Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[Signman]

Originally Posted by Foebane

I have to admit, I don't really care at all for the Amiga 1000, it was a dry-run, a prototype, an initial basic version that was overpriced and underpowered. It looked ugly and cheesy with that keyboard storage thing, and even the keyboard didn't look like the final version.

No, to me, the REAL first Amiga was the A500, an improvement in every single way possible.

My God you couldn't be more off with that view. I doubt many concur. As a young man in 1986 I paid a lot of money for the 1000 and finally going later with a 500 for the chipram really bothered me.

[phx]

Originally Posted by Signman

My God you couldn't be more off with that view. I doubt many concur.

Absolutely! The A1000 defined the Amiga. It was the dream machine we saw in magazines, but couldn't afford (at first). And I love its keyboard-storage feature!

[Thomas Richter]

Keyboard storage and mechanical design were superb, but the technical specs were quite unbalanced. It didn't have enough RAM. The Mac had a similar problem, though it solved it through the "soft-swapping" and "resource management" Amiga didn't have.

Hard to believe I could work with only 1MB memory my A2000 had back then...

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Signman

My God you couldn't be more off with that view. I doubt many concur. As a young man in 1986 I paid a lot of money for the 1000 and finally going later with a 500 for the chipram really bothered me.

Granted, I never had any personal experience with the A1000, but I'm going by the specs and the physical appearance that I know of.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by luncheon

Amiga just needed a C64 compatibility mode - instead of launching the (excellent) C128 they should've made a 6510 + VIC-II + SID expansion card for the A1000/A500 to keep momentum and enable an upgrade path for their millions of users.

Ultimately the failure of CBM was too many incompatible systems in quick succession:

PET > VIC20 > C64 > C128 > TED/C16/+4 > Amiga

You did not avoid an Amiga due to its lack of C64 compatibility! It's totally wrong. You did not bought it because it was too expansive but you wanted one.

And about systems compatibilities it's wrong too. There was no real OS at this time so compatibility was not something you looked for. When you bought a new machine it was like cleaning the black board and hoping to embrace a new and better adventure. The problem with Commodore was to release machines with lower capacities from the previous one (C16/+4) or not enough ground-breaking / flawed (C128).

[Frogs]

Re Having a Commodore 64 card for the Amiga

I was one of the lucky ones where my dad could afford the Amiga and got really early access to it.

Now, 15 year old me only cared about the games. And *my* computer was a Commodore 64 so having to put in a Kickstart disk and then workbench wasn't a big deal because, compared to the 1541, the Amiga was super fast.

Re this thread

As a side note, this is one of the best discussions I've read online in many years. The amount of useful information in this thread is amazing. I'm so glad I joined this community.

Re the Amiga 1000
We all obviously have the benefit of hindsight. Few people in 1985 realized that the computing world was going to start consolidating like it did. In 1984, there were lots of computers and the IBM PC compatibles were just one of many and not particularly impressive at that.

Even with hindsight, I don't think the Amiga could have displaced the IBM compatibles given the points brought up in this thread. It's really the Mac that I think the Amiga could have beaten.

My recollection of using a Mac 128k of the same era was just how sharp the text was and how neat Page Maker was. By 1989, I was using an AT clone with Windows 2.11 and Page Maker to make magazines. There is no way I would have wanted to use my dad's Amiga for that.

I do kind of wonder how many people are using or remember well what the Amiga with a 1080 or 1084 monitor was like. My Amiga 1000 is hooked up to a 1080 and it is not a good experience compared to even my Apple II.

This is where all the monitor talk comes in, some of which is above my head like with phosphorous timings and what not (and it's a real treat reading some of the knowledgeable people here talk about these issues).

Re Living with Kickstart 1.1 / Workbench 1.1
Indeed. I feel like a high percentage of the comments in this thread presume that time machines existed.

In 1985/1986 we had Kickstart 1.1. 1.2 didn't come out until near the end of 1986. That's a long time to wait to be able to use the computer other than for demos and games. Once we had 1.2 I think things like Logistx (remember that?) and a few other apps started to show up.

I don't think Commodore could have waited until late 1986 to release the Amiga for numerous reasons.

Re who to target the machine to?
There's a great comment that is regarding the great head-scratcher: What the heck was the Commodore 128 about? It actually had a decent word processor (remember Word Writer 128?) that just served to split the ISVs.

Having the Commodore 64 as the entry machine and the Amiga as the high end machine makes sense except the Commodore 128 was for who? It just diluted messaging and resources.

But at $3000+ in today's dollars, you couldn't do real work on the initially shipped Amiga. I've seen some people refer vaguely to word processing and spreadsheets but what, specific, word processors and spreadsheets would that be in 1985/1986? And would you actually want to run them on the hardware at the time given the state of Topaz, no hard drive support (like zero).

I think that's why my dad thinks a graphics workstation was the way to go. The Amiga was way ahead of the Macintosh and would remain so for many years. And the early Amiga adopters had money.

I really think the Amiga could have beaten the Mac in the market. But people like my dad, who, like many early adopters, would have happily spent extra on hard drives and higher resolution color monitors couldn't. There was no option at all.

[Signman]

It seems myself and Frogs dad can relate similar experiences. Having purchased the 1000 in Feb. 1986 just starting out in business (signs and graphics). I had much interest in making a way with this along with hand skills and tried for about five years with addons, early vector and paint apps, digiview, and so on but finally surrendered.

In the early days most in America wanted a productivity machine but the software and certain capabilities were not there. I could not even get a decent accounting program let alone a program that would drive the early vinyl cutters. Eventually after all the travail I got a 486 and with vga and drivers and software for devices I went a different path.

Europeans saved the machine but mostly as a gaming computer and not what early adopters here wanted for the most part. As far as development from there on, kudos for the all young people in Europe especially England for saving something. The Germans being who they always are were awesome in subsequent engineering new boards and other developments. At that point it was mostly forgotten here by the early 90s'

I remember the last straw was the release of the Amiga 1200. Not enough to hold on to and I really hated that. I spent way more than I can really justify for the 1000 back then but I have never enjoyed any computing or pastime as much since.

I recently received a treasure trove of Amigas, video toasters, from a great guy just five miles from me a few years ago. His story could be told to as he had a twenty year career from the early 90's as a videographer. He spent tens of thousands on it and his business which took him to the late 90's when he finally gave in to the Mac. When he gave all of this to me he said, this must feel like Christmas to you. Yes my friend, it did.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I think that's why my dad thinks a graphics workstation was the way to go. The Amiga was way ahead of the Macintosh and would remain so for many years. And the early Amiga adopters had money.

I really think the Amiga could have beaten the Mac in the market. But people like my dad, who, like many early adopters, would have happily spent extra on hard drives and higher resolution color monitors couldn't. There was no option at all.

I believe this is true. Commodore was the wrong company for the Amiga. While our generation was happy to get A500s into our childhood homes, the Amiga should have stayed away from that market (would we then all have become Atari fans?). Commodore always aimed for low-margin, high sales numbers. Always the same technology at always lower prices. This worked with the C64 but not with the Amiga. Commodore was about milking a computer model to death rather than creating a platform. With the low-end Amigas in abundance, all Amiga-software always aimed for the lowest common denominator which remained the same until the A1200 showed up in 1992. It meant preserving the technology and cutting costs until it became obsolete rather than keeping up with technical progress. After the A3000 every new Amiga should have had a harddisk port, 32bit chipmem and a flickerfixer. Instead they cut every novelty the A3000 brought away again for the A500+ and also for the A600 (which at least had an IDE port but required an awfully expensive 2.5" harddisk because of an unneccessarily small case). A flickerfixer would have made the Amiga more expensive (but would have meant more of a user's money going to Commodore) but without a flickerfixer (ECS A500+ and A600) the users would either never get to use the productivity modes (hindering better software) or have to buy an expensive multiscan monitor not available in mass market numbers (a user's money spent elsewhere). By allowing the users to go the cheap route (sticking to 15kHz monitors and TVs), they sabotaged their own products' new feature.

On the other hand, to beat the Mac the Amiga would have needed much more software. As Thomas Richter pointed out, it would have required Commodore to invest in software, developer support and service to provide professional grade productivity software (also your dad's point). Investments were mostly seen as potentially unnecessary costs in Commodore management.

Of course, there are a lot of people who point out that Commodore didn't have the knowledge and market position to get the software side right, hence, going cheap with the A500 was the only realistic option that Commodore had and led to the (short lived) success of the Amiga in the late 80s. This is probably true as well. The high-end Amigas never sold in good numbers to sustain the technology. But the technology had all the potential that was needed to make the Amiga a long-time winner.

[Foebane]

@Grond

The alternative would've been Amiga never being bought out and the technology being put onto the scrapheap before anybody in the world even knew about it.

At least Commodore showed the world the Amiga and what it was capable of, even if they were doing it along the lines of "Hey, come look at our latest toy!"

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Keyboard storage and mechanical design were superb, but the technical specs were quite unbalanced. It didn't have enough RAM.

True, but that was easily solved. I got a 2MB FastRAM expansion for my A1000 and allocated 512k of it to a RAD disk so I could reboot into the hard drive without needing a Workbench floppy. I was very happy with that combo until 1991 when I got an A3000 (and still would be if some ******** hadn't stolen it).

The Mac had a similar problem, though it solved it through the "soft-swapping" and "resource management" Amiga didn't have.

When all you have is 128k and a single floppy I'm not sure 'solved' is the right word.

I had an early Mac for a while - what a frustrating experience that was! The OS had to be patched for each specific model, so if you didn't have the exact OS disks for that model it wouldn't work. The variable speed drive was incompatible with everything so transferring software to it was a nightmare. And when I finally managed to get it going, what did I have? A pokey little screen, one button mouse, and no software worth running on it.

I eventually dismantled my Mac and extracted any chips I thought might be useful. If someone gave me one today I would do the same.

Hard to believe I could work with only 1MB memory my A2000 had back then...

An A2000 with 1MB is effectively just an A500 in a bigger box. But those slots were crying out to be filled. Most A2000 owners I knew had them stuffed to the gills with cards and drives.

[Valken]

Regarding the Amiga 1000 @ Launch:

Electronic Arts bet their 16-bit career launch on the Amiga. That gave birth to ST and Mac games from a relatively 8-bit games company at the time.

Deluxe Paint created and elevated MANY careers in game designs and artistry!

It would have been an ST vs Mac slugfest vying for an eventual number 2 position, and ST would have won the consumers on entry price alone but with that basic as heck TOS. Mac would still cater to the gourmet market and probably taken video production if the Amiga did not exist.

All that from the lowly Amiga 1000. Without her, there would be no "Amiga line".

Amiga didn't thrive only because PC has the benefit of scaling.

386/486+VGA+Sound Blaster was better than Amiga 500/1200 and yet better bang for the buck than big box Amiga with a incredible amount of software development.

Looking back, it is easy to see this.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I do kind of wonder how many people are using or remember well what the Amiga with a 1080 or 1084 monitor was like. My Amiga 1000 is hooked up to a 1080 and it is not a good experience compared to even my Apple II.

Apple II? You had a choice of green screen (which showed colors as barely distinguishable patterns) or a composite color monitor/TV with 6 'colors' and fringing around text. And that's supposed to be better than an Amiga with RGB monitor?

Some of us still have original Amiga monitors, so we don't have to 'remember well' what they were like. I also have a Samsung SyncMaster 940mw with SCART RGB, and it's not a good experience compared to the 1084S.

I don't have to remember what the Apple II was like either, since I have an Apple IIc. I tried 80 column text on my TV and it was unreadable, unlike the A1200.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Valken

Regarding the Amiga 1000 @ Launch:

Electronic Arts bet their 16-bit career launch on the Amiga. That gave birth to ST and Mac games from a relatively 8-bit games company at the time.

Deluxe Paint created and elevated MANY careers in game designs and artistry!

It would have been an ST vs Mac slugfest vying for an eventual number 2 position, and ST would have won the consumers on entry price alone but with that basic as heck TOS. Mac would still cater to the gourmet market and probably taken video production if the Amiga did not exist.

All that from the lowly Amiga 1000. Without her, there would be no "Amiga line".

EA has promised a lot in the beginning but didn't really deliver anything of note in the first few years, no major Amiga game since everything was multiplat anyway. And they even skipped or delayed a lot of big games such as Wasteland or Neuromancer. ST had plenty of games without EA anyway (Mac didn't really matter, nowhere near Apple 2's gaming significance)

A1000 was important, of course, being the first Amiga, but it also nearly sank the whole project. If not for the A500/2000 reviwal in 1987 it could have really been only just ST vs Mac. And if the first Amiga was A500 it could possibly have brushed off the ST, captured much larger share of the market and compete with Apple.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

But at $3000+ in today's dollars, you couldn't do real work on the initially shipped Amiga.

But at $6,000+ in today's dollars, you couldn't do much real work on the initially shipped Mac either. And at $4,400+, you couldn't do much of anything on the initially shipped IBM PC (16k RAM, CGA, no drives, no monitor).

Yeah we know, computer stuff cost a lot more back then. But to just quote the Amiga's price in 'today's dollars', without comparing it to other competing products, is dishonest.

I've seen some people refer vaguely to word processing and spreadsheets but what, specific, word processors and spreadsheets would that be in 1985/1986?

In 1985/86 developers were just getting familiar with the Amiga, and I'm betting word processing and spreadsheets were not uppermost on their minds when there were much more interesting possibilities. Let's be honest here - few in 1985 saw the Amiga and thought "Forget the amazing graphics and sound, intuitive GUI and multitasking OS - this is just what I need to do boring spreadsheets and word processing!".

But then...

1985: Micro-Systems Software introduces the Scribble word processor for the Amiga.

August 1986: MaxiSoft ships MaxiPlan, the first Excel-class GUI spreadsheet program for the Amiga.

And would you actually want to run them on the hardware at the time given the state of Topaz, no hard drive support (like zero).

Topaz is my preferred font on the A1200 and A500.

In 1985 hard drives were prohibitively expensive, and not that big. A 10MB hard drive could only store the equivalent of ~12 Amiga floppy disks, and since you could have up to 4 floppy drives... Hard drives were available for the A1000 from 1986.

I couldn't afford a new hard drive back then, but in 1989 I managed to get a second hand 20MB MFM drive for $350 (equivalent to ~$800 in today's dollars) and a PC controller card for free. With a simple bus interface I soon had that running on my A1000. Before that I had 3 external floppy drives (two 3.5" drives and one 5.25").

[Foebane]

Let's be honest here - few in 1985 saw the Amiga and thought "Forget the amazing graphics and sound, intuitive GUI and multitasking OS - this is just what I need to do boring spreadsheets and word processing!"

Frogs's father certainly did.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by Foebane

"Let's be honest here - few in 1985 saw the Amiga and thought "Forget the amazing graphics and sound, intuitive GUI and multitasking OS - this is just what I need to do boring spreadsheets and word processing!""

Frogs's father certainly did.

That's pretty unfair. It's not unreasonable to expect a $3000+ (in 1985 dollars) investment to be superior to an ancient Apple II in every way. "boring" spreadsheets and word processing are what computers were primarily used for in 1985 (and to a lesser extent today).

What, in 1985, were you multitasking. Be specific? And besides games, where were you doing with these graphics and sound? What were you doing with the intuitive UI? Specifically.

I remember working at Babbages and being amused that the NeoGeo makers thought it had a chance since it cost like $700 in 1990. Who is going to pay $700 just to play games? Yet, some of the comments in this very thread see no issue with someone paying $1,300 (5 years earlier) without a monitor and thinking it being only a game machine is perfectly sane.

So what was the Amiga 1000? An insanely priced game machine? Or a very niche game graphics editor (Deluxe Paint) where getting images to use on non-Amigas was a pain. Or what? Because you weren't going to be doing any serious "boring" work on a 1080 monitor.

The Amiga 1000 was on the cusp of being the ultimate computer. It had the multitasking, intuitive UI, great graphics and sound. Make a 21khz monitor. The earliest EGA monitors could switch between 21khz and 15khz.

Imagine an Amiga 1000 that shipped with a Denise chip that could handle both 15khz and 21khz monitors, I think, would have changed everything. It might have taken the price from being $1249 to say $1299 (tops) and made the Amiga able to do *everything*.

[Ernst Blofeld]

Originally Posted by Frogs

So what was the Amiga 1000?

Something that recaptured the excitement and imagination that was part of the early computer scene, just as everything was starting to became corporate, boring, locked down.

A tool for creativity can also be used to do accounting.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Frogs

That's pretty unfair. It's not unreasonable to expect a $3000+ (in 1985 dollars) investment to be superior to an ancient Apple II in every way. "boring" spreadsheets and word processing are what computers were primarily used for in 1985 (and to a lesser extent today).

The opening line of your thread here is:

My dad got one of the first Amigas back when the launched. He ended up using it a great deal for video production but had intended on using it as general purpose "work" computer.

I'm happy your father found more uses for his A1000 than you describe here, but the Amiga was a hobbyist machine, open to lots of potential creative uses than the typical, boring PC of the day. At least he was open to them, unlike most who see computers as just a tool, including my parents.

In fact, I'm reminded of a conversation in Disney's Tron which sums this up:

Good Guy: User requests are what computers are for.
Bad Guy: Doing our business is what computers are for.

Computers these days are used for everything under the sun, not just office tasks, but for gaming, creativity, entertainment. Of course, that wasn't the case for the beige box in 1984, but the Amiga opened the door to this future versatility of uses, even if just a little.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Imagine an Amiga 1000 that shipped with a Denise chip that could handle both 15khz and 21khz monitors, I think, would have changed everything. It might have taken the price from being $1249 to say $1299 (tops) and made the Amiga able to do *everything*.

Well, if the Amiga 1000 had shipped with an ECS chipset, it still wouldn't have given you word processing and spreadsheet software for the serious work you'd wanted to have done. Only IBM compatibility or writing it yourself together with the operating system would have given you that.

[Frogs]

Originally Posted by grond

Well, if the Amiga 1000 had shipped with an ECS chipset, it still wouldn't have given you word processing and spreadsheet software for the serious work you'd wanted to have done. Only IBM compatibility or writing it yourself together with the operating system would have given you that.

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.

Originally Posted by Foebane

The opening line of your thread here is:

Quote:
My dad got one of the first Amigas back when the launched. He ended up using it a great deal for video production but had intended on using it as general purpose "work" computer.

I'm happy your father found more uses for his A1000 than you describe here, but the Amiga was a hobbyist machine, open to lots of potential creative uses than the typical, boring PC of the day. At least he was open to them, unlike most who see computers as just a tool, including my parents.

"work" doesn't mean just doing word processing and spreadsheets.

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?

It's not like we can't just look up and find out that, outside of games and Deluxe Paint, nothing really of note came out during the Amiga 1000 era. This is primarily because there was not enough there for developers to work with.

Here are some of the apps that could have sprung up on the Amiga had it shipped with the capability of doing 21khz as well as 15khz Denise:

* Corel Draw
* Illustrator
* Photoshop
* Digital Dark Room
* Quark Express
* Various database apps (Amiga's multitasking and GUI would have been amazing for this)

So "boring" spreadsheets and word processing is just the tip of the iceberg.

By the time ECS came out (1990) it was too late. These apps had sprung up, mostly on the Mac.

Had the Amiga 1000 shipped not with ECS but simply a Denise chip that supported 21khz monitors (which were common at the time) it would have been able to do some of the amazing things it could do (specifically: Deluxe Paint, Games, cool demos, photo displays) it could also have provided the starting point for more some pretty amazing software.

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