Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I think if Commodore had had better management the Amiga would exist today.

The Amiga could have owned the markets that Creative Labs and NVIDIA lead in today imo.

I could imagine a whole line of Amiga products ranging from video cards to audio chipsets. Every computer today could have had an Amiga chipset in it instead of Realtek or whatever.

How many billions is NVIDIA worth today? That could have been just one of the Amiga business units.

Agree, would have been very nice!

[NovaCoder]

Lack of investment in the brand and lack of vision mostly.

The CDTV also really hurt them financially and put paid to any more innovative computers.

[grond]

It's really impressive how Commodore was seemingly NOT interested in making more money from their products just because they didn't understand their own business and market. Just have a look at the A1200: it came with a lowly 020 and no fastmem. Yes, it was a cheap and attractive package, good value for the price (where Amiga once was premium quality for a premium price). But why did Commodore put a CPU on the PCB and not on one of a variety of expansion boards with differently clocked 020s and 030s and varying amounts of fastmem? They saved a dollar for the daughterboard connector and at the same time gave away the entire business that Phase5 et al took over building accelerator boards which ultimately led to almost anyone having a useless and paid for 020 CPU in their A1200s. Commodore could have offered a few basic configurations like 020, 020+fastmem, two speed steps of 030+fastmem at a good margin and have left the in-betweens and low-cost competing boards to other companies.

[khph_re]

Remove the expensive PCMCIA, make room inside for a cd-rom (optional upgrade), add half a meg of fast, and bodge a HD floppy. That's the bare minimum improvement it would need.


Ideally, the whole chipset should have been overhauled in '91.


But they hired the guy who did the PC Junior, one of IBM's biggest failures.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

The CDTV also really hurt them financially and put paid to any more innovative computers.

That's because Commodore initially REFUSED to have ANY mention of the name "Amiga" in relation to the CDTV, even refused sellers to stock it in the same place as the Amiga computers, but to treat it like a kind of premium CD player or VCR instead. It's like they were EMBARRASSED of the Amiga. Dumb fucks!

[Gorf]

One more thing: the Amiga is quite capable of a "textmode", by using Blitter and Copper the right way:

http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/CharMode

CharMode shows how the Amiga graphics hardware can generate
grid-based graphics modes with animated fonts and automatic
rendering from a byte code to patterns on screen without any
CPU overhead! It uses the Copper to program the Blitter to
program the Copper to program the Blitter so that one write
to a chipRAM buffer can update a whole pattern rectangle on
the screen, or all patterns corresponding to a certain code
- and all the work is done by the custom chips.
....

Examples of character-mapped modes that emulate PC MDA, CP/M,
PET, MSX, Memotech, Sinclair ZX-80/81, Dragon, TRS-80 and many
other classic character-mapped computers are included.

[Foebane]

Why didn't you mention it before then, Gorf?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Why didn't you mention it before then, Gorf?

Because the whole "textmode" talk was misleading:
the problem never was text vs. gfx but the lack of a flicker free higher resolution - and while it certainly did hurt the market performance a little bit, it was probably not the biggest problem ....

After we pointed all that out in this thread, I thought it might be nice to mention this specific software, that shows the flexibility of the custom chips.

[Foebane]

I always thought that "textmode" meant stuff like the BBC Micro's "Teletext" mode, or indeed, any of the 8-bit computer systems of the 1980s that had character-based graphics (which I think was ALL of them). Obviously, the PC's textmodes were the same sort of thing, a holdover from the 8-bit days that was finally killed off with Windows XP. Heck, even PC boot-up screens and BIOS settings systems don't use textmode anymore.

[matt3k]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Don't get me wrong: I was totally satisfied with my A3000 throughout the entire 90's and most of the time I felt having the superior product compared to PCs.
And while there was maybe no abundance of business software available:
FinalWriter and FinalCalc did everything I needed in the "office" department. Pagestream was great for posters, invitations, ... and there is of course the great PasTex package, that made the Amiga a first-class LaTeX citizen.
And early internet was no problem as well.

I just posted a theory, why the Amiga did not take off in the US like it should have - and while there are a couple of reasons I am quite sure RadioShack is a major one and the missing higher resolutions play some part but are less important.

I loved my 3000D back then and still use it today!

Amiga did have nice office software for sure, but easy ledger and only a very small handful of accounting products really took them out of the game.

Your points are very solid with Radio Shack, great points. They did hit the home market hard where I live. They did fill a void that the pc market had and bought time for the rest of the industry to catch up.

Resolution and text limiting it's productivity/business success, I don't think I really believe it was a material reason. If you run easy ledgers, a decent accounting software on a 1080 in lower resolution it works fine, easy to read and enough room to do your job. It would have been nice to have a scan doubled high resolution 31khz option in 85, but Commodore was their own worst enemy with the Amiga and that is imho the reason I'm still using my A3000 from 91 and not something else...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

One more thing: the Amiga is quite capable of a "textmode", by using Blitter and Copper the right way:

http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/CharMode

Thanks for that. I often wondered if this was possible, and all this time it's been done already!

Why didn't you mention it before then, Gorf?

It's irrelevant. At the time when people decided on IBM 'because it has a text mode' it was not known that the Amiga could do this. In fact it was not known that the Amiga could do anything, because before 1985 it didn't exist.

[Kin Hell]

Heck, back in the Eighties....

The Amiga was a True Pre-Emptive Multi-Tasking Computer. It's operating System was designed around a cut down version of UNIX.
Bad marketing up to the demise of C= let them down & Bill ended up getting his way. Windows 3.1 was absolutely poop compared to Workbench.

Nothing in it's day came close in any manner & it got tarnished by the PC users as a Gaming Machine. - It did that better than anything on the market at the time as well....

Nothing wrong on the Amiga with DTP, Office based programs, Graphic Manipulation, 3D Modelling or Gaming on my WB2.0 A3000. That Pizza Style Desktop is still a powerhouse in it's own right today.

The BBC used A2000's with Genlocks for their Weather Reports on the News.

& the next time you watch the original "Jurassic Park", remember the Amiga did all the Wire-Frame animation because nothing came close for smoothness on a 15Khz signal. Faster computers were used to render the detailed Skin's.

Perhaps it didn't Thrive as much as it should have done, but above all, it was "Fun Computing" & still is!

Still Love my PC with SLI 1080 Ti's for Fragging, but it can't Scroll Pinball Fantasies & others like a Real Amiga can.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Gorf

One more thing: the Amiga is quite capable of a "textmode", by using Blitter and Copper the right way:

http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/CharMode

This is a nice package. Almost makes one want to shake whoever at Commodore didn't think to have this sort of thing included.

However, even with this, it would have had to deal with the 640x200 limitation but I think this would have helped quite a bit.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

This is a nice package. Almost makes one want to shake whoever at Commodore didn't think to have this sort of thing included.

However, even with this, it would have had to deal with the 640x200 limitation but I think this would have helped quite a bit.

If 640x200 is such a limitation then why did IBM invent CGA, why was it the first graphics card offered with the PC (with support built into the BIOS), and the only one they produced for 3 years, and why were millions of PCs sold with it? Why did the hugely popular Tandy 1000 use the same resolution, and what made Tandy think they could get away with using it for their DeskMate integrated office package?

Let's face it - if the Amiga had simply been IBM compatible it could have been hugely popular in the US, but without it there was no chance.

So what did Commodore do wrong with the Amiga? They didn't put an x86 CPU in it. They filled it up with advanced hardware and software that wasn't IBM compatible. They promoted its multimedia features and intuitive multitasking OS. All stuff that 'nobody' in the US wanted. If only they had just stuck to making PC clones!

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Gorf

One more thing: the Amiga is quite capable of a "textmode", by using Blitter and Copper the right way:

http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/CharMode

Hey, was looking for something like this! Could be used for tiled graphics as far as you know?

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

If 640x200 is such a limitation then why did IBM invent CGA, why was it the first graphics card offered with the PC (with support built into the BIOS), and the only one they produced for 3 years, and why were millions of PCs sold with it? Why did the hugely popular Tandy 1000 use the same resolution, and what made Tandy think they could get away with using it for their DeskMate integrated office package?

Let's face it - if the Amiga had simply been IBM compatible it could have been hugely popular in the US, but without it there was no chance.

So what did Commodore do wrong with the Amiga? They didn't put an x86 CPU in it. They filled it up with advanced hardware and software that wasn't IBM compatible. They promoted its multimedia features and intuitive multitasking OS. All stuff that 'nobody' in the US wanted. If only they had just stuck to making PC clones!

By the time the Amiga shipped, the choices were MDA (for monochrone) or EGA. I'm not sure why CGA keeps getting brought up in this discussion. CGA came out in 1981, 4 years before the Amiga. EGA came out in 1984, a year before the Amiga.

The problem, is that Commodore didn't fill the Amiga with advanced hardware in all cases. It was objectively inferior when it came to do doing the work most people in 1985 were using computers for (word processing, spread sheets). Mac went with a high resolution monochrome graphics display and the PC users could choose between monochrome (and crisp text) or EGA if they wanted color and crisp graphics (most businesses were still monochrome).

It's not about what people "wanted". We keep going around in circles. What, theoretically, would someone DO with an Amiga 1000 in 1985? What, specifically, are you multitasking? What, specific, multimedia feature (outside of games) would you be doing with the Amiga that could earn you a living in 1985? 1986?

I went from Amiga to OS/2 so you're preaching to the choir about appreciating advanced features. But as a productivity device, the Amiga team made some mistakes because they saw it as a game machine that could do home computing -- which would have been fine if it had been half the price (imo).

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Hey, was looking for something like this! Could be used for tiled graphics as far as you know?

If your character set is made out of numbers and letters or graphical elements is irrelevant.
it should be possible as well (with some adjustments) to run it on several bitplanes (one after the other). That should give you tiled color-graphics.

The autor of this package invented this method for his Sinclair QL emulator and used it there as well:

http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/QDOS4amiga1

Source:
http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/QDOS4amiga2

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Mac went with a high resolution monochrome graphics display

the Mac classic had a max resolution of 512x350 - that are 179k pixels
the A1000 (NTSC - non interlaced) has 704×242 - that are 170k pixels

So I guess because of 5% more pixels the Mac was "high resolution" and the Amiga was not?

[lmimmfn]

The argument of resolution from '85 is nonsense. I dont know of any PCs using a high res 400+ vertical resolution at this stage.

The PC was a neanderthal in comparison to the Amiga that year, ive still to hear a relevant argument for the PC.

The Amiga did play catchup with the PC with ECS in terms of resolution but the problem was and from this thread is PC software compatibility which Commodore did try to address with bridge cards. Why they didnt campaign for this moving forward and have them reasonsbly priced is beyond me.

[marcfrick2112]

Originally Posted by Kin Hell

Heck, back in the Eighties....

The Amiga was a True Pre-Emptive Multi-Tasking Computer. It's operating System was designed around a cut down version of UNIX.
Bad marketing up to the demise of C= let them down & Bill ended up getting his way. Windows 3.1 was absolutely poop compared to Workbench.

Nothing in it's day came close in any manner & it got tarnished by the PC users as a Gaming Machine. - It did that better than anything on the market at the time as well....

Nothing wrong on the Amiga with DTP, Office based programs, Graphic Manipulation, 3D Modelling or Gaming on my WB2.0 A3000. That Pizza Style Desktop is still a powerhouse in it's own right today.

The BBC used A2000's with Genlocks for their Weather Reports on the News.

& the next time you watch the original "Jurassic Park", remember the Amiga did all the Wire-Frame animation because nothing came close for smoothness on a 15Khz signal. Faster computers were used to render the detailed Skin's.

Perhaps it didn't Thrive as much as it should have done, but above all, it was "Fun Computing" & still is!

Still Love my PC with SLI 1080 Ti's for Fragging, but it can't Scroll Pinball Fantasies & others like a Real Amiga can.

Actually, AmigaDOS is based on Tripos, Developed at Cambridge....There have been quite a few UNIX programs ported to Amiga, which I bet caused the confusion. Google 'tripos manual' .... you'll be shocked at how similar it is to AmigaDOS.