The most detailed information about the Amiga A300?

[grelbfarlk]

Medhi Ali got shitfaced one night and after railing his sixth line off of a hooker he noticed that his gardener was still cutting down a branch off of an elm tree. Medhi said, "Hey, let me borrow that chainsaw" and while swaying about sawed off 1/4 of an A500 which was used to play techno mods on a loop and mysteriously it kept playing afterward. Everyone laughed heartily, and the next morning he turned it on and it displayed some boot colors but never turned on again. When he made it into work he said I want the same money but with 1/4 less costs, I could rail 25% more blow. And thus the A600 was born.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

Why didn't they make a mixed bundle or productivity bundle?

They did.

The Amiga 600 Epic Language Bundle came with a 20MB 2.5 IDE hard drive, a word processor (Wordworth?) with 5 language dictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Myth, Rome and Epic.

The A600 'Robocop' bundle came with Robocop 3D, Myth, Shadow of the Beast III, Graphic Workshop, and Microtext.

The A500 "Class of the 90's" pack (released in 1990) came with Deluxe Paint 2, Maxiplan, ProWrite 2.5, Deluxe Paint & Deluxe Print 2, Let's Spell, Amiga Logo, Dr. T music composition software and a BBC emulator.

The "Amiga System 500" pack released in 1988 included an MPS 1200P dot matrix printer and 'the Works' word processor, spreadsheet, and database.

The list in that link is not definitive. Many other A500 packs included productivity software. I have the original disks for an 'A500 Starter' pack that included KindWords (with dictionary and 'super font' disks) and Fusion Paint, and another package by Gold Disk called "Amiga Complete" which has 'Write', 'Spell', 'Paint' and 'Music' (not great programs, but they do work).

But yes, the A600 form factor wasn't a viable choice for this, it should have been either A1200 form factor or a cheap big box with external keyboard (A1500?).

I disagree. The A600 was fine for the sort of 'productivity' stuff most people wanted to do. Certainly no worse than an expensive 386SX laptop with a horrible passive mono LCD screen (I have one that I hope to fix once I get a working floppy drive for it - but should I bother?).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Medhi Ali got shitfaced one night and after railing his sixth line off of a hooker he noticed that his gardener was still cutting down a branch off of an elm tree. Medhi said, "Hey, let me borrow that chainsaw" and while swaying about sawed off 1/4 of an A500 which was used to play techno mods on a loop and mysteriously it kept playing afterward. Everyone laughed heartily, and the next morning he turned it on and it displayed some boot colors but never turned on again. When he made it into work he said I want the same money but with 1/4 less costs, I could rail 25% more blow. And thus the A600 was born.

Best. Origin. Story. Ever.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

They did.

The Amiga 600 Epic Language Bundle came with a 20MB 2.5 IDE hard drive, a word processor (Wordworth?) with 5 language dictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Myth, Rome and Epic.

Hey! The graphical art was splendid!

But despite the French flag on it, I never saw this bundle in retail or advertising.

[Megalomaniac]

The serious bundles definitely didn't get as much attention as the games ones though. Did Commodore not make enough publicity of the more serious bundles, or did the media overlook them in favour of a perception of the Amiga being primarily a games machine compared to PCs (and, in much of the world, STs)?

Even the cruddiest laptop at least allowed you to do business work on the go, which even if you did put your A600HD/PSU/RF lead/mouse in your bag to take to the hotel, you still couldn't do on the train.

I wouldn't want to do spreadsheeting especially without a keypad to make entering the numbers quicker, although I see you can buy fancy-looking keyboards without keypads nowadays, sadly they just scream 'Amiga 600' to me in quite a negative way.

[grond]

At least that one example bundle with productivity software pictured above looks to me more like it was directed at students that needed something to convince their parents having a computer in their room was all about school and only very little about entertainment.

A "cute" form factor counters any attempts at conquering a serious market. I still believe that a most simple big box (no Zorro slots, no ISA slots) with external keyboard, internal power supply and IDE would have left a better impression.

[Dunny]

Dave Haynie mentions the A300 on his Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/What-happened-...ommodore-Amiga

The A600 had originally been an in-house project called the A300, designed to deliver an even lower cost alternative to the A500, was jacked up in useless ways to cost more than the A500 but deliver less.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The "Amiga System 500" pack released in 1988 included an MPS 1200P dot matrix printer and 'the Works' word processor, spreadsheet, and database.

The list in that link is not definitive. Many other A500 packs included productivity software. I have the original disks for an 'A500 Starter' pack that included KindWords (with dictionary and 'super font' disks) and Fusion Paint, and another package by Gold Disk called "Amiga Complete" which has 'Write', 'Spell', 'Paint' and 'Music' (not great programs, but they do work).

I disagree. The A600 was fine for the sort of 'productivity' stuff most people wanted to do. Certainly no worse than an expensive 386SX laptop with a horrible passive mono LCD screen (I have one that I hope to fix once I get a working floppy drive for it - but should I bother?).

Yeah, Mum and Dad brought the A500 starter pack back from Australia in 1990 that came with Kindwords, Fusion Paint, Crazy Cars and Super Ski.

Amiga System 500 pack for small businesses
Interested in more information about this pack as it also came with the PC Emulator PC Transformer and wonder what the word processor, spreadsheet, database software was.

edit: fount at https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/...105/The-Works/ containing Analyze! Organise! and Scribble!, Interesting that they changed from Kindwords and Textcraft.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Even the cruddiest laptop at least allowed you to do business work on the go, which even if you did put your A600HD/PSU/RF lead/mouse in your bag to take to the hotel, you still couldn't do on the train.

A sensible person would get up earlier and do their computing stuff at home, then take a little nap on the train.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Dave Haynie mentions the A300 on his Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/What-happened-...ommodore-Amiga

He can only be talking about the PCMCIA and IDE ports. I just asked my Ethernet and CF cards, and they disagree.

The Vampire complained about not having a proper CPU slot though... it said the A600 wasn't jacked up enough!

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A sensible person would get up earlier and do their computing stuff at home, then take a little nap on the train.

Expecting potential customers to adopt to your product's capabilities instead of addressing their needs and wishes with your products is the shortest road to success, of course...

[Megalomaniac]

It's telling that so many people inside Commodore are so negative about the A600, even if the A300 concept might have been well-regarded.

PCMCIA and IDE ports are useful in 2023. Were they useful for (what was originally meant as) a budget model in 1992? Maybe if you removed all the ports except the mouse/joystick/second disk drive you could hit a £250 price point, which alongside a £350-400 A500+ might have been enough of a pricing gap to justify selling both models.

Would it have saved any money to remove HAM from the A300/A600? That was almost never used for games.

[TEG]

Regarding the A300 there's this quote from David Pleasance:

- David Pleasance: "It isn't I particularly dislike the A600 for what it is, rather I hate what it did to Commodore as it was wrong in every possible way.

My initial idea was to provide a purpose-built product to fill the gap that the C64 left and to attempt to reach a price point low enough for the socio-economic population who could not afford an Amiga 500 - so I asked for a 'cut down' (cost reduced) Amiga that we could sell for a maximum price of £249 to get the basic machine.

But this product could be expanded as and when users could afford it. I specifically requested we call it the Amiga 300 - so there was no misunderstanding as to where this model fitted in the line-up.

I have no idea who ultimately changed the model number to A600. The first several thousand A600's that were built had A300 on the motherboard.

The last straw was of course Bill Sydnes who was head of engineering at the time. He added some specs and it ended up costing more to make than the A500, so we shot ourselves in the foot.

A team of professional saboteurs could not have done a better job."

Source: [ Show youtube player ]

(previously posted in the A1200 thread)

[grond]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

It's telling that so many people inside Commodore are so negative about the A600, even if the A300 concept might have been well-regarded.

PCMCIA and IDE ports are useful in 2023. Were they useful for (what was originally meant as) a budget model in 1992?

PCMCIA and IDE were nothing a low-cost replacement of the A500 needed. They should either have went full-low cost (A300) or upgraded A500 (A1200-sized A600) or both. Trying to kill two birds with one stone is what made the A600 such a flop.

Would it have saved any money to remove HAM from the A300/A600? That was almost never used for games.

No, it would have increased cost because with microchips you have a lot of one-time costs and low per-piece costs. Thus, it usually is cheapernto produce more of one chip than the same number of two closely related chips.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

A sensible person would get up earlier and do their computing stuff at home, then take a little nap on the train.

Laptops were really used in 3 ways from my experience in the mid nineties.

1. You need to be based at multiple sites so you take your laptop with you.
2. You need to be based away from home, like a hotel, so you take your laptop with you.
3. You need to be able to do work on the train or on the road whilst travelling between clients in a single day.

Commodore, unlike Atari, never bothered to make an Amiga laptop. Couldn't tell you if this is lack of interest at the corporate level or lack of talent in the engineering department. All sorts of people used the Amiga for professional creative use (artists, advertising agencies etc) in the eighties and it would be no less of a commercial success as the Atari Stacy laptop.

Originally Posted by Dunny

Dave Haynie mentions the A300 on his Quora answer: https://www.quora.com/What-happened-...ommodore-Amiga

The A600 added internal IDE, of all the upgrades to the base model Amiga at £400 this was the only useful one before the graphics chips were updated for AGA IMO. An A500plus + hard drive is going to be in the £600-650 range, a 2.5" 40mb drive is a lot less than £200 even in 1991. Not sure why he calls it useless upgrades. Nobody knew PCMCIA would be useless for Amiga all the way back in 1990/91.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The serious bundles definitely didn't get as much attention as the games ones though. Did Commodore not make enough publicity of the more serious bundles, or did the media overlook them in favour of a perception of the Amiga being primarily a games machine compared to PCs (and, in much of the world, STs)?

Even the cruddiest laptop at least allowed you to do business work on the go, which even if you did put your A600HD/PSU/RF lead/mouse in your bag to take to the hotel, you still couldn't do on the train.

I wouldn't want to do spreadsheeting especially without a keypad to make entering the numbers quicker, although I see you can buy fancy-looking keyboards without keypads nowadays, sadly they just scream 'Amiga 600' to me in quite a negative way.

The A600 wasn't the only option and the fact you might even consider those kind of applications is really the price point it was sold for. If you sell a Ford Escort RS Turbo for the price of a BMW 325i in 1991 you naturally expect it to be as good as a BMW 325i.

At the right price the A600 would still have a place in the market in 1992 next to the A1200, the problem is Commodore neither could nor would sell an A600 for £199.99 in 1992 but from a technological point of view that is the price point 7 year old technology needs to be at. £100 less for no AGA, slower CPU, half the RAM and smaller keyboard of a home computer is what crippled the A600 as soon as the A1200 went on sale. Had the A600 been a half price option to the A1200 in 1992 it would still have sold. I think it was 1993 or 94 when Atari stock dumped the 520STFM for £150 and that sold out fast.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I disagree. The A600 was fine for the sort of 'productivity' stuff most people wanted to do. Certainly no worse than an expensive 386SX laptop with a horrible passive mono LCD screen (I have one that I hope to fix once I get a working floppy drive for it - but should I bother?).

Amazingly I actually agree too, a cheap computer for something between a 'proper' computer and a cheap 16bit console doesn't need more than the A600 offered. The price was the only problem really, it was nearly 250% the price of a Megadrive in 1991 early years.

By 1991 there were few machines considered sophisticated enough for use in the home by a family. There were no £500 DELL or Gateway PCs in 1991 so that only left Amiga. Realistically a £200-250 Archimedes, Amiga or STE was the only real option from a market product point of view. Apple Mac and PC compatibles could never go that low, even if sold as a stand-alone floppy based monitor devoid package. Nobody produced a computer cheap enough so the sales of MD and SNES cut deeply into home computer sales. Why buy a C64 in 1992 for £99 when for about £20 more you could get a 16bit console? We were on a path, this is how it turned out. It may have always turned out this way between the end of the NES and start of the PS1 era but as nobody released a product that would ever change that.

£250 was a lot of money in 1991, seems trivial today but back then it was a simple case of Megadrive/SNES purchase or nothing because you couldn't afford anything more, hence the number of game rental options popping up to counter the £50 cartridge cost issue for consumers who bought a cheap console.

Perhaps the answer was a DRM'd Amiga compatible and so Commodore would get a royalty on every game sold and so offset the cost of something like an A300 at £250 so they could sell the hardware at a loss to capture the consumers. This is how the low priced SNES/MD console was possible in most part.

[ImmortalA1000]

There is also the issue of the Atari Falcon, it was expensive for an all-in-one carbon copy of a 520STFM cased computer but it was not expensive for the potential of the hardware. It sold very very poorly. You could argue the same for the Archimedes A3010 and A3020 machines which also had the same all-in-one home computer style form factor. I think in the marketing wars the all-in-one form factor was always seen as a 'toy computer' and nothing beyond 'a little bit more than a kick-ass 16bit console' could ever sell in record numbers. The perception was set by the competition with some heavy weight software packages (Photoshop etc) that never came in an all-in-one form factor.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

There is also the issue of the Atari Falcon, it was expensive for an all-in-one carbon copy of a 520STFM cased computer but it was not expensive for the potential of the hardware. It sold very very poorly. You could argue the same for the Archimedes A3010 and A3020 machines which also had the same all-in-one home computer style form factor. I think in the marketing wars the all-in-one form factor was always seen as a 'toy computer' and nothing beyond 'a little bit more than a kick-ass 16bit console' could ever sell in record numbers. The perception was set by the competition with some heavy weight software packages (Photoshop etc) that never came in an all-in-one form factor.

True but there was also big compatibility issues with the Falcon which reduced the number of people wanted to upgrade, even if aficionados + price + availability + Atari not having the financial resources to market the product so the very low confidence the product inspired.

Buying a Falcon was something like jumping again into the unknown.

I still remember the booth of Atari in a big computer exhibition in Paris when the Falcon was launched. It was 1 desk with 1 person showing the clown picture. The booth was absolutely tiny, along a hallway, just the place of the desk and the chair for the person! I regret I did not took a photo at the time. And if you wanted one, you had to buy it in confidential Atari specialized shops.

[TEG]

Another bad point for the Falcon was the TOS appearance which did not evolved. It was heavily dated and the first thing you see to evaluate subjectively a machine is the desktop. its look was really outdated and no more attractive.

On the other hand the A1200 desktop had evolved was full of colour.

[Megalomaniac]

I think the Falcon didn't have any compatibility with ST sound hardware, so almost no existing games would work. The A1200 only running maybe 2/3 of existing games was bad enough, but at least before long all the new stuff worked with publishers only having to do one version. Workbench 2 and beyond was a lot nicer to look at or use than any version of GEM as well.

In many ways the Falcon was probably more powerful than the A1200, at least on the serious side (though why only 1Mb memory in the £499 base model?), but it needed a lot more marketing than it got.

Enough A1200s were sold to tell me that all-in-one form-factor computers were still a viable idea in 1992, though maybe less so than in 1987 before PCs had really entered the home in Europe.

[TEG]

+ Germany wanted to sold the Falcon as a serious machine, contrary to UK, and winning the contest so UK games developers boycotted it resulting in very poor games library.
+ the case itself, too similar to the ST one, was not a sale pitch.

[edit]
Some flaws that would not have helped in the long run (quoted from the WEB):

There are so many hardware flaws, which you'll discover only at second glance: No (real) line-level audio output (like STE or Amiga) with crappy 3,5mm connector and strange bass-boost circuitry (which was corrected later with the C-Lab Falcons!), microphone input instead of line-in, very sensitive and uneven bus system (almost all Falcons need additional clock patches as a workaround) etc etc!