Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Dunny]

That's no surprise; MacOS is still a disaster zone and it's no joke to say that we have to warn our users when there's an update that all their 3rd party software will likely fail to run.

Kudos to Apple though, they usually get stuff fixed in short order with a point-release update. They also do some pretty braindead stuff though; the most frustrating was dropping the system sample rate to 8khz when BT audio devices were enabled a few years back. That resulted in so many support calls.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TEG

I watched a video about macOS which show that it was an unstable OS for a very long period of time.

I really don't recall it being that unstable - actually in my impression it was at least as stable as AmigaOS or Windows 3.11 or even Windows 95.

Windows wasn't that great before NT and NT was not that usable before Windows XP.

So during the 90s all major operating systems were still very vulnerable to misbehaving programs

The Pink -> Taligent -> CommonPoint disaster is of course very famous ... literally hundreds of developers over 7 years - and in the end a half finished product that underwent a further transformation into a Java framework to be at least somewhat useful ...

Why Copland was such a disaster and could not get finished is hard to understand since Apple had something just like it already running and working since 1988:
A/UX
In essence a System 7 on top of UNIX - just what the "Bluebox" of Copland was supposed to be.

There was also a version for other Unixes: MAE
even featuring a 68k emulation layer for SPARK and PA-RISK

So why not just take a BSD kernel, replace X11 with something more direct add a GUI and be done?

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Windows wasn't that great before NT and NT was not that usable before Windows XP.

Yes but this is a point that can be more easily forgiven to Microsoft because this in an OS which have to deal with a lot of different hardware. Apple had the control of the whole. Someone know if MacOS 9 used a MMU?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TEG

Yes but this is a point that can be more easily forgiven to Microsoft because this in an OS which have to deal with a lot of different hardware. Apple had the control of the whole. Someone know if MacOS 9 used a MMU?

Yes MacOS did utilize a MMU from System 7 on, but only as a provider vor virtual memory as in disk swapping and afaik not for memory protection.
(But that was missing in some models like the Mac LC)

[oscar_ates]

Problem was, Commodore engineering were already slow without the intervention of the clowns like Mehdi Ali and Bill Sydnes, who made the things even worse. From 1987 to 1992 there was no significant update on the A500 released in 1987, instead they showed on CES like events new OCS/ECS machines with Zorro slot, or 68030 cpu added. There were also disasters like CDTV project which sunk 90M$, C64GS ended up commodore to cannibalize the unsold boards to place in C64C machines which was still selling. No need to mention working on a new 8-bit machine in 1987 to 1991 "C65" which market had no interest. All flops. CDTV sold a few 100s in US, and 30k in UK, 20k in Germany surprisingly. US people totally dismissed it. Then geniuses Mehdi/Bill thought the future was PCs and did nothing on Amiga for 6 months. After that realized that the PC market was overtaken by Taiwanese attack of the clones. Then came the infamous A600 from Bill Sydnes, which further detoriated the situation for Commodore. In the mean time, to promote A600 sales they cancelled the still selling A500plus production, which on its own shooting directly on your head not even on your foot. A1200 was done in panic mode, using A600 as base machine and shoehorning some AAA/AA working chips on it. It is no miracle that it was not enough/too late/future proof. Games like the Wing Commander/Wolfenstein 3D/Alone in the Dark made the PC gaming took high off together with powerful 386/486 CPUs. And finally, Doom was the final nail in the coffin, since the bare A1200 could not run it. Overall story is similar to what happened to Nokia/Blackberry phones. If you don't innovate and be in line with customer expectations, end result will be what happened to commodore in 1994. Overall, still Irving Gould was the main responsible person that this all happened under his ego/hunger for holding grip on power/watch.

[lionagony]

There was a really interesting article from the Village Voice from 1994 posted on Reddit today https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comme...e_changed_the/

I thought this was a great quote from a Commodore sales rep to sum up Commodore management "we're a 90-day company," valuing short-term profit over long term strategy.

I'd also never heard the Star Trek story which is pretty crazy, a great read.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by lionagony

There was a really interesting article from the Village Voice from 1994 posted on Reddit today https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comme...e_changed_the/

I thought this was a great quote from a Commodore sales rep to sum up Commodore management "we're a 90-day company," valuing short-term profit over long term strategy.

I'd also never heard the Star Trek story which is pretty crazy, a great read.

Ahaha.
I just imagine these ungrateful engineers reading Bruce fierce defense of Commodore management.

Strangely they doesn't blame only the users for Commodore demise.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by lionagony

There was a really interesting article from the Village Voice from 1994 posted on Reddit today https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comme...e_changed_the/

Interesting read Thank you for the link

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by lionagony

I thought this was a great quote from a Commodore sales rep to sum up Commodore management "we're a 90-day company," valuing short-term profit over long term strategy.

Commodore's policy with licensed dealers, who traditionally build the bedrock for any new machine's success, may have been even more destructive. Barry Einstein, former general manager of the Amagination dealership. claimed that Commodore broke its promises not to sell the Amiga by mail order. This undercutting left dealers with overpriced stock that they couldn't move. Einstein wrote a letter complaining about this practice in January 1993. He claims he never got an answer, though a sympathetic Commodore sales rep told him that there was nothing he could do because "we're a 90-day company," valuing short-term profit over long term strategy

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Commodore was selling Amigas direct to the public via mail order? First I heard of it. If they were it would be because dealers were doing a piss-poor job of it. However I suspect what he really meant was mail order companies selling Amigas at discount prices.

I found this reference to an 'Amagination' store from 1999:-

It has been almost seven years since the New York Amiga store Amagination (a.k.a. Digital Dimension) closed its doors. I first became aware of the Amiga because I live only a few blocks from where they were located (on West 26th Street in NY's Chelsea district; later they moved around the corner to smaller quarters and changed their name to Digital Dimension so they could subsidize their rapidly dwindling Amiga sales by devoting half of their tiny store to Laser Disc sales and rentals).

A computer store that doesn't sell computers. How quaint.

By 1993 Commodore needed to move stock rapidly or they were dead. If the 'dealer network' was holding them back then I don't blame them for changing an anticompetitive sales policy. AFAIK Commodore NZ didn't have any such restriction. You bought the computers from Commodore and sold them however you liked at whatever price you liked. The only problem I had in 1993 was getting enough A1200s to sell.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Ahaha.
I just imagine these ungrateful engineers reading Bruce fierce defense of Commodore management.

Strangely they doesn't blame only the users for Commodore demise.

People naturally blame someone else for their failings. I've been reading Brian Bagnall's book Commodore the Final Years in which he interviews many former Commodore employees to get the 'big picture'. The picture he gives is far more complicated than the narrative most Amiga fans have been fed. This book was such an interesting read that a few days ago I also purchased the previous edition, Commodore the Amiga Years. I recommend both of these books to anyone who wants to be better informed. They are also quite entertaining.

With respect to the "we're a 90-day company" thing, Commodore was a public company trading on the stock exchange, which required quarterly reporting so investors would know how the company was doing. But the big retail chains preferred to buy stock for Christmas in October and November, while Commodore's fiscal year ended in June. As result they would 'pre-sell' stuff throughout the year to maintain a steady sales volume for each quarter.

As for 'short-term profit over long term strategy', that's the result of companies being expected to maximize shareholder value. Unfortunately courts have ruled that maximizing short-term profit is effectively a fiduciary requirement, often further distorted by CEOs getting stock options or bonuses for increasing the stock price. That's what happens when you let anybody buy a share of your business!

[ Show youtube player ]

[TEG]

Originally Posted by lionagony

There was a really interesting article from the Village Voice from 1994 posted on Reddit today.

Very interesting. I ocrized the article. Here the text version for a better reading:

Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Could Commodore Have Changed the World?

By Noah Green - VOICE May 17, 1994


Over on Waverly Place, Ezra Story, a 23-year-old computer programmer, lives in the museum of a future that might have been.

Ezra's sitting in front of his Commodore Amiga 3000, a home computer from 1990. With half the processing power, memory, and storage space of the latest PCs, the machine is playing a mindblowing technorave music video at full-throttle speed. Onscreen, what appear to be Ecstasy-fed Scandinavians dance, their writhing bodies embellished with digital sketch lines reminiscent of that awful a-ha video from 1985. An intricate, grainy Cubist mesh contracts and explodes behind them.

Apple claims it invented movies on a computer screen. But a fully loaded PowerPC Macintosh would need an entire hard drive to store Ezra's video, and would spit it out in fits and starts. Ezra's file, downloaded from the archives of the European hacker culture centered around creating Amiga "demos," takes up less than one megabyte, and runs for 10 fluid minutes.

In another room, Ezra has a partially disassembled Amiga 1000, the original model, a cybernetic senior citizen. Standing in the gloomy light that filters in from his courtyard, we watch this decadeold machine play games with better graphics, sound, and speed than a modern Sega Genesis.

The Amiga, says Ezra, "was built to do anything, at any time, anywhere."

Both machines, when they were new, cost about $2000; today, they go for under $1000-much less than the Macs and PCs whose capabilities might come close. Maybe that's why half of Hollywood uses the Amiga for special effects-why the space station on Babylon 5 is an Amiga animation. The secret: three built-in, dedicated graphics chips that Amiga engineers named Agnus, Denise, and Paula back in 1985.

Welcome to the future that may never be: a time when computers provide the user with the most capabilities for the lowest cost; when you won't need expensive, dubiously compatible add-on boards to make movies or compose symphonies: when users won't have to make massive hardware investments to support the bloated software of Microsoft Windows or Apple's System 7.1; when being a samizdat publisher won't be defined by having $895 to drop on Aldus Pagemaker.

That future was indefinitely postponed on April 29, when Commodore International, the Bahamas-based company that created and sells the Amiga, went into liquidation.

Rumors of Commodore's ill health had circulated for years, but they became particularly grim during the last few months. In the weeks before the end, I became a regular attendee of a digital deathwatch in the Internet's comp.sys.amiga.aduocacy discussion group. A longtime programmer who had never touched an Amiga before, I was struck by the fierce loyalty, love, and idealism with which the Amigans regarded their endangered species of machine.

"The Amiga computer is the rebel of all computers. It is the underdog, you can't help but love it," said Paul Griswold, a Commodore shareholder from Miami.

They praised the machine's graphics, sound, and muititasking, and its more esoteric, hackerly virtues. But many also cited the combination of low price and high power that attracted so many users, particularly young ones who cut their programming teeth on Commodore platforms.

"Today's computers might be too easy to use but too hard to program," said John Homkvist, a computer science student at Whitman College, in Washington. "The first thing I did with my C-64 was to copy the program that was on the box, and behold! 500 hearts scrolled across the screen." Without Commodore's affordable, programmer-friendly machines, said Hornkvist, "there is no longer a natural path from computer user to computer programmer."
Mike Farren, himself a former Commodore engineer, and a programmer of some of carly computing's most famous games (including the classic Temple of Apshai), said he often felt the Amiga and the C-64 had the chance to bring more egalitarianism to the digital class-divide. "Where Commodore stood alone was in the low end," he said. "By the end, when the A1200 was selling at around the $500 to $600 range, there was just nothing else there that powerful at that price. [Commodore] should have been pushing the hell out of it in every SaveMart in the world... [The Amiga is] the only thing that people in recessionprone countries, like all of Europe, can afford, which is why it sells so well there. I really have my fingers crossed that something will come out of the ashes."

There is a silicon underpinning to the machine's low-end power, said Leo Schwab, a programmer who designed some of Amiga's most popular software-including the now legendary animations called "Schwabbies". (Schwab now works at 3DO, the much hyped game technology company that's the Valhalla of former Amiga designers -more than half of its employees are ex-Commodore people, including founders R. J. Mical, Dave Needle, and Dave Morse, who helped create the original Amiga technology.) To make his point, Schwab compared two segments of computer code that accomplished the same task -resizing a window- one on a Macintosh, and one on the Amiga. He found the Amiga code was half as long. This underlying economy, he says, makes the machine easier to program for, and a far better buy. That's because the Amiga's ROM, as well as its graphics chips, performs so many more routine operations than other systems' innards.

"It's the philosophy adopted by the people who created the machine which persists to this day." he said. "It was an attitude of 'We're here to help you.' They put a remarkable amount of functionality into the ROM. They saw the first Macintosh as being crippled with 128K of RAM, so they made a frugal machine that could do more with what was still less than a megabyte of RAM."

Schwab sneers at operating systems like Microsoft Windows NT, which eat RAM, processing time, and wallets for breakfast. "It is absolutely ridiculous that Windows NT requires 12 megabytes just to boot," he said. "It is manifest proof that [Microsoft designers] absolutely do not know what they are doing. I have seen it done better, faster, and smaller. There is no excuse."

So how did Commodore, which literally dominated the home computer market in 1984, come to such an ignominious end? Part of the Amiga's problem was that it was ahead of its time-a multimedia machine introduced years before the word multimedia.

"The Amiga was really too early. But I wouldn't call that the main problem," said Andy Bose, a technology analyst at New Yorkbased Link Resources. Bose believes that "ultimately, [the failure of the Amiga] is a management problem."

Management is the word Amigans use again and again to describe what brought Commodore low. The company. which began as a typewriter store in the Bronx. hit its high in the early '80s but has hemorrhaged ever since, going through CEOs like bad diskettes, and nearly going bankrupt in 1985. Sales of the Amiga, mostly overseas, kept the company afloat. But the Amiga, as computer trade journalists are fond of saying, "never caught on." Sales continued to drop, while Commodore president Mehdi Ali continued to earn $2 million annually in salary and bonus and CEO Irving Gould frequently used the corporate jet to fly between New York, Canada, and the company's Bahamas headquarters. Last year, the company lost a whopping $357 million and experienced its worst Christmas season ever-failing to bring its CD32 home game consoles to the American market after unpaid suppliers wouldn't sell it the necessary parts. The stock went through the floor.

What happened?

No marketing, said user after user on the Internet. Nobody recalls seeing any Commodore ads anywhere for years. Don Hicks, managing editor of the eight-year old Amiga magazine Amazing Computing, hasn't been offered a Commodore ad for over a year. Christian Liendo, who worked at Amagination, the final New York Amiga dealership to fold, characterized the company's word-of-mouth strategy as trying to "sell 3 million computers to the same 1 million people."

Several Amiga developers, engineers, and writers repeated to me what has become the most famous horror story of Commodore marketing ineptitude-a story that goes a long way toward explaining why the company has failed to, as they say. live long and prosper.

Almost every Macintosh user remembers the scene in Star Trek IV (1986) where Scotty uses a Macintosh on present-day Earth to design the materials necessary to fix his starship. They all remember when he picks up the mouse, thinks it's a microphone, and says "Computer!" to it. The scene was the perfect tie-in, a pop-culture legitimation that would reap big dividends for the fledgling machine.

What few know is that the film's art director who knew good animation when he saw it, originally wanted an Amiga. Commodore refused to lend Paramount an Amiga, and indefinitely delayed the order when the producers tried to buy one. So Paramount called Apple. A Macintosh. complete with a programmer "to make it do whatever the hell Paramount could possibly want," said one Amiga developer, was driven from Cupertino to Hollywood on the same day.

Commodore's policy with licensed dealers, who traditionally build the bedrock for any new machine's success, may have been even more destructive. Barry Eiastein, former general manager of the Amagination dealership. claimed that Commodore broke its promises not to sell the Amiga by mail order. This undercutting left dealers with overpriced stock that they couldn't move. Einstein wrote a letter complaining about this practice in January 1993. He claims he never got an answer, though a sympathetic Commodore sales rep told him that there was nothing he could do because "we're a 90-day company," valuing short-term profit over long-term strategy.

Then there are the infinite horror stories of what went on at the company itself: allegations about mismanagement, arbitrary firings, and incompetence-such as the infamous 2.04 Amiga operating system, which sat, fully packaged, in a warehouse for months in 1991 before being released.

One former Amiga engineer, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed many of these stories. "It was basically, for the engineering staff, insanity. I don't think I've ever seen another organization as crazily mismanaged as Commodore. It was truly bizarre." He described a workplace where new employees did not get desks, computers, or assignments for months. "For the longest time." he said, "many engineers didn't even have copies of the ROM kernel manuals," the master guidebooks for any computer design.

Another Commodore engineer, who agreed that "from mid 1991 on, the engineering group was being run with no proper direction," described how management discontinued the A500, the company's most popular PC, and released inferior new machines based on the same technology. This, he said, was why "sales dropped through the floor." (Commodore representatives did not return any of the Voice's numerous phone calls.)

Both the engineer and an Amiga developer recounted the "deathbed vigil" party that engineers at the company's research headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania organized in the weeks before the final day. The party was scheduled for April 30, and was renamed "the wake" when the company's demise became final a day earlier. Over 80 former employees showed up at one employee's house to commiseratethough one of them returned to the corporate campus and wrote the names of Ali and Gould on the parking lot's much reviled speed bumps.

Nonetheless, Amazing editor Hicks says the Commodore's bankruptcy is "a fantastic opportunity for the Amiga."

"I sincerely believe that there'll be an Amiga tomorrow," he said. "This is too important to cable stations. Almost every cable station has an Amiga. The Amiga is saving millions of dollars in post-production houses all over Hollywood."

Will another company step in, buy the technology, and turn the Amiga into a credible alternative to the Macintosh-Microsoft monopoly? One hopeful suitor, CEO Alex Amor of the Amiga distributor Creative Equipment International, said yes. (He's one of 15 interested parties, according to a Commodore employee.) If not, the Amiga will live on still-in silicon fragments scattered across the latest TVs, toasters, and medical imaging machines, after a flock of corporate vultures buys the technology piecemeal. Agnus, Denise, and Paula will each end up in separate foster homes. And we will enter the future that shouldn't have been, where a small, powerful group of companies forces us to fork over more and more bucks for inefficient operating systems, and kids can no longer buy cheap, programmable computers. Now, it seems, the future of the future rests in the hands of the Bahamian Supreme Court.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

Very interesting. I ocrized the article. Here the text version for a better reading:

Thanks for that.

Still not making much sense.

What few know is that the film's art director who knew good animation when he saw it, originally wanted an Amiga. Commodore refused to lend Paramount an Amiga, and indefinitely delayed the order when the producers tried to buy one. So Paramount called Apple. A Macintosh. complete with a programmer "to make it do whatever the hell Paramount could possibly want," said one Amiga developer, was driven from Cupertino to Hollywood on the same day.

The production budget for Star Trek IV was US$24 million, and they couldn't afford just buy an A1000 from a retail store? The A1000 was new and not well known in 1986, while the Mac had been around for 2 years. Therefore the Mac was the obvious machine to use as a prop, especially given the sight gag which only made sense if you recognized what it was that Scotty was holding. IMO they made the best choice anyway, since the Mac mouse looks a lot more like a microphone than the Amiga mouse.

The other suspicious bit is 'complete with a programmer "to make it do whatever the hell Paramount could possibly want,"'. So they wanted more than just the machine?

I'm not saying this story is BS, but something doesn't seem quite right about it.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I'm not saying this story is BS, but something doesn't seem quite right about it.

I agree it should be taken with a grain of salt. Would be interesting to know directly from the protagonists, provided that they are still alive.

[grond]

I have heard the story about the Star Trek movie lots of the time and don't see any reason to not believe it. The computer isn't just a stage prop, it's basically the central piece of the scene and, if I were making a movie, I'd make sure I have been granted the rights to use it from the computer company. Since the 1980s things have changed and movie makers are actually taking money for product placement but they learned there was this opportunity exactly from this Star Trek episode.

[Locutus]

A very similar case is Silicon Graphics, which got featured in Jurassic Park (also included Thinking Machine!) and Twister.

In both cases they provided complete pro-bono work to 'make it do whatever hollywood wanted'.

While SGI is a different target market it definitely was a great marketing ploy for likely not all that much money.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Locutus

A very similar case is Silicon Graphics, which got featured in Jurassic Park (also included Thinking Machine!) and Twister.

In both cases they provided complete pro-bono work to 'make it do whatever hollywood wanted'.

While SGI is a different target market it definitely was a great marketing ploy for likely not all that much money.

Yes. It was heavily marketed that JP used Silicone Graphics station. It was much less marketed that it also used Amiga.
Worst of all, in the movie, Nedry use a MacIntosh Quadra, probably provided courtesy of Apple.

Jurassic Park was so massive in 1993, I can't even understand why Commodore didn't use this showcase of Amiga habilities in a marketing campaign.

Can you imagine A4000 were also used in 1997 Titanic ? A computer released in 1992 without any real support since 1994 was used in one of the biggest movie production at that time.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Yes. It was heavily marketed that JP used Silicone Graphics station. It was much less marketed that it also used Amiga.
Worst of all, in the movie, Nedry use a MacIntosh Quadra, probably provided courtesy of Apple.

Jurassic Park was so massive in 1993, I can't even understand why Commodore didn't use this showcase of Amiga habilities in a marketing campaign.

Can you imagine A4000 were also used in 1997 Titanic ? A computer released in 1992 without any real support since 1994 was used in one of the biggest movie production at that time.

In Titanic, they used Amiga + Lightwave for pre-vis only. No final effects were made on it though AFAIK.

[mykrowyre]

No, not at all because:

1) Internal IDE. No more stupid GVP on the side of my A500 crashing when I bumped it.
2) PMCIA
3) Smaller form factor.. WAY smaller than an A500 with GVP.
4) AGA graphics
5) DBLNTSC mode for BBS'ing.
6) FASTER (Not significantly but enough)
7) Newer WB roms

I didn't play games all that much, so for me the A1200 was awesome.

My PC friends were alll amazed by the Amiga. The multitasking was far better than windows at the time.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

In Titanic, they used Amiga + Lightwave for pre-vis only. No final effects were made on it though AFAIK.

Well for a computer released in 1992 it doesn't seems a proof of its capabilities enough ? We're speaking about the biggest movie ever made at that time in termes of budget.

The very fact that the Amiga could be used in its production, long time after it stopped to be supported anymore is a testimony of how advanced the machine was.
Strangely they didn't chose to use a superpowerful 1997 PC (or a SNES) for the pre endering.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

The very fact that the Amiga could be used in its production, long time after it stopped to be supported anymore is a testimony of how advanced the machine was.

I wonder why they bothered. Take Babylon 5. They only did the pilot episode on the Amiga.