updating Amiga back in 90`s?

[Amiga Forever]

This was interesting reading from Dan Locke who know about amiga on why they didnt update the amiga back in 1991!

Have good read...

Let's see here. The original chipset was state of the art until 1987, when the 256-color PCs and Macs were released. Commodore had a 256-color chipset two years later that would have brought the Amiga up to date. Gould and Ali canceled it because they wanted the R&D money for themselves.

Then, Commodore started work on the AAA chipset, which would have given the Amiga the power of the 3DO in 1991. Gould and Ali canceled it because they wanted the R&D money for themselves. The Amiga became even more dated.

By 1993, the original Amiga was a joke next to 486 PCs and PowerPC-based Macs, so Gould and Ali finally relented and let the Amiga be updated - with a chipset that was years out of date. The result was the 1200, which had only 2 MB of RAM and a 68020 processor. Even the SNES, released two years prior, outperformed it in every way.

So Commodore failed because Gould and Ali kept the Amiga stuck in 1985 - until 1993, when they made it closer to 1987.

What could have be if Amiga had AAA Chipset and sell them....would have Doom run on New AAA Amiga say back in 1991/1992?

[TCD]

It was an alien conspiracy! I tells ya!

[rossb]

:-) Greed powers ar*eholes!

[cosmicfrog]

Just what I need a good news story

[mattbarton.exe]

It sounds like Gould and Ali are the reason we're not using Amigas right now. GRR!

[desiv]

I remember, back in the day, I was reading something about highest paid Computer executives and Gould and Ali were both in the top 10 (of that list, whatever it was).
And I was thinking it was crazy, because CBM was tiny compared to IBM and Compaq and the other big companies....
<sigh>

desiv

[chrispy]

To think Amiga's were used everywhere including TV studio's etc. If they had released the R&D money back then the world of computers would be completely different today.

[mfletcher]

There was an interview I read in Game Informer a few months ago, it was with Bobby Kotick (of Activision). Im not 100% sure, but he made an offer to Commodore to either buy the company or the Amiga technology; he wanted to produce a games console.

I wonder how that would have worked out. Would Bobby Kotick have managed the Amiga legacy better that Gould or Ali?

[lugosi]

Originally Posted by Amiga Forever

<snip>
So Commodore failed because Gould and Ali kept the Amiga stuck in 1985 - until 1993, when they made it closer to 1987.</snip>

A quote from here:
"... Mehdi’s background includes more than twenty years of operating experience. His prior experience includes serving as the President of Commodore International, where he accomplished a major operational turnaround. ..."

It was a "major operational turnaround"...very nicely said

[NovaCoder]

Basically it was all Gould's fault......easy answer.

Go read the 'rise-and-fall', great book which tells the complete story.

[chrispy]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Basically it was all Gould's fault......easy answer.

Go read the 'rise-and-fall', great book which tells the complete story.

I didn't even know there was a book about it. I'll have to track one down.

[athiga]

is a well known fact that the hardware developers hated fat cat bosses that were out for
all they could grab then retire rich as much as i hate microsoft at least they care more
about the future devs

[Fabie]

who is Gould and who is Ali ?

[TCD]

http://www.unitechelectronics.com/hist.htm

[Paul_s]

I find it extremely fascinating what the landscape of computing would look like today if Commodore had survived.

Microsoft of course would still be going with Windows and I think the current crop of PC's etc of what we have today would still be the same in a large way.

If the Amiga had lived on it may have lived on in high-end video studios. But then again, maybe not. Look at what happened to Silicon Graphics

I think C= Amiga today would be a flagship leader in gaming. It would have a hard time in the office/infrastructure market with what we have today imo...

Who knows though, but the Amiga was truly groundbreaking for its time and still is in a way with what it can do with so little.

[chrispy]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Basically it was all Gould's fault......easy answer.

Go read the 'rise-and-fall', great book which tells the complete story.

£70 odd for a second hand copy of that book and it's not even available in pdf format, that sucks. I guess I won't be reading that for a while then.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Amiga Forever

The result was the 1200, which had only 2 MB of RAM and a 68020 processor. Even the SNES, released two years prior, outperformed it in every way.

The SNES outperform an A1200 in every way? That's pure none sense. Keep it accurate, please.

[Photon]

Thorham: Yeah, added for oomph I suppose.

Originally Posted by cosmicfrog

Just what I need a good news story

Hehehe.

On topic: well, I guess a lot of people wonder how Commodore could throw away the Amiga. Part of the reason was games compatibility vs the chipset, although an early enough update to twice the cpu/blitter speed would surely have made many NEW games see the light of day, as well as having kept gamedevs on Amiga around for a while longer. The 1985 model was really supremely viable until 1991 or so, when console games started to become good.

I just yesterday thought 'even a simple OCS board with a 68020 and fastram could have been enough, if early enough'.

In the world of markets and companies, releasing something great is just one of the many things they consider when making products. Sadly, 'making something awesome' is too often quite far down on such a list.

In 1991, the A500 etc was still selling like hotcakes here in Europe - certainly it by then had quite viable upgrade paths and quite a few killer apps. And after all, it had the most excellent and responsive user-experience of all computers up until that time.

I think the decision-makers decided to milk their existing products until the end before offering new models. The problem was, I think, that while it was still excellent for end users, software (also game) devs, managers of like, and business people in general were seeing the end of OCS/ECS, and maybe the end of the home computer era in general, 2-3 years before this. With nothing 'proper', 'professional', 'upgradable so it's worth investing in' being offered by Commodore-Amiga in 1988, they lost all long-term/future markets. The Amiga 3000 was an offer in that direction, but years too late (and graphics were really as slow and lores as ever).

(Just some though projections; they may or may not be accurate.)

"It's easy to be after-wise" as we say here in Sweden, but a model with improved color depth and hiring many more software devs to the OS department, to also give the OS a direction with ambitious devkits, licenses, frameworks etc, would have been investments that could have built an empire.

[gilgamesh]

David Haynie on that topic:

An Amiga with today's hardware specs would be just like a Macintosh with today's hardware specs: it would be a PC. Guaranteed. Near the end, we were already moving toward using as many commodity parts are possible: PC power supplies, disc drives, etc. Future systems were going to use the PCI bus, and would most likely have been designed CPU-agnostic (look up the "PIOS One" for an example, if there's anything still online... that's the direction I was pushing things before C= failed).

The hardware didn't need saving... you need to reinvent computing hardware every five years or so, or it gets too complex to keep advancing. Had Commodore not failed, they would have eventually got out of the graphics chip business, just like Compaq and various other PC companies who once did their own graphics chips stopped. Graphics chips became GPUs, and any one systems company could no more make their own GPU than their own CPU. Everyone who tried either of these failed, in time, unless they built a very strong market well above the level of the personal computer.

here

[TCD]

/me offers gilgamesh a forks-n-torches-full-body-shield (tm)