Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[grond]

Originally Posted by Frogs

How do you figure?

The Mac got word processing and spreadsheet software and desktop publishing precisely because it came, out of the box, capable of doing those things well. The trade off was color of course.

The Amiga 1000 with ECS and productivity mode would have made the Amiga a superset of the Mac of the time. One could argue that it would have been the Amiga, instead of the Mac, that emerged as the alternative to the "boring" IBM compatibles.

Yes, that was your or your dad's original point. The interesting question is whether dropping 15 kHz screenmodes altogether would have made the Amiga even more likely to assume the role of the Mac.

[Signman]

Originally Posted by Frogs

How do you figure?

Then again, I never found Page Maker or Corel Draw "boring" back in the day.

It may have been on a 386 which needed a math co-processor but Corel Draw was excruciatingly slow. Just doing an extrude on some text may have taken 20 seconds. Don't even bother moving it. People who bitch about any so called encumbrances in today's machines should just be quiet.

[Ernst Blofeld]

Originally Posted by Frogs

The Amiga 1000 with ECS and productivity mode

Would not have been an Amiga. Those things were added later, to try and capture a lost market. The Amiga was a machine built around broadcast video standards, as it was meant to work with receivers of those standards. Anyone who thought they were getting something else was... well...

[Foebane]

The Amiga was FINE from the start, by design. It was meant to be its OWN thing, not try to imitate anything else.

To be honest, the Amiga was doomed as a platform in its country of origin, the USA, from the start. When the competition consisted of PCs on one side and Nintendo on the other, with the market establishment those two had, is it any wonder the Amiga was a very niche market there? Some US companies did well to produce software and hardware, like EA and NewTek, but ultimately, the Amiga didn't last as long in the USA as it should've.

No, the Amiga's true home, and where it saw the realisation of so much of its potential, was Europe and PAL territories in general. The sheer number of UK and European games, and the massive proliferation of the Demoscene in that continent, showed everyone what the hardware was capable of.

[defor]

Originally Posted by Frogs

The Amiga 1000 with ECS and productivity mode...

Please correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Amiga chipset originally developed as a new gaming hardware? That this original purpose was changed shortly after to a more general personal computer was possibly because of a video game industry crash which happened at that time. It was designed to generate a video signal for TV standard(s), the circuitry timing was based on that. From the Amiga history timeline, it is quite clear that the Amiga team was pretty busy to finish even that original design on time. No chance to further extend it with higher vertical/horizontal display frequencies. Not in 1985/1986 at least. Again, correct me if I am wrong, but later in 1987, Commodore released A2000 which was capable of hosting extension boards -- therefore it could handle better graphics and higher freq monitors. In hindsight to me, it seems that they, at that time, tried as much as they could do to develop and finish products on time.

Originally Posted by Frogs

And yet you mention not a single example of said potential on a $3000+ (today's dollars) machine with 512K with a single floppy disk and a 15khz color monitor that lacked a Midi output, had no option for higher frequency monitors, no option to boot to a hard drive (Kickstart 1.1). So what hobbyist things was the Amiga 1000 capable of doing?

Seems to me a little unfair to mention drawbacks (or lacks of functionality) only. Apparently people at that time were attracted to Amiga by its capabilities. These should be mentioned as well: Decent available graphics resolutions, variable color depths up to 32 independent colors (was HAM mode available at that time?), full 12bit color palette, very precise synchronization with a video beam allowing to change graphics properties, 4 independent 8bit PCM audio channels, input/output ports, ... etc. Listing it all here would be pointless. I think people were interested. I would agree that Amiga was a multimedia machine. The powerful game-console packed into a computer :-) Productivity machine? Maybe. If supported by a proper software. However, I'm not convinced that if released with a proper higher refresh rate monitor support then it would immediately win over Apple(Mac)/PC users. Loyal fan-base takes time to build.

[Signman]

Stay focused guys, the Amiga was launched with Andy Warhol demonstrating the graphics capabilities. Also Amiga Live, I believe that was the name was touted as the next thing soon after. Not exactly sure if it was a genlock but definitely utilizes live graphics with the Amiga. I seem to remember Spielberg's tv show Amazing Stories utilizing Amiga hardware.

So no, games were always a major part but Commodore wanted more from the start.
Even here in the US a lot of us were always trying to convince others that it was much more. Isn't that for games? Heard all the time but always retorted if it can do games at such a level all the rest is cake.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Signman

It may have been on a 386 which needed a math co-processor but Corel Draw was excruciatingly slow. Just doing an extrude on some text may have taken 20 seconds. Don't even bother moving it. People who bitch about any so called encumbrances in today's machines should just be quiet.

I used Corel Draw just fine on a 286. Just really depended on the complexity.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Signman

Stay focused guys, the Amiga was launched with Andy Warhol demonstrating the graphics capabilities. Also Amiga Live, I believe that was the name was touted as the next thing soon after. Not exactly sure if it was a genlock but definitely utilizes live graphics with the Amiga. I seem to remember Spielberg's tv show Amazing Stories utilizing Amiga hardware.

So no, games were always a major part but Commodore wanted more from the start.
Even here in the US a lot of us were always trying to convince others that it was much more. Isn't that for games? Heard all the time but always retorted if it can do games at such a level all the rest is cake.

Exactly.

Even in this thread we are long on "amazing" and short on specifics. Lots of people, like my dad, saw the demos including the Andy Worhol one and though "This is it! The machine that could do it all".

Then he got one and realized that even for drawing, it wasn't really useful unless you were doing art that would be used in software and games. You weren't going to be doing architecture drawings or making concept art on it.

"The Amiga was a machine built around broadcast video standards, as it was meant to work with receivers of those standards. Anyone who thought they were getting something else was... well..."

What in 1985...1986 were you doing with an Amiga 1000 that involved "broadcast video standards"?

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I used Corel Draw just fine on a 286. Just really depended on the complexity.

I did start my foray on vector graphics in 1993 with a program called Art Expression - despite was not the first vector graphics package (anticipated by Aegis Draw if i remember), had support for AI88 and EPS fonts and did work with 1.2; could work in regular Hires or Interlaced (better with a meg of RAM) and might not have had gradients and a limited palette but was decent.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

What in 1985...1986 were you doing with an Amiga 1000 that involved "broadcast video standards"?

Amiga Pioneers Desktop Video Technology

By RICHARD O’REILLY Dec. 21, 1989

Personal computers and television have never gotten along very well. Even though both produce images on video screens, their signals are quite different and normally cannot be mixed.

The exception is Commodore’s Amiga computer, which from the beginning has been more compatible with television than other personal computer designs. As a result, Amiga owners have been developing a growing application known as desktop video. It allows you to do everything from adding simple graphic titles to your home videos, to full video production including sound, graphics and three-dimensional animation.

Desktop video started with the Amiga 1000 in 1985, which had a built-in jack to connect directly to a videocassette recorder. The composite video signal delivered by the Amiga combined color, brightness and synchronization information in compliance with the standard of the National Television Standards Committee.

As a result, developers began to provide a variety of software programs and hardware accessories to enhance the Amiga’s video capabilities.

Among the features of Amiga computers that benefit desktop video are a multitasking operating system, fast graphic animation processing by special-purpose chips, stereo sound and many color graphics modes, including some with a characteristic called overscan.

Most home computers produced video signals that were just compliant enough with broadcast standards to work with TVs, but not good enough for glitch-free video titling and certainly not suitable for broadcast. In addition, 'genlocking' (synchronizing the computer display to the incoming video signal) required a very expensive external device that was out of the reach of home users.

Business computers weren't any better. CGA had composite output, but it was not overscan, not genlockable, not interlace and not enough colors or resolution to do anything worthwhile (and only did NTSC, not PAL). Later on some VGA cards had composite video output (if you could get it to work) but weren't genlockable so you couldn't display computer graphics over incoming video, and since PCs weren't normally used with TVs the desktop display was horrible.

The A1000 was designed to take a genlock, with a space underneath the case for it. That plus Deluxe Paint or Aegis Video Titler was all you needed to overlay titles onto your home videos, which was a popular application back then. And the Amiga was the only affordable system that could do it.

[Ernst Blofeld]

Originally Posted by Frogs

"The Amiga was a machine built around broadcast video standards, as it was meant to work with receivers of those standards. Anyone who thought they were getting something else was... well..."

What in 1985...1986 were you doing with an Amiga 1000 that involved "broadcast video standards"?

I didn't say I was, did I?

But, I was mucking about with video with my Amiga 1000, as much as my limited teenage budget would allow. I may never have broadcast anything, but I did put stuff onto video tape. The results were as you'd expect, with no extra equipment due to my budget.

There were definitely small companies springing up to use the Amiga to compete against the big guys on smaller jobs. Who needed a Quantel Paintbox when most of your work was opening titles on wedding videos?

I certainly didn't buy my Amiga to do word processing and spreadsheets. The fact that it could, well enough for my school assignments at least, was an added bonus.

[Frogs]

@Bruce, you may recall in the OP that my dad used his Amiga to do video editing. So obviously he and I are familiar with this.

@Ernest how did you afford an Amiga ($3000 in today’s dollars wo monitor) as a teenager? As I reminded Bruce, my dad was obviously familiar with the Amiga’s video editing and had a part time gig adding credits to videos. Not in 85/86 though.

But such a niche use is not what the Amiga was intended for as its primary market. That’s why I asked what you, not theoretical person, were doing with video broadcasts in 1985/1986.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Frogs

@Ernest how did you afford an Amiga ($3000 in today’s dollars wo monitor) as a teenager?

Frogs, as an aside, why do you keep mentioning today's prices for retro hardware when no-one has any idea what that means in terms of inflation? Why not just mention the prices they were back then? People can relate to that.

When I got my A500 in 1990, I knew back then that they cost £400, and I honestly don't care what their value would be 30-odd years later, nor inflation.

[Ernst Blofeld]

Originally Posted by Frogs

@Ernest how did you afford an Amiga ($3000 in today’s dollars wo monitor) as a teenager?

If it's any of your business, which it isn't, hire purchase and manual labour, every Saturday for a year.

Originally Posted by Frogs

That’s why I asked what you, not theoretical person, were doing with video broadcasts in 1985/1986.

Please read what I've written, at no point did I say that I was.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Ernst Blofeld

That’s why I asked what you, not theoretical person, were doing with video broadcasts in 1985/1986.


Please read what I've written, at no point did I say that I was.

I read what you wrote. You wrote:

"The Amiga was a machine built around broadcast video standards, as it was meant to work with receivers of those standards. Anyone who thought they were getting something else was... well..."

You implied that my dad was dumb or something for buying an Amiga expecting that an expensive machine advertised to be able to do a host of creative and business things could do a host of creative and business things. And that he should have known that it couldn't [realistically] do these things because it was built around "broadcast video standards" (meaning that its only productive use would have been in doing something with video because of the genlock or something).

Or did you have some other meaning in mind?

You later say you bought it essentially as a tech toy. There's nothing wrong with tech toys, I've bought many myself. And if we want to be honest here, the Amiga, with the benefit of hindsight, was an amazing tech toy. But it also went the way of all tech toys. My earliest forays into assembly language were doing primitive Amiga demos back in the early 90s.

That said...

What inspired this post was, in essence, why didn't the Amiga, rather than say the Mac, become the alternative to the PC rather than being a tech toy / expensive game machine / niche video production tool?

Because, let's face it, most of us (certainly myself) labored under the impression that if it weren't for Commodore's bad marketing and business practices, the Amiga would have taken off in a big way.

My dad's contention is that it wasn't solely or even mostly anything Commodore did but rather that the Amiga, from day 1, was designed as a premium tech toy. He then listed some of the decisions made with the Denise chip that showed a line of thinking that the Amiga was not designed to do serious productivity work and that Commodore, recognizing there wasn't a sustainable market for a $3000 (in 1985 dollars) tech toy tried to position it as business machine / creative workstation.

There are many other examples that show that the Amiga team was thinking tech toy rather than productivity machine such as an amazing audio system but not bothering to include a Midi port to make audio work seamless. Or even supporting hard drive booting in Kickstart until much later.

When the Amiga 500 came out, Commodore was able to get the price down and position it as the ultimate home computer. But the Amiga 500 came out later and the rest is history.

People like me who wish things like the Amiga (and on the PC, OS/2) had become a viable long-term alternative to the PC and Mac look back and wonder what changes could have been made. This thread and my dad's comments have convinced me that had Denise simply supported even 21khz displays back in 1985 that it would have attracted a whole range of killer software. We'll never know of course. But that's the fun, just speculation amongst friends.

The fun of threads like this is to talk about the what-ifs. One assumes we're all here because we love the Amiga.

p.s. Lest someone think I'm using "tech toy" as a pejorative, I am not. I suspect I'm not the only one in this thread messing with Raspberry Pi's and the like.

[Ernst Blofeld]

Originally Posted by Frogs

You implied

No, I didn't.

Originally Posted by Frogs

You later say you bought it essentially as a tech toy.

No, I didn't.

[grond]

I can only tell about myself but anyway... When I was looking to upgrade from my A600 to something AGA, the Amiga was on the way out (as we all know). I remember talking to a shop owner that used to have Amiga stuff. It turned out he had abandoned the Amiga and was now exclusively selling PCs. We basically argued about whether the Amiga still had any future. I mentioned that the Amiga is so much better for graphics than the PC. He corrected me and said that this was only true for video, not graphics. I begrudgingly agreed. He told me to forget about AGA and, if it really had to be an Amiga, rather buy a used A2000 and put in a graphics card instead (because that could do graphics). Thinking back about that conversation I have to admit that all this "Amiga is so great for video" argument was really just juvenile bullshit. I never cared about video editing and nobody of the Amiga people I knew did any video editing. It was just something we liked to state to point out some advantage of our beloved Amiga over its competition even though it didn't matter to us personally at all.

Again, this is how it was for me personally and in my direct environment. I am not saying that this may have been the same for a majority of Amigans.

[Ernst Blofeld]

Originally Posted by grond

upgrade from my A600

So, that means '92 or '93? Yeah, the Amiga was, for all intents, dead already.

But, if you could have had an A600 in '85 or '86? Well... some people still have found reasons to fault it.

[Signman]

Ultimately what are we arguing about? Those that created and supported Commodore, Apple, IBM and all the others have contributed to what we work with today. Let's be clear, we would kill for what is now available if we could have it back then.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Ernst Blofeld

So, that means '92 or '93? Yeah, the Amiga was, for all intents, dead already.

I bought the A600 in early summer of 93. It didn't last long so probably end of 93, early 94. Yes, very late in the life of the Amiga. I was a poor kid and my parents had no interest at all in computers.

But, if you could have had an A600 in '85 or '86? Well... some people still have found reasons to fault it.

Well, the A600 wasn't much progress over the A1000 in 85. More RAM and some connectivity options the A1000 didn't have. ECS remained totally theoretical because I used the monitor I had from my C=64.

The reason I bought the A600 was because it cost only 299DM (that would have been less than 80USD at the time) and I thought "oh, I always wanted one when an A500 was 1,000 to 1,200 DM (and that amount of money was far out of reach for my even younger self)". So for me the "always lower prices for always the same technology" motto worked. It didn't work for Commodore who would have been better off without me as a customer that bought the A600 below production cost...