Just how many things can one company cockup

[ImmortalA1000]

Here are two classics, a bit like that old Volkswagon Golf advert about the guy who made bad choices all the time lol

1. Commodore had a pretty nice version of UNIX for Amiga, even a nice GUI layer. They never did anything with it after the A3000 was shelved. Perhaps the EC040 was a dumb choice for a computer costing TWICE the price of the identical Mac LC475 with identical 25mhz EC040? They went a bit nuts making sure CP/M would run on the C64 successor putting a useless (in C64/128 mode) Z80 on the motherboard but they don't continue with UNIX....the asswipes even said Amiga 5000 would use Windows NT lol a real shitshow of an OS compared to UNIX in the mid 1990s.

2. Text to Speech, we had it essentially in 1986 right? Just as all the buzz is about PC/Mac having text to speech finally in their OS in the 90s Commodore lose it in Workbench 2.0 onward. Oh but we do get some batch processing language port of IBM's REXX...absolutely essential for 1992 small business/home computers.

Lest we not forget we are lucky Commodore survived as long as it did.

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Here are two classics, a bit like that old Volkswagon Golf advert about the guy who made bad choices all the time lol

1. Commodore had a pretty nice version of UNIX for Amiga, even a nice GUI layer. They never did anything with it after the A3000 was shelved. Perhaps the EC040 was a dumb choice for a computer costing TWICE the price of the identical Mac LC475 with identical 25mhz EC040? They went a bit nuts making sure CP/M would run on the C64 successor putting a useless (in C64/128 mode) Z80 on the motherboard but they don't continue with UNIX....the asswipes even said Amiga 5000 would use Windows NT lol a real shitshow of an OS compared to UNIX in the mid 1990s.

2. Text to Speech, we had it essentially in 1986 right? Just as all the buzz is about PC/Mac having text to speech finally in their OS in the 90s Commodore lose it in Workbench 2.0 onward. Oh but we do get some batch processing language port of IBM's REXX...absolutely essential for 1992 small business/home computers.

Lest we not forget we are lucky Commodore survived as long as it did.

1 word comes to mind when it comes to O/S. “Microsoft”. DOS and Windows pretty much took over.

UNIX was a big thing back in the day which tried to emerge as the way forward. Have a look at the old Computer Chronicles vids on YouTube to get a history lesson Bromigo!

Fast forward and now LINUX has a dominance

[lmimmfn]

The loss of text to speech for me was a huge loss in >KS2. While it seemed niche in 1.3 with the Internet it would have been great to read pages which were mainly text based back in the day, at least it would have been a plus vs other micros

[Matt_H]

Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil video gets into the fate of Amiga Unix. Commodore management almost had a deal to OEM the A3000UX to one of the big Unix workstation vendors. Sun, I think. Then they bungled closing the deal. Twice. The cash flow from that alone could have kept them going another few years, probably.

The speech synthesis was actually licensed from another vendor and at some point Commodore didn't want to pay for it anymore. That decision must have happened late in the development of OS2.1, which would put it in the latter half 1992, when they were starting to run out of cash. Developers weren't really doing much with it, so management probably decided the money would be better used somewhere else. Not that management were all that smart about allocating money...

Including ARexx in the OS was absolutely correct, however. The inter-process communication that ARexx enables is a hugely valuable feature and is one of the three essential interfaces for applications outlined in the official Amiga UI Style Guide, along with CLI and GUI. The ease with which programs can pass data to one another using ARexx is something that modern systems still struggle with. The only negative about ARexx is that Commodore supposedly screwed the developer they bought it from, meaning it was not really developed further.

[Daedalus]

Indeed, ARexx is one of the features of Amiga OS that I love the most. It was intended as a replacement for the version of Microsoft BASIC that was included with earlier versions of OS 1.x, and which was so poorly coded that it crashed on any CPU over a 68000. ARexx is a wonderful language in comparison, and indeed it is a shame that Commodore shafted William Hawes as well, because further development of it could have been even better.

[rothers]

No companies at that time seemed to know what they were doing (apart from maybe Nintendo - but they did have the VR headset).

Sega also wrecked themselves in a similar way.

No one could predict where computing and video games were going, so they had to just guess.

Wasn't it ultimately the patent troll who killed Commodore anyway? Their crazy decisions might have paid off if that didn't happen.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by rothers

Wasn't it ultimately the patent troll who killed Commodore anyway? Their crazy decisions might have paid off if that didn't happen.

The writing was already on the wall at that point, but it was indeed the final nail in the coffin. Many other mistakes and burned bridges had already brought them to a point where this was their last chance.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Here are two classics, a bit like that old Volkswagon Golf advert about the guy who made bad choices all the time lol

1. Commodore had a pretty nice version of UNIX for Amiga, even a nice GUI layer. They never did anything with it after the A3000 was shelved.

This is over-selling it, the Amiga UNIX was never going to go anywhere.


It had nothing going for it, it wasn't cheap enough, it had no unique features, it had no support and it was slow.


It's a fairly run-of-the-mill port of SystemV UNIX, the GUI it shipped with is just Openlook, and also where the problems start; No sensible graphics option for a UNIX machine, you'd need to add that 2410 graphics card pushing up the price.


And at that point you could just a better machine with actual software support, good development environments (NeXT says hi) and exceedingly better hardware.


No sorry, Amiga UNIX would have always been a failure and it was a pathetic product.


I honestly don't even really believe the whole Sun deal legend, it makes no sense and it's never been corroborated by anyone from Sun.