Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Commodore didn't actually infringe on the XOR patent because it was invalid (there was published prior art). But apparently Commodore's lawyers either didn't know that or weren't able to convince the judge.

Patent stuff can be tricky, but let's say that is true and there is nothing to that patent...
Commodore didn't have time or money...
These lawsuits take time and money, lots of both.

Had Commodore been able to put up a winning fight, it would have taken months anyway...
And Commodore didn't have money to keep going for months, much less keep going and fight this in court...

When you look at some of the business practices that made Commodore successful under Jack in the early days tho, it is kind of a fitting way to go out... I know Jack wasn't there, but still... ;-)

[TEG]

Originally Posted by desiv

Had Commodore been able to put up a winning fight, it would have taken months anyway...
And Commodore didn't have money to keep going for months, much less keep going and fight this in court...

It depend. On such case you can make a deal with the complainer. "Let me sale the machines and I will give you x% on each sale". It's win-win. Everyone lost on what have been done. This is why it add to the strangeness.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by TEG

It depend. On such case you can make a deal with the complainer. "Let me sale the machines and I will give you x% on each sale". It's win-win. Everyone lost on what have been done. This is why it add to the strangeness.

Yep, and I'm sure Commodore did that, but whether or not that is granted is based on the judge and past information, if any.

In this case, if Commodore's lawyers were doing even the minimum, they'd ask for that.
But I am sure Cadtrack would have responded with "We already have deals with IBM and others for this..."
Right there, Commodore is behind the eight ball and will probably not be allowed to sell until it is resolved...

[TEG]

Originally Posted by desiv

Right there, Commodore is behind the eight ball and will probably not be allowed to sell until it is resolved...

So others forces behind Cadtrack to push them to be intransigent and so finish the Amiga once and for all? We will certainly never know.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by TEG

So others forces behind Cadtrack to push them to be intransigent and so finish the Amiga once and for all? We will certainly never know.

Well, I don't think IBM and the others did it intentionally to take down Commodore... Although that would make a really great story.. Hmmm..

Just that Cadtrack already had customers paying them for their patents.
So when Commodore goes to a judge and says "We don't have to pay, please let us keep selling..."
Cadtrack is going to tell the judge "Hey Judge, we already have lots of other people paying us, so this is a valid patent!!"

The judge is going to start with that assumption, unless Commodore could produce an easy/obvious smoking gun that would convince a non-technical judge of the opposite...

That wasn't going to happen with existing patent paying clients for Cadtrack, so this would almost certainly go to court...

[TEG]

It does not explain the point of not making a deal after the judgment and finally winning nothing apart the dismiss of Commodore. Still, it is necessary that Commodore asked for deal.

Would be interesting to know who was at the board of Cadtrack.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

It does not explain the point of not making a deal after the judgment and finally winning nothing apart the dismiss of Commodore.

Seems obvious that Emmerich decided to make an example of Commodore because they wouldn't buckle under. He only had a few more years of 'legal' extortion time left, and burning Commodore would scare other (possibly more lucrative) marks into submission.

The whole thing stinks, but that's the law for you.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Have you actually read the patent?

Yes, and I've seen the prior art too. Maybe they could have had a valid claim on some detail, but the rest is definitely bullshit. Using XOR to restore background was a well-known method well before 1980 when the patent was granted. It's also so obvious that it shouldn't have gotten a patent anyway.

The dual playfield thing is a stretch, as it appears to also use XOR. Is that how the Amiga does it?

[grelbfarlk]

As disappointing as the A1200 is, it turns out from the patents, it was all stolen, so they didn't even steal from something good.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes, and I've seen the prior art too. Maybe they could have had a valid claim on some detail, but the rest is definitely bullshit. Using XOR to restore background was a well-known method well before 1980 when the patent was granted. It's also so obvious that it shouldn't have gotten a patent anyway.

The first of Dr. Josef Sukonick's patents of this kind was filed 1976 for his company Nugraphics that would later become Cadtrak:

US4070710
"Raster scan display apparatus for dynamically viewing image elements stored in a random access memory array"

1976 is admittedly quite early for anything with a frame buffer, but the Alto was of course already there (1973)
Also a lot of the claims of this patent are very similar to a computer-system from a company called Calma:

The digitizing input station is linked by system software to the CRT display, which allows an almost instantaneous display of any segment of the source drawing or a graphic element from the library. The CRT display also has windowing and magnification capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calma

And Sukonick was an employee of this company before he founded Nugraphics!

It is rather clear, that most of the ideas he would later patent for his own company, were actually born at Calma.

Later patents of Cadtrak, after they stopped producing anything, are just ridiculous ... but they still got them granted, like e.g.
US4812834 from 1985
"Graphics display system with arbitrary overlapping viewports"
Describes what every sprite-engine or Atari's display lists did for over 5 years at this point ... filed 85 and granted 89


Sukonick had left Cadtrack by then, but he was not done inventing:
US4773024A
"Brain emulation circuit with reduced confusion"

[oscar_ates]

If the Irvin Gould was not such a narcissistic/egocentric man, He could pay 10 mil to Cadtrack instead of Rattigan's court case. After Rattigan, He hired the yes-man Ali whose only deed was counting the A500 cash money and pay himself and Gould huge salaries. At the R&D front they sat on their arse and watch how PC caught up and became more advanced compared to Amiga.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

If the Irvin Gould was not such a narcissistic/egocentric man, He could pay 10 mil to Cadtrack instead of Rattigan's court case. After Rattigan, He hired the yes-man Ali whose only deed was counting the A500 cash money and pay himself and Gould huge salaries.

What part of "a business only exists to make money for its owners" don't you understand?

In my experience most people who build empires worth billions are narcissistic/egocentric. It's practically a requirement for the job, and necessary to get the product development we crave. Without the Goulds, Tramiels, Gates and Jobs of the world, we would still be using 1970's technology that costs so much nobody could afford one on their desk.

At the R&D front they sat on their arse and watch how PC caught up and became more advanced compared to Amiga.

This is silly. The PC was always more advanced than the Amiga in all the areas that mattered.

In 1985 when the A1000 was released, the PC had:-

- A faster CPU with memory protection
- High resolution flicker-free color graphics
- Text mode
- Real time clock
- 1.2MB floppy drive
- 70MB hard drive
- Up to 8MB of internal RAM
- Full IBM compatibility

2 years later (1987) the Amiga had managed to catch up in some areas. It now had up to 9MB of internal RAM, a real time clock, hard drive, and IBM XT compatibility. The next year (1988) it got a 14MHz 32 bit CPU with MMU and FPU, and flicker-free hires graphics. However by this time the PC had gained:-

- a 25MHz 32 bit CPU
- up to 16MB RAM
- Even higher resolution graphics with more colors
- More text modes
- up to 1.2GB hard drive
- 6 voice FM synthesizer

Commodore wasn't just sitting on its arse though. In 1989 they gave the Amiga a 25MHz 32 bit CPU with up 112MB of RAM, and IBM AT compatibility. In 1990 the expansion bus was upgraded from 16 bit to 32 bit, and a new 32 bit CPU slot was introduced to take next-generation processors. They also produced a 10Mb/s 16 bit Ethernet card, and a 7 port serial card with onboard CPU. Soon after this many high performance graphics cards became available, as well as 16 bit sounds and specialized cards for video production.

Does this mean the Amiga had finally caught up with and was becoming more advanced than PCs? Unfortunately no. In almost all cases the PC got there first, with the Amiga making use of the same technology later. Apart from a few exotic features of no importance, such as genlocking, a graphics chipset oriented towards TV video games, and a sound system with no synth capabilities and only 4 voices, the Amiga never had anything worth talking about that could be considered more advanced than the PC.

[Promilus]

The PC was always more advanced than the Amiga in all the areas that mattered

Mattered to whom? Please realize already Amiga was project which was developed out of gaming console concept. It's multimedia capabilities were years ahead of PC. And that's the only real thing which was ahead of PC (well, along with OS but there was hardly any software on it with 1.3 and it was too late for great boom by the time 2.0 arrived). And they lost the lead in multimedia anyway.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What part of "a business only exists to make money for its owners" don't you understand?

In my experience most people who build empires worth billions are narcissistic/egocentric. It's practically a requirement for the job, and necessary to get the product development we crave. Without the Goulds, Tramiels, Gates and Jobs of the world, we would still be using 1970's technology that costs so much nobody could afford one on their desk.

This is silly. The PC was always more advanced than the Amiga in all the areas that mattered.

In 1985 when the A1000 was released, the PC had:-

- A faster CPU with memory protection
- High resolution flicker-free color graphics
- Text mode
- Real time clock
- 1.2MB floppy drive
- 70MB hard drive
- Up to 8MB of internal RAM
- Full IBM compatibility

2 years later (1987) the Amiga had managed to catch up in some areas. It now had up to 9MB of internal RAM, a real time clock, hard drive, and IBM XT compatibility. The next year (1988) it got a 14MHz 32 bit CPU with MMU and FPU, and flicker-free hires graphics. However by this time the PC had gained:-

- a 25MHz 32 bit CPU
- up to 16MB RAM
- Even higher resolution graphics with more colors
- More text modes
- up to 1.2GB hard drive
- 6 voice FM synthesizer

8><————-

Include prices for the systems and see if it changes anything. ;-)

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What part of "a business only exists to make money for its owners" don't you understand?

In my experience most people who build empires worth billions are narcissistic/egocentric. It's practically a requirement for the job, and necessary to get the product development we crave. Without the Goulds, Tramiels, Gates and Jobs of the world, we would still be using 1970's technology that costs so much nobody could afford one on their desk.

This is silly. The PC was always more advanced than the Amiga in all the areas that mattered.

In 1985 when the A1000 was released, the PC had:-

- A faster CPU with memory protection
- High resolution flicker-free color graphics
- Text mode
- Real time clock
- 1.2MB floppy drive
- 70MB hard drive
- Up to 8MB of internal RAM
- Full IBM compatibility

2 years later (1987) the Amiga had managed to catch up in some areas. It now had up to 9MB of internal RAM, a real time clock, hard drive, and IBM XT compatibility. The next year (1988) it got a 14MHz 32 bit CPU with MMU and FPU, and flicker-free hires graphics. However by this time the PC had gained:-

- a 25MHz 32 bit CPU
- up to 16MB RAM
- Even higher resolution graphics with more colors
- More text modes
- up to 1.2GB hard drive
- 6 voice FM synthesizer

I call bullshit on all of these 'PC' specs comparisons. Can a 1987 PC do Shadow of the Beast 1? nope. Can it do Lotus II? nope. Hell can you do 3D rendered scenes in 4000+ colours like Turbo Silver could? nope. So end of story. 6 voices of garbage OPL2 noise vs 1981 SID is a foregone battle let alone quad DAC 28khz with DMA cycles on a multiprocessor motherboard.

PC copied everything that is good today about PC from Amiga 1000, everything.

The difference between an Amiga and a PC of the 80s is simple, 2,5L BMW M3 of the 80s vs some lame 5.0L Mustang II convertible. "oooh it has 5 litre V8 and it's a convertible' yeah good luck with your PC is awesome quest on an Amiga forum Brucey lol

No PC in 1989 could ever dream of doing a game like Shadow of the Beast 1 unless that PC was the 80386 FM Towns.

PC 486DX250 required to run Lotus III as well as an A1200, or Lotus II A1000, but cost as much as an Amiga 4000/040 in 1992 once you add the £400 Roland MT-32 and £150 Soundblaster 16 + £1000 20" inch monitor etc and it still has tunes that sound like garbage compared to quad DACs of Amiga.

Even worse, Super Stardust (yes it was sold with that name on PC as well as Stardust 96) required a Pentium 133mhz PC to match 50/60fps update of same game running on a £349.99 A1200 in 1994 ooops.

You can't do anything like HAM Interlace on 1986 PC unless you spend $10,000 on a specialist graphics card too.

The only thing IBM did better was marketing bullshit, which clearly some people were very susceptible to lol

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What part of "a business only exists to make money for its owners" don't you understand?

That is true for most mediocre businesses - but in many cases it is not true for the industry-changing or revolutionary things.

It is not true for Jobs/Apple, who pushed the Lisa and the Macintosh against all odds, even to the point where they fired Jobs.

It was not true for MS Windows either - the first two installments were terrible flops, but Gates kept on pushing this new concept forward even if it was losing money the first 5 years!

We can go back to the first car makers or Rudolf Diesel or James Watt or the Wright brothers ...

They all dreamed of making some money with their inventions and most did, but in most cases this money was used to push the ideas and visions, rather than accumulating personal wealth.

If you just wanted to make money with computers in the late 80s, you would manufacture PC clones ... and be pushed out of business by other clone-makers a couple of years later ...

If you wanted to make some real impact, offer something "better", then you would push your own visions and ideas.
The Amiga was such a vision - but Commodore did not push it forward.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

What part of "a business only exists to make money for its owners" don't you understand?

That should, however, also imply that the company is sustainable, which implies that the owner cannot just drag all the money out of it. Thus, this "strategy" was "a little bit shortsighted" in the goal would have been to make as much money as possible (as the owner, I mean).

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

In my experience most people who build empires worth billions are narcissistic/egocentric. It's practically a requirement for the job, and necessary to get the product development we crave.

There was a report on a study on this in the German 'ct magazine, and this supports your estimation. Upper management attracts persons with "personal issues" (to put it this way).

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Without the Goulds, Tramiels, Gates and Jobs of the world, we would still be using 1970's technology that costs so much nobody could afford one on their desk.

Welllll..... Without Jobs, certainly. Without Gold? Doubtfully. Tramiels business attitude worked for a while.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

This is silly. The PC was always more advanced than the Amiga in all the areas that mattered.

Not really. Actually, not at all. My neighbour had the latest IBM PC the time I had my first A2000. Boy, that was a shitty system with its ugly pink/blue or red/green graphics. Actually, all the PC did back then in terms of graphics was 4-planes, 320x240 VGA, with a tiny little bit of "graphics processing" that allowed you to rotate or mask pixels when writing to the frame buffer. There was no "graphics accelerator" (aka blitter). That was copied from the Amiga. It neither had autoconfig (later PCI copied from the Amiga), and if you "jumpered" your expansion card incorrectly, you had bad luck. Neither did it have sound, only a CPU-driven beeper.


It does have a text mode. If you call that an advantage. Oh, and 640KB main memory (that ought to be enough), with segmented addresssing. This required all kinds of silly tricks to utilitize any memory beyond 640K, extended and expanded memory, tricks in config.sys to get the drivers in high memory, wierd programming models to get around the 64K segments and 16byte "paragraphs" the intel CPUs (still) have.


No, sorry, that was a pretty lousy system.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Does this mean the Amiga had finally caught up with and was becoming more advanced than PCs? Unfortunately no. In almost all cases the PC got there first, with the Amiga making use of the same technology later. Apart from a few exotic features of no importance, such as genlocking, a graphics chipset oriented towards TV video games, and a sound system with no synth capabilities and only 4 voices, the Amiga never had anything worth talking about that could be considered more advanced than the PC.

That depends a bit on the time. Early on, the Amiga was certainly ahead. Better graphics, better sound, autoconfig... Just CBM did little to make use of this pole position. The IBM PC caused competition amongst vendors, and thus drove its development. There were, however, never Amiga clones, probably because you could not clone them without the custom chipset.


In that sense, the dirt-cheap shitty architecture helped the PC. Everybody could clone such a system and develop enhancements to the architecture. Mac was on the edge of dying if M$ would not have helped, but unlike the Amiga, Apple was smart enough to attract buyers with deep pockets and not the cheap gamers and cul coderz from high-school.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Mac was on the edge of dying if M$ would not have helped, but unlike the Amiga, Apple was smart enough to attract buyers with deep pockets and not the cheap gamers and cul coderz from high-school.

I think the single biggest factor helping the Mac survive was the fact that it did have Office-compatibility. That was almost as good as full IBM-compatibility but allowed for using an otherwise better system than an MS-PC. This and some quality Mac-software compensated for the lack of full PC-compatibility.


The Amiga had neither (not counting Shapeshifter).

[TEG]

Originally Posted by grond

I think the single biggest factor helping the Mac survive was the fact that it did have Office-compatibility. That was almost as good as full IBM-compatibility but allowed for using an otherwise better system than an MS-PC. This and some quality Mac-software compensated for the lack of full PC-compatibility.

The Amiga had neither (not counting Shapeshifter).

And it's perhaps rooted in the deal with Microsoft Basic during Tramiel time:

Commodore BASIC, also known as PET BASIC or CBM-BASIC, is the dialect of the BASIC programming language used in Commodore International's 8-bit home computer line, stretching from the PET (1977) to the Commodore 128 (1985).

The core is based on 6502 Microsoft BASIC, and as such it shares many characteristics with other 6502 BASICs of the time, such as Applesoft 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.
[...]

Commodore took the source code of the flat-fee BASIC and further developed it internally for all their other 8-bit home computers. It was not until the Commodore 128 (with V7.0) that a Microsoft copyright notice was displayed.

Source

Easter Egg (Microsoft!)

Although the deal to sell Microsoft BASIC did not require the Microsoft name to be displayed, Bill Gates had other ideas. Commodore had internally been making changes to Microsoft BASIC version 1.1, but required an update for the PET in 1979 and the delivery of Microsoft BASIC version 2.0 clearly contained an Easter Egg written by Bill Gates. If you pass 6502 to the WAIT command, a message is displayed on the screen: MICROSOFT!

According to Jim Butterfield “Commodore paid Microsoft an additional fee to write a revision to the original BASIC that they had bought. Among other things, spaces-in-keywords were changed, zeropage shifted around, and (unknown to Commodore) the WAIT 6502,x joke was inserted.” Although this update affected other computers, the Easter Egg wrote directly to screen RAM at address $8000, and so it seemed that the Commodore PET had been targeted directly. The Easter Egg exists on the 6502 BASIC on the KIM-1 but also on 6809 (CPU) BASIC and 6800 (CPU) BASIC. Jim Butterfield goes on to say “Shortly after that implementation, I show this to Len Tramiel (Jack Tramiel’s son) at the Commodore booth of a CES show. He was enraged: “We have a machine that’s short of memory space, and the *!$%$ put that kind of stuff in!” The 51 bytes of code were to be removed for subsequent machines, but the 10 bytes required to spell the message remained in the master copy.

Source

We can only speculate on the reasons why Microsoft and possibly Bill Gates himself added the easter egg. A possible reason is that Microsoft wanted to make sure Commodore cannot take credit for “Commodore BASIC” – similar to the “Stolen From Apple” case.

Or it was only about showing the world who really wrote it. Jim Butterfield: As an afterthought, Microsoft would have liked to see their name come up on the screen. But it wasn’t in the contract.

Source

And then there's the story of Bill Gates coming on the Commodore booth and trying to display the easter egg without success because it was removed. (I can find back the source at the moment, if someone have it...).

So there was perhaps personal revenge.

It catch up with what @Thomas wrote: "Tramiels business attitude worked for a while."

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TEG

So there was perhaps personal revenge.

I don't think so:
MS ported Multiplan to the C64 after this and also delivered Amiga Basic (although with some delay) ... and Jack had left C= by then anyways.

And even after MS got sued for Windows 2.0 by Apple they continued to develop Powerpoint and Excel for the Mac...
(Powerpoint was actually a Mac-only program the first 3 years, Excel for 2 years....).
So MS seems not to act overly revengeful and putting business first.

I guess MS never ported anything else to the Amiga was because of the lack of Amigas used in the office ... since there was no office software for the Amiga ... the chicken and the egg ...

OK - one mayor reason was of course the the lack of a useful high resolution in most Amigas ..

The Atari ST did offer such a resolution, but there actually your theory of revenge might be correct - maybe MS really did not want to support Jack's new endeavor - especially after he contracted the rival Digital Research for TOS and GEM.

[Cyprian]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

There was no "graphics accelerator" (aka blitter). That was copied from the Amiga.

If I remember correctly a blitter wasn't Amiga invention, it was included in a different arcade machines earlier, Mindset computer (released by ex-Atari engineering in 1984) also in Commodore C900.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

PC copied everything that is good today about PC from Amiga 1000, everything.

chunky VGA 256 color video mode wasn't inspired by Amiga in any way.
The same with audio cards.