BASIC to a small firm called Micro-Soft. Micro-Soft agreed to be paid per PET once delivered. Delays hurt cash flow so much they nearly went under. Micro-Soft were saved only by Apple licensing Micro-Soft BASIC for their Apple II."
Twenty years later, in 1997, with Apple near bankruptcy, Microsoft invested $150 million in to Apple.
It's interesting to wonder what would have happened had these companies not throwing each other a lifeline at these critical times, or if they instead just bought the other outright.
It was in the renewal of the Applesoft Basic license that Apple gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac interface:
> Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed by John Sculley in November 1985.
>Commodore licensed BASIC from Microsoft in 1977 on a "pay once, no royalties" basis after Jack Tramiel turned down Bill Gates' offer of a $3 per unit fee, stating, "I'm already married," and would pay no more than $25,000 for a perpetual license
> Shivji’s Atari 130ST display units were hollow cases, but people could see them.
Those were live STs, running actual OS bits. There weren't many of them working (I think we had five machines, and limited supply of the custom chips). But they were there for people to see, pushing real honest pixels. From time to time a display machine would die (IIRC they were overheating a lot), and the hw folks would take it away and fix it.
I owned an St when I was a teenager, I still think it stands a lot in the shadow of the amiga. I was excited to read a bit more about the background story (I know bits and parts of it), but this article is terribly written. It is very incoherent and different characters are mentioned at random without any relation to each other. It almost feels like a row of (only marginally related) bullet points that seem to have been pulled together from different sources. There are lots of grammar mistakes kissing definite and indefinite articles...) which makes it very hard to follow.
As a note to future writers, if you put together a story like this and seemingly start with a "main" character, don't just start talking about other characters (also companies) without telling how they relate to the main characters.
Same here. I had an Atari 8-bit and couldn't wait for the Amiga to be released. The ST fell short of expectations but was still lots of fun that I couldn't get with the 8-bit like Megamax C and Minix. Gem was fine but not that exciting and I had the higher res monochrome monitor so not many games just Magaroids and Balance of Power.
I read the post as a fairly complete collected history and overlooked the incoherence. There were some details I didn't know or had forgotten. I had a good view of the Atari side of things as I had connections that got first ST units and early beta software and programming docs.
31 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd
https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22
I tried AMOS basic, though this was a little difficult because of patchy intel. No YouTube tutorials to learn from. Only books from the library or AmigaFormat magazines. Blitz basic was easier and I had some better tutorials. I progressed to writing my own games.
When I finally moved to PC I picked up rudimentary C++ to write a game, I managed but but it was difficult. Then pascal at school. Java at university. Now it’s my day job. JavaScript was learned on the job.
On the side I’ve learned groovy, scala, kotlin, go, rust.
I’ve now been a software dev for 16 years professionally and have started a consultancy this year.
All pretty much thanks to the Amiga. That machine was an Xmas present, I almost got a Nintendo instead. I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been!
These are the people that were superior to Apple at the time - both in technology and business acumen. Then they imploded...
On that subject, there's this article from the fantastic Ditial Antiquarian blog:
"We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up"
https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-3-we-made...
The 500, 2000, and even 3000 were all refinements of the same original system. The basic platform hardly changed at all until the Amiga 1200 and 4000 in 1993, when they added AGA graphics. And it was too little, too late.
EVERYBODY lacked business acumen. Motorola, MOSTEK, TI (although they were better than most), Apple, Radio-Shack (Tandy), Tramiel, Commodore, Amiga and Intel. What a mess! It's a wonder that they ever got out of the swamp.
I guess MS, ARM and Intel all turned out doing OK. And, Steve Jobs grew up and returned (in greater numbers with a turtle-neck!) and became an incredible intuitive design-evaluator and huckster (is that what you call the person who starts a new religion?), but having lived through so much of this (including Compaq and Star (the Dallas one - not the Xerox one - but that counts too!), [EDIT: I forgot about ComputerLand and their sinister hand in all of this - and of course Garry Kildall missing the IBM meeting - I'm not even getting into the software stack with zip-zip-zimmerman] and the origins of Dell and the ending of Compaq (and Tandem and DEC and HP!), everything seems to chaotic and random.
I know that we all (probably) like to feel like we are the gladiators on the field, and winning from strategy and planning and cunning and intelligence and skill - but in retrospect - everything seems so random to me.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical.
I later got an A1200, and then an A4000 as well. While the platform updates were great, those weren't what really made the Amiga shine - it was the multitasking OS that the Mac and PC didn't really have - they were nowhere near Amiga OS, which was pretty amazing. Through AREXX any application could control any other application, which is something Windows and OSX still don't really do. I mean to some extent it's sort of possible now, but not as easily as it was with Amiga OS.
If Commodore was still around and had not gone out of business, I'd absolutely be using Amigas today. (yes, I know it sort of still exists, but it isn't really funded or widely used)
It was really cool for the time, but I always felt Commodore let it stagnate. In the late 80's, they could've kept up. By 1993, 486's were common, lots of folks had super VGA, soundblaster cards, etc. Amigas needed a LOT of expansion to keep up.
I still play around with Amiga emulators. I have a MIST box, and am hoping to get a Vampire standalone board.
I had an amiga 1000 my dad got and the preemptive multi-tasking is what really set the amiga apart. The engineering was next level: 512K with double-sided, double density disks was enough for anyone.
AppleScript was introduced in System 7.1.1 back in 1993. Maybe ARexx scripting was much better, I don't know.
(Support for scriptable Macintosh applications actually arrived in 1991, but there was no built-in scripting language for it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/10/
Maybe with great management the Amiga could have become something like the Mac, but that's the best hope.
If Microsoft had released Word and a spreadsheet for it perhaps it would have had a chance. The Amiga did get Word Perfect though which may have been a bigger word processor at the time. It had Pro Write as well which was a very good word processor that even had real time spell checking.
The Amiga was such a great machine. But it was probably doomed to be marginal by the time the Amiga 500 came out.
Twenty years later, in 1997, with Apple near bankruptcy, Microsoft invested $150 million in to Apple.
It's interesting to wonder what would have happened had these companies not throwing each other a lifeline at these critical times, or if they instead just bought the other outright.
> Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed by John Sculley in November 1985.
source: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC
>Commodore licensed BASIC from Microsoft in 1977 on a "pay once, no royalties" basis after Jack Tramiel turned down Bill Gates' offer of a $3 per unit fee, stating, "I'm already married," and would pay no more than $25,000 for a perpetual license
Those were live STs, running actual OS bits. There weren't many of them working (I think we had five machines, and limited supply of the custom chips). But they were there for people to see, pushing real honest pixels. From time to time a display machine would die (IIRC they were overheating a lot), and the hw folks would take it away and fix it.
As a note to future writers, if you put together a story like this and seemingly start with a "main" character, don't just start talking about other characters (also companies) without telling how they relate to the main characters.
I read the post as a fairly complete collected history and overlooked the incoherence. There were some details I didn't know or had forgotten. I had a good view of the Atari side of things as I had connections that got first ST units and early beta software and programming docs.