Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Promilus

Mattered to whom?

Mattered to the people who could justify spending big bucks to get the latest technology.

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

Exactly. It was a toy with delusions of grandeur. Not that such delusion was necessarily a bad thing, or that it was the only one. The vast majority of home computers were in the same world, and the Amiga was king of that realm. But a business computer it wasn't. Therefore it's not fair to apply business computing standards to it.

The only area the PC had to 'catch up' to the Amiga in was gaming and multimedia, and it did it via a different path. The goal of a PC was always to help businesses make money. The entire industry was focused on business performance - more processing power, bigger storage capacity, higher resolution displays. And what do you know, these things eventually turned out to be good for games and multimedia too!

If the PC had started out as a true home computer nobody would be accusing Commodore of 'sitting on their arse watching how PC caught up', because the PC would have failed miserably. In fact that's what did happen when IBM produced a true home computer, even though the PCJr was superior to contemporary business PCs for gaming.

So for many years the PC got more and more powerful while remaining too expensive to be a mere toy, while games for it got better and better until one day... BOOM! it eclipsed everything else. With 90% market share and hardware powerful to do texture mapped 3D, and adverts and shops selling it everywhere, no mere toy had a chance. 99% of the computer buying public had never even heard of the Amiga, and those who had only knew it was a cheap gaming computer that wasn't up to PC standards. In fact it wasn't IBM compatible at all! You would be an idiot to buy one.

That's why I say that in all the areas that mattered, the PC was always ahead. Home computers were a different market that didn't focus on being ahead, but on providing more entertainment at a lower price. In the home computer market constant advancement was not appreciated. The average user couldn't afford it and didn't see the point. The more advanced their machine was the longer they expected it last, and the games market was based on a stock machine being the standard for many years. The most important thing was to get the userbase above 'critical mass' where developers would continue to support it (a problem the PC never faced).

The Amiga didn't fail because Commodore 'sat on their arse'. It failed because the PC did an end run around it by concentrating on business performance where the money was. The PC had an inherent advantage since 1981 when IBM put their badge on it, virtually guaranteeing that it would assimilate everything else. It was what everybody who could afford it wanted - a computer that you wouldn't get fired for choosing - a computer you didn't have to compare to anything else, because it was IBM compatible. That's what mattered.

(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).

Even 1.3 was way ahead of its time. To say there was 'hardly any software on it' is a stretch. One advert in the June 1990 edition of Amiga World (the one introducing the A3000 and WB2.0) lists 45 'graphics', 41 'video', 13 'cad', 42 'art', 19 'business', 22 'word processing and DTP', 6 'BBS', 51 'educational', 10 'database', 34 'programming', 39 'music' and 46 'utility' titles. WB2 made it much easier to produce high quality applications, including pubic domain and shareware software. I can't be bothered trying to list them all, but I bet the total would rival Windows 3 apps on the PC.

And they lost the lead in multimedia anyway.

Not quite sure what you mean by that. Scala MM100 won Byte Magazine's "Best of Comdex" in 1996. Until then it had been an exclusively Amiga program. So yeah, Amiga 'lost the lead' in 1996, two years after Commodore was gone.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

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

How is this relevant?

I guess one could claim that any PC you could buy for £399 in 1992 was worse than the A1200, therefore the Amiga was still ahead.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Gorf

So MS seems not to act overly revengeful and putting business first.

Yep. Microsoft was always putting business first - a strategy that worked very well.

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 ...

If by 'office software' you mean a word processor, spreadsheet and database, the Amiga had all those. Most businesses got by with a just a word processor and spreadsheet, but for many businesses an accounting package was pretty much essential (I say 'pretty much' because my own computer shop didn't use one until 1997 since my manager preferred to use a manual system!).

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

At the time when most Amigas couldn't do flicker-free high res, many PCs couldn't either. Most business PCs spent their time running in text mode, either monochrome with a long-persistence monitor that blurred moving text horribly, or CGA with the same resolution as the Amiga. From 1987 VGA gradually took over, providing nicer looking text but no more functionality. I still see Point of Sale systems using VGA text mode today...

Anybody who has used an Amiga terminal program knows that it can do text fine. 4 colors in 640x200/256 is fine for an accounting program. My friend ran his business with Easy Ledgers on an A1200. It was way better than the (expensive) QuickBASIC accounting programs that most businesses used. Later on I used it myself - only problem was my accountant couldn't use the report files directly. I solved that problem with a conversion program I wrote in Amiga BASIC.

But let's be honest, you wouldn't waste a great games machine by putting it in the office doing word processing and invoicing all day, would you? No, you would buy a crappy PC for that job. Unless, like my friend, you enjoyed playing games instead of working! Mind you I did use my A3000 in the office - with a 50MHz 060 and 32MB of RAM it went rather well. Unfortunately I didn't have time to play games...

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.

Perhaps, but more likely MS just figured neither machine had a big enough market to make the development cost worth it (same reason Jon Carmack wouldn't port Doom to the Amiga). And I hate to think how buggy MS office ported from the Mac would be. Amiga BASIC was bad enough.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

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).

Eventually the owner will be looking to cash out. Irving Gould was born in 1919 and died in 2004. Let that sink in for a bit. In 1992 he's 73 years old. He could have gotten out a few years earlier when Commodore's financials were better, but he's become enamored with the Amiga and foolishly thinks it might still have a future.

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

They all had their flaws. Jobs almost sunk Apple, then later came back to save it. Gould bankrolled Commodore many times - the Amiga would not exist without him. Imagine if Gould was a wimp and Tramiel had gotten his way. We would all be talking about how disappointed we were by the Commodore ST.

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.

Yes they were shitty, but graphics was just to display the occasional bar chart. You spent most of the time using text mode because it got the job done quicker. You soon remembered the keyboard shortcuts and could bang out letters and invoices in no time. You had the essentials, a hard drive, printer, compatible file formats etc.

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.

Yes, the PC architecture was a mess. But you had programmers and technicians to handle that stuff. You paid through the nose and they made the system work, and everybody was happy. The cost didn't matter because you wrote it off as an expense, reducing your tax liability. So the PC industry grew and grew due to all the money there was to be made from it. And the glue that held it all together was - IBM compatibility.

Anybody who thought the Amiga could make headway in that market is deluded. I tried - for a while. Luckily Commodore went bankrupt before I did.

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.

Again you miss the point. The Amiga could have had hyper-advanced Alien technology in it and it still wouldn't have helped. The Amiga never had the essentials it needed to be better than the PC in all the ways that mattered. 'Better' graphics, better sound, Autoconfig? Nice things for sure. But text mode, an x86 CPU, IBM compatible BIOS etc. were the essential things the Amiga needed before it could be 'better' than a PC. Otherwise it was just - different, and instantly dismissible.

In that sense, the dirt-cheap shitty architecture helped the PC.

Yes. But what helped it most was having IBM behind it, with their untypical decision to make the hardware generic and 'open source'. Once that genie got out of the bottle...

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But text mode, an x86 CPU, IBM compatible BIOS etc. were the essential things the Amiga needed before it could be 'better' than a PC. Otherwise it was just - different, and instantly dismissible.

Text mode on 68K would not have helped the least. People that wanted x86 programs to run required an x86 processor, not a 68K. CBM offered the bridgeboard to address those customers, but why would you get one if you could get a PC in first place without the Amiga part.

The first power Macs (the desktop version) also had something like a 486 based bridge board, if I recall, as the first PPCs were not fast enough for a useable x86 emulation.

[Promilus]

@Thomas Richter - yes, but overall Macs weren't IBM PC compatible nor Windows compatible and yet they survived and are in good shape DESPITE 3 CPU architecture changes. So I really don't get why Bruce claims no matter how Amiga would have been improved it would've died anyway due to IBM PC incompatibility. As if IBM PC compatibility was everything. It was not. Large enough userbase, clear goals for future improvements (while taking into account market demands) and partnership with developers to introduce more gamechanging software to the platform... that's what it was lacking the most. Not PC compatibility!

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Promilus

overall Macs weren't IBM PC compatible nor Windows compatible and yet they survived and are in good shape DESPITE 3 CPU architecture changes. So I really don't get why Bruce claims no matter how Amiga would have been improved it would've died anyway due to IBM PC incompatibility. As if IBM PC compatibility was everything. It was not. Large enough userbase, clear goals for future improvements (while taking into account market demands) and partnership with developers to introduce more gamechanging software to the platform... that's what it was lacking the most. Not PC compatibility!

Clearly beyond his scope. I tried to explain the same somewhere else but I stopped arguing in front of the deny of the reality.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

At the time when most Amigas couldn't do flicker-free high res, many PCs couldn't either. Most business PCs spent their time running in text mode, either monochrome with a long-persistence monitor

But the PC DID have flicker-feee high res since 1981 - that this was only for text mode is irrelevant: MDA is 720*350
(And Hercules added a gfx mode in that resolution in 1982)

You need to have a high enough resolution to display enough information (text or otherwise) on a screen … MDA or later the Macintosh delivered the bare minimum for office applications … the Amiga did not until Flickerfixer or ECS were available.

This was quite obvious by 1985 and a couple of members of the original Amiga Crew identified this design-flaw in later interviews.

Jay Miner always wanted to build much more than a game-console or home-computer (512k + expansion ports from the beginning), but this was cut down by Commodore, which resulted in the awkward position the A1000 was in after Commodore decided to put it over the $1k mark … where Miner’s original design would fit much better.

Still Miner later admitted that the interlace mode was not sufficient …
(in NTSC with the right monitor one can tolerate this a little bit longer, but it is of course terrible in PAL)

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Thomas Richter - yes, but overall Macs weren't IBM PC compatible nor Windows compatible and yet they survived and are in good shape DESPITE 3 CPU architecture changes. So I really don't get why Bruce claims no matter how Amiga would have been improved it would've died anyway due to IBM PC incompatibility. As if IBM PC compatibility was everything. It was not. Large enough userbase, clear goals for future improvements (while taking into account market demands) and partnership with developers to introduce more gamechanging software to the platform... that's what it was lacking the most. Not PC compatibility!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Promilus

@Thomas Richter - yes, but overall Macs weren't IBM PC compatible nor Windows compatible and yet they survived and are in good shape DESPITE 3 CPU architecture changes. So I really don't get why Bruce claims no matter how Amiga would have been improved it would've died anyway due to IBM PC incompatibility. As if IBM PC compatibility was everything. It was not. Large enough userbase, clear goals for future improvements (while taking into account market demands) and partnership with developers to introduce more gamechanging software to the platform... that's what it was lacking the most. Not PC compatibility!

Indeed. And even with all that 'Macs' nearly didn't make it either. I think it's safe to say that Commodore never really knew what direction to take the Amiga brand and eventually just settled on making it a C64++.

[Gorf]

PCs and Macs were not alone in the 90s. Gaming consoles had a huge comeback and sold an order of magnitude more machines than in the decade before.
Workstations like SUN or SGI also survived the 90s.
PDAs appeared as new category

There would have been enough possibilities for the Amiga to survive in a better shape than it did in the 90s … as a pretty good allrounder with focus on professional digital video and audio.

The relatively strong after market, despite all the chaos and total lack of commitment of Escom and Gateway, proves that ….

I mean even after all the mistakes of Commodore and its eventual demise in 1994 there still would have been a small chance for the Amiga, if the intellectual property would have fallen in the right hands.
A joined effort of NewTek, MacroSystems, GVP, Phase5 and ProDAD (p.OS) under the umbrella of a new and competent owner would have been a way forward even then.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I guess one could claim that any PC you could buy for £399 in 1992 was worse than the A1200, therefore the Amiga was still ahead.

(going in circles again)

Yes, that is true for the < £400 segment.
The problem was that Commodore did not offer anything in the £600-800 range as well as the £800-1000 range ... the A4000 was too expensive again (especially for what it delivered)

Commodore HAD to offer the A1200 at this low price, and sacrifice margin by doing so, because the time of underpowered wedge-computers was over.

They failed to offer something more advanced, that could sell at a higher price, since they did not spend enough time and money in R&D for the Amiga, but preferred to design the 100th PC-clone-board instead...

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by TEG

Clearly beyond his scope. I tried to explain the same somewhere else but I stopped arguing in front of the deny of the reality.

My point was more that a text mode would not have helped the Amiga the least. With its architecture, it is just superfluous, and other architectures such that the of the Mac or the ST proved that text modes were just dying technology.

What matters is a living software ecosystem that addresses the needs of the target audience. In the business market, this was the PC and its software ecosystem. CBM came from a home computer market and did not understand that the key to the success was software (or became software) and not hardware abilities. The Amiga could not run the software business users wanted to run, and bought the PC for, and thus was simply an uninteresting games machine as which CBM tried to push it.

This is, BTW, also my critique on vampire, which provides more or less useless hardware features instead of putting compatibility first.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

What matters is a living software ecosystem that addresses the needs of the target audience. In the business market, this was the PC and its software ecosystem. CBM came from a home computer market and did not understand that the key to the success was software (or became software) and not hardware abilities. The Amiga could not run the software business users wanted to run, and bought the PC for, and thus was simply an uninteresting games machine as which CBM tried to push it.

I agree with you about the software Thomas as I posted earlier on the thread. The hardware was good enough but the software was 4 years late (Breathless, Photogenics, Wordworth AFC, Final Copy Light).

The Amiga 3000 manual came with some fancy hand drawn CAD software on the front brochure, I don't know which CAD software that was.

Who knows maybe if their was an Amiga owner at CERN who helped developed www and ported it in the early days to KS2+ Amiga, it would have helped push a few more models.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by redblade

The Amiga 3000 manual came with some fancy hand drawn CAD software on the front brochure, I don't know which CAD software that was.

Yes :-)

they wished ... but even with the integrated fickerfixer the A3000 was anything but a CAD workstation (and I still love my A3000)

Who knows maybe if their was an Amiga owner at CERN who helped developed www and ported it in the early days to KS2+ Amiga, it would have helped push a few more models.

At least it was not too far off.
In the mid/late 80s the documentation project at CERN started on PDP-11 and more and more Apollo workstations, which were 68k based. Until they would finish their own documentation system LaTex was used as a substitute ...
Finally Berners-Lee moved his development over to a (68k) NextStation and the rest is history.

But this would not have changed much: AMosaic was already available 1993 ... so the Amiga was still among the first systems to support HTTP/HTML, well before the WWW became actually useful
.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Gorf

they wished ... but even with the integrated fickerfixer the A3000 was anything but a CAD workstation (and I still love my A3000)
.

Never used them, but there were several CAD packages for the Amiga.
From Wikipedia (I know):

At its beginning Amiga was considered to offer the most powerful graphic platform at a reasonable price.[1][2] It had various CAD programs available for it, such as X-CAD, IntelliCAD, DynaCaDD, MaxonCAD, IntroCAD, and even programs to design and test electronic circuits, such as ElektroCAD.

The other option was that they were suggesting AmigaUX and that was a Unix CAD package.
Never poked at Amiga Unix, but apparently it was Sys5...

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by TEG

Yeah, I was in the idea of Microsoft refusing a deal with Commodore asking to bring Office on the Amiga but this is assuming Commodore would ask. I don't know if it was done.

Most likely (99,999%) that never happened. :-)

Originally Posted by TEG

Well, there was the productivity mode since ECS (Amiga 3000 - 1990 and A500+ - 1991).

So it was 5 years after the A1000, way to long, and barely usable from my own experience (unexpectedly falling back in lower resolution, so scrambling VGA monitor).

So yes, it's a point and a valid one to say that the Amiga did not catch up with the PC at a certain point in time.

And ECS was some 3 years after IBM introduced the VGA standard so that should have been plenty of time to do something better than ECS.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by desiv

Never used them, but there were several CAD packages for the Amiga.
From Wikipedia (I know):

All rather semiprofessional except maybe DynaCADD

CATIA, AutoCAD, Pro/ENGINEER, TurboCAD are all missing

And 640*400 is not really a resolution someone would call "made for CAD" even in 1990 ...

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Gorf

And 640*400 is not really a resolution someone would call "made for CAD" even in 1990 ...

True, but the 3000 could do 1280x512 I believe.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by desiv

Never used them, but there were several CAD packages for the Amiga.
From Wikipedia (I know):

All rather semiprofessional except maybe DynaCADD

CATIA, AutoCAD, Pro/ENGINEER, TurboCAD are all missing

And 640*400 is not really a resolution someone would call "made for CAD" even in 1990 ...

Sure you could use an early gfx-card without support from the OS or even the CAD software or the A2024 monitor that was only 15'' and may also not be supported by the software