Some thoughts on why the Amiga didn't thrive

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Frogs

I always heard it was bad marketing or failing to keep the Amiga's tech lead or Commodore mismanagement in general the killed it.

You heard wrong. If it wasn't for Commodore the Amiga would never have seen the light of day.

History of the Amiga

Further presentations were made at the following CES in June 1984, to Sony, HP, Philips, Apple, Silicon Graphics, and others. Steve Jobs of Apple, who had just introduced the Macintosh in January, was shown the original prototype for the first Amiga and stated that there was too much hardware – even though the newly redesigned board consisted of just three silicon chips which had yet to be shrunk down. Investors became increasingly wary of new computer companies in an industry dominated by the IBM PC. Jay Miner, co-founder, lead engineer and architect, took out a second mortgage on his home to keep the company from going bankrupt...

the Amiga group received interested from Commodore, and began discussions of selling the company. In August 1984, Amiga was purchased by Commodore for $27 million, including paying off the loan from Atari.

That's not to say that Commodore didn't make a lot of mistakes, but they weren't alone in that. Consider IBM's attempts to enter the home market with the PCJr and wrestle back control of the PC market with the PS/2 line and OS/2, all of which failed. Then there's the iAPX 432 CPU that Intel pinned their hopes on - which reportedly ran 2 - 5 times slower than a 68000 and was not IBM compatible.

IBM created a monster with the PC. By the time Commodore managed to get the Amiga into a fully working state PC clones were already dominating the market with exponentially increasing sales. It's truly remarkable that Commodore managed to develop several unique Amiga models and sell so many units, a testament to the engineers' design skills and quality of the machines, as well as proof that Commodore wasn't that incompetent at marketing them.

Could the Amiga have done better under a company with better management and a stronger vision? Sure, but such a company did not exist. The market was driven by a rabble of clone manufacturers just trying to make a buck by copying everyone else, and customers who didn't want to think for themselves. Every computer manufacturer that went against that tide drowned, even Apple would have if they hadn't diversified into other products.

The Amiga lost from the outset by the design of the Denise chip. It ensured that the Amiga was just a game machine because at the time its competition, while inferior in lots of superficial ways, were much better in the areas that mattered for people using computers for work:

The Amiga was never actually aimed at that market. Most businesses just wanted something to write letters on and do their accounts - for which a mono text screen and low performance 8 bit CPU were adequate.

From the start Commodore touted the Amiga's creativity rather than 'productivity', which was echoed in the name Amiga (feminine "friend" in Spanish) compared to IBM's boringly unimaginative 'PC'. The Amiga's amazing built-in graphics and sound was supported by an efficient multitasking operating system that PC users could only dream of, and a truly intuitive GUI that mainstream PCs didn't match until 10 years later with Windows 95.

The Amiga's chipset wasn't a mistake, it was necessary to provide the desired features at the price, and it ensured that all Amigas would have the same advanced multimedia capabilities. In contrast, PCs of the day had a mishmash of various hardware bits that made it difficult to produce a fully integrated machine. This didn't worry business users who just needed a text display, but it was a severe problem for games and multimedia applications.

In many ways the Amiga was ahead of its time. The use of an advanced integrated chipset was later copied by PCs, to the point where most PCs today only have 2 or 3 main chips apart from the CPU, and many have a combined 'system on chip' which integrates the CPU and graphics etc. The Amiga's properly multitasking OS was much more productive than single-tasking PCs or Macs, it didn't suffer the memory limitations of DOS, and the GUI made users feel they were one with the machine rather than fighting it. Little things, like being able to run each program in its own screen and drag one down to reveal another behind, made all the difference.

To support these features at a realistic price the Amiga had to have an integrated chipset which was the same in each model, unlike PCs which came with no graphics card and customer's chose what they wanted, eg. MDA for nice text (only) or CGA for color graphics (but not so nice text).

The Mac SE (which came out in 1987) didn't have a text mode but its graphics mode could do something like 512x340 without interlacing. So the screen was solid and the text sharp.

Hah! I had a Mac for a while. That pokey little screen looked nice but quickly became tedious, and made me feel like I should take a shrink pill to match my size to the screen and mouse. It was OK for desktop publishing I guess, but not much else.

The IBM AT (which came out in 1984) couldn't do graphics well but it had a rock solid text mode letting users also do work with very crisp, sharp text.

This is sort of true, depending on which graphics and monitor you got with it. And it is valid criticism of the Amiga except that some PC users were frustrated by the lack of graphics capability. Applications ran in DOS to get performance, but tried to do GUI with characters that didn't work that well. Some DOS programs used graphics modes just to show charts etc. or preview documents, but users really wanted a 'what you see is what you get' display all the time, with a proper GUI - which is why Microsoft developed 'Windows' (another unimaginative name to suit unimaginative users).

The Amiga maxed out at 640 x 200 which wasn't suitable for work use or 640x400 interlaced which was also not useful for work. The other modes may have had lots of colors but they were too low resolution to do work.

And yet millions of PC users worked with CGA and didn't complain about it - because they had colored text to make up for it. Unfortunately the Amiga did fall down here - not because it couldn't do it (it could) but because 16 colors required 4 bitplanes which was slow in hires.

Your father is right to point out this weakness of the Amiga chipset, but what if it had included a 'rock solid text mode'? This would have been incompatible with the GUI and gotten in the way of intuitive operation, just like PCs when you tried to run DOS applications from Windows. Wider ChipRAM bandwidth would have fixed this, but it wasn't technically feasible at the time. PCs of the day suffered the same problem when they went full GUI because the ISA bus couldn't deliver the required bandwidth - which is why most apps used text mode!

But even if the Amiga had included a text mode just as good as EGA or VGA, it still wouldn't been good enough because it still wasn't IBM compatible. However it would have made life awkward for Amiga owners who didn't want to fork out for a special monitor. The advantage of 640x200 (640x256 in PAL world) was that it was compatible with TV standards - just like CGA (except with a lot more colors etc.). Those of us who were used to running our home computers on a TV appreciated this, and it made the Amiga ideal for video applications (along with built-in genlocking capability).

However saying that the Amiga 'maxed out' at 640 x 200 is not quite right, as the the A2000 had a slot for a 'flicker fixer' and the A3000 had one built in. I bought an A3000 with the standard multisync monitor in 1991 when they came out. The flicker fixer did a pretty good job of producing 640x512 (better resolution than VGA) and with the CPU having 32 bit access to ChipRAM it wasn't that slow. As well as that any A2000, A3000 or A4000 user could install an RTG graphics card if they wanted. I had one in my A3000 and it rocked! Since these were the machines that 'serious' users bought, the complaint about not having sufficiently high resolution modes is a bit off (one could argue that it was expensive, but that's a different complaint).

Amigas certainly were used in business despite their perceived failings. 640 x 256 was quite sufficient to run business apps, just as CGA was on PCs. I ran my business on EasyLedgers, and also used GPFax, Final Writer, Professional Calc and Professional Page. These programs were at least as good or better than their PC equivalents, and the A1200 and A3000 both handled them fine. At no time did I have any desire for a plain text mode. I also knew of other people who used their Amiga 500s for 'serious' work. Many of them had a hard drive and almost everyone had a printer. These people were using their lowly Amigas to do things that otherwise would require an expensive PC.

What your father missed was that the Amiga was not intended to compete directly against boring business PCs, nor did Commodore seriously market it as such (they sensibly produced their own PC clones for that). In the market it was designed for it excelled - the only problem is that market disappeared as everyone got sucked into the PC cult.

The Amiga lost from the outset for the simple reason that PCs were already there and had a stranglehold on the market. It could have been designed better and marketed better, but still would have lost to the PC eventually just like all the others. Nothing could stand up to the PC juggernaut because people in general are too lazy and unimaginative to think for themselves. And that's OK. If the Amiga had become 'mainstream' it would have lost its unique character just like PCs did.

[Tigerskunk]

@Frogs: I think and feel, that the counterargument to this is the ST failing. Which did everything the Macs did much better and at a much cheaper price.

The only answer to this is the PCs steamrolling the US market.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Frogs

Now, with what we know now, we know that the Amiga team intended it as a game machine that could be used as a computer but that's not how it was marketed in the US when it came out.

Perhaps a better title would have been why the Amiga didn't thrive as a business computer since it later found a niche in home video editing and with the Video Toaster graphics work.

Amiga was intended to be a home computer, and after a messy start with the neither-fish-nor-fowl A1000 it did thrive for quite a few years after A500 and A2000 were released.These models weren't meant to compete with business PCs, thankfully. It's also a very good thing that it wasn't marketed as (or made into) a console, because it'd have either completely lost to the Japanese big players or be some sort of boring also-ran. As it was, A500 was affordable enough so the kids like me had the ability to experience some arcade quality games, "big" PC ones, creative programs and much more. And creatives had the high end models to play with.

With better vision from Commodore it could have perhaps lasted longer, if A1200 had more cutting edge design, perhaps, but sooner than later it would have to ultimately fade away, like everybody else.

PCs have not won because its users were brainwashed cultist idiots, like Mr. Abbot kindly suggests*, but because nothing could compete with the idea of an open design which anybody can put together and innovate for. In that respect I'm actually glad that Amiga "lost" because I don't want the computer market to be controlled by one corporation, no matter how much nostalgic sentiments I might have for it.


*if you are wondering why I called this topic "flammable", here's your answer

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

sooner than later it would have to ultimately fade away, like everybody else.

What are you talking about? Apple, the cancer on the IT industry that it is, is still with us to this day. Apple should've died out, too.

[Mad-Matt]

Originally Posted by Foebane

What are you talking about? Apple, the cancer on the IT industry that it is, is still with us to this day. Apple should've died out, too.

If it wasn't for Microsoft throwing them a bone, they would have. I bet MS regrets that decision

[Gordon]

Here we go, another person from the US playing down the Amiga. There are other lands across the atlantic sea! In Europe the Amiga did THRIVE and did so for many years, up with the top in the business and gaming market while Americans were still working on their apple IIs and playing with the NES!

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Foebane

What are you talking about? Apple, the cancer on the IT industry that it is, is still with us to this day. Apple should've died out, too.

Apple was completely insignificant until the ipod came round. Yeah, in some scenario perhaps Amiga could have replaced them in that last-man-standing computer niche, but since I'm not a fan of their biz model I can't say I care much for that either.

The best way for Amiga to really thrive nowadays would be being reborn as an interesting hobby machine, some sort of affordable open-source Vampire with no copyright BS baggage.

[dalek]

Originally Posted by Frogs

...
(My dad was a hardware engineer at DEC back in those days).
...

Respect! DEC made the best hardware of the day. I think he has some really valid points. I started IT on DEC systems - some of them still running to this day.



It's something you can even still see today - give someone a nice screen, keyboard and mouse and what's under the hood matters less and less.

[robinsonb5]

In its latter days I think the lack of chunky display and limited display bandwidth held back the Amiga. I'm not just talking about Doom, etc., but also - to build upon OP's points - actually text rendering performance too.

Rendering scalable outline fonts on a planar display is much more difficult than rendering that same font to a chunky display. By the mid 90s MS Word on a PC could scroll a page of crisp truetype text smoothly, pretty much in realtime, while Amiga apps struggled to do the same with any level of fluidity.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Rendering scalable outline fonts on a planar display is much more difficult than rendering that same font to a chunky display. By the mid 90s MS Word on a PC could scroll a page of crisp truetype text smoothly, pretty much in realtime, while Amiga apps struggled to do the same with any level of fluidity.

I have to agree: separate bitplanes may be a boon for 2D scrolling games, but it's certainly not designed for word processing or DTP in Workbench. I'll never forget the snail's pace of updates, especially with a lot of bitplanes. The screenshots for AGA looked gorgeous, with many 256 colour screens, but they must've looked terrible in action.

[Jobbo]

Instead of speculating and exchanging personal opinions I would highly recommend reading: Commodore: The Amiga Years and Commodore: The Final Years.

Both were eye-opening and gave me a much wider view than my perspective living through the Amiga years in the UK.

[khph_re]

The Amiga didn't take off until the A500, if the wedge was released first,
some market share could have been stolen two years earlier from other platforms. As soon as possible after that, an expandable big box with more ram and a faster processor. I would have actively courted prominent ST and MAc devs with cash if necessary. I wouldn't have released the A100 at all.


Additionally a high res 31 KHz mode, and perhaps scan doubled TV modes would have made it a lot more professional. The move from planned 5 micron

to commodores 3 micron process might have allowed this.

[KONEY]

All this makes sense but the biggest reason for me is that Commodore (like Atari with ST and Acorn with Archimedes) didn't have the power and/or the will to act as a lobby towards professional software publishers like MS and apple did. For the same reason these days applications like for example Cubase VST or Photoshop aren't ported to Linux, because if they were MS and apple would have plenty of legal ways to make the publishers sorry for it. We all are very well aware of this.

[Foebane]

I think the TV drama Micro Men summed it up best, especially for computing in the UK: The competition at the time consisted of smaller companies like Acorn and Sinclair, with their competing products the Atom / BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum / QL respectively, with the big giant American corporations eventually steamrolling over everything. The visual metaphor with Sir Clive Sinclair on his tiny C5 electric car being overtaken by huge lorries with American brand names on them like Microsoft and IBM is so appropriate, if sad.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

PCs have not won because its users were brainwashed cultist idiots, like Mr. Abbot kindly suggests*, but because nothing could compete with the idea of an open design which anybody can put together and innovate for.

"An open design which anybody can put together and innovate for" would be the S-100 bus.

The IBM PC was not really an 'open' design. It used a specific CPU and other chips made by Intel, with a proprietary BIOS and OS. IBM enforced its BIOS copyright to prevent 'clone' manufacturers from producing fully compatible machines, and Intel went after any chip manufacturer who tried to make a compatible CPU.

Why do I say it was a 'cult'? Even before IBM released the PC, people were clamoring for a 'cheap' desktop computer from them because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". Despite its flaws and poor performance it instantly achieved 'cult' status, and from then on the question on every computer purchaser's lips was 'Is it IBM compatible?'.

The PC didn't promote innovation, it stifled it. Users demanded that machines be '100% BM compatible' because then they didn't have think about what they were doing, and clone manufacturers spent all their efforts sating that desire. Other manufacturers who tried to make truly innovative alternatives were pushed out of the market.

IBM PC compatible

The IBM PC was sold in high enough volumes to justify writing software specifically for it, and this encouraged other manufacturers to produce machines which could use the same programs, expansion cards, and peripherals as the PC. The 808x computer marketplace rapidly excluded all machines which were not hardware- and software-compatible with the PC...

By June 1983 PC Magazine defined "PC 'clone'" as "a computer [that can] accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an IBM PC, walks across the room, and plugs it into the 'foreign' machine". Because of a shortage of IBM PCs that year, many customers purchased clones instead.

The primary reason that the PC took off so rapidly was not because it was more 'open', but simply due to IBM's reputation. By choosing IBM customers didn't have to make decisions they might regret or have to learn about different systems. IBM was the 'safe' option, and pretty soon the only one worth considering - in the minds of PC cultists.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Foebane

I have to agree: separate bitplanes may be a boon for 2D scrolling games, but it's certainly not designed for word processing or DTP in Workbench. I'll never forget the snail's pace of updates, especially with a lot of bitplanes. The screenshots for AGA looked gorgeous, with many 256 colour screens, but they must've looked terrible in action.

You never used an ISA bus PC with VGA then. Standard VGA only has 16 colors in hires, and it uses bitplanes. Chunky has no advantage until you get to 256 colors, and then only when manipulating individual pixels. At lower color depths planar has the advantage, including when rendering to fewer planes in a deep screen (eg. for scrolling monochrome text).

The Amiga's bitplane implementation has the added advantage of being able to tune the color depth to the application for faster rendering and lower memory usage. For example I run IBrowse on my A1200 in 8 colors because I prefer speed to eye candy, and 16 colors doesn't look any different on my TV. With VGA you don't have that option - it's either 2, 16, or 256 colors and nothing in between.

The real problem with a 256 color hires screen is simply the amount of data that has to be moved around. This is a problem both for Amigas with a 16 bit Blitter and for PCs with a 16 bit ISA bus. Until faster buses were developed for PCs, a 256 color desktop was terrible to use - especially with some of the cheap (and therefore popular) VGA cards of the day.

[dalek]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The primary reason that the PC took off so rapidly was not because it was more 'open', but simply due to IBM's reputation. By choosing IBM customers didn't have to make decisions they might regret or have to learn about different systems. IBM was the 'safe' option, and pretty soon the only one worth considering - in the minds of PC cultists.

Yes and the marketing around "IBM Compatible" which struck fear into the hearts and minds of many a Mum or Dad lest they choose poorly for their children and be shown up in front of their peers.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by khph_re

The Amiga didn't take off until the A500, if the wedge was released first... I wouldn't have released the A100 at all.

The idea behind the A1000 was to make it look like something better than the 'toy' home computers of the day. That did pay off for at least one customer - me. I bought the A1000 even though I could have had an A500 for less, because I preferred the styling of the A1000.

Another reason was that the A1000 wasn't finished when they produced it, and needed a large daughterboard to hold the 'writeable control store'. Squeezing this into an A500 would have been tricky. Many people complained about the A500 needing to have an external modulator and power supply too, because they couldn't fit those things into the 'wedge' case.

Additionally a high res 31 KHz mode, and perhaps scan doubled TV modes would have made it a lot more professional.

They did effectively have that with the flicker fixer, and then later with the ECS chipset (but only in 4 colors max). Scan doubled TV modes would have been nice but the bandwidth wasn't available, and many VGA screens don't do 50Hz or overscan.

The move from planned 5 micron to commodores 3 micron process might have allowed this.

Yes, along with many other enhancements they could have made with more transistors. It would be interesting to speculate on what was practically achievable, and what they should have done with it if given the chance. I wonder if with modern FPGAs it might be possible to create an AGA compatible chipset with such enhancements.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Many people complained about the A500 needing to have an external modulator and power supply too, because they couldn't fit those things into the 'wedge' case.

I figured that there was too much tech inside the modulator to fit in the A500 case itself, which was already crammed with the Amiga tech proper. Same for the PSU. The PSU issue never bothered me anyway, and as for the modulator, it also wasn't an issue for those who went for the monitor, anyway.

However, in my case, I was using an old wooden computer desk that was snug enough for an Atari 800XL as it was, for the A500, which was really too big for it, a good inch of the bottom of it was hanging off the edge!

[Photon]

The title is incorrect. The Amiga did thrive. Try to get an answer on an 8086 PC forum today

Your dad is an average American. He just didn't get it. I'm sorry but it just sounds like making up excuses from hindsight. Illegal software monopolies 'made' the IBM PC (clones), not anything else.

From research and talking to friends from the US, early 1980s, the conclusions are that a) most Americans couldn't afford a new computer, and b) those that could weren't enthusiastic about any computer unless it emulated DOS 8-bit from the 1970s. Stuck in the old. And they already had such a computer. It sounds like your father expected the Amiga to be the WYSIWYG, print to laser printer work computer of the mid-1990s, but he's a decade off there. The Amiga would do that too, at that time.

Here are some facts:

(if they are relevant after slaughtering your father - but it seemed like he was justifying making the wrong choice back then. It was the wrong choice, we could all be running Amigas with expansion cards instead of waiting a decade and then run PCs with expansion cards.)

1. The IBM PC or original Mac offered absolutely nothing the Amiga didn't in 1985.
2. The original Mac required disk swaps just like the Amiga, but incessant enough to drive you mad unlike the Amiga. (I own one, in case you feel like contesting this point...) One great difference between the two was that the Amiga supported external drives to avoid any disk swaps! The original IBM PC could not boot without a floppy disk either - and in 1987 the Amiga supported harddisks just like the later IBM PC models did.
3. WordPerfect 4.1 was out for the Amiga in 1987, just like 4.0 for (MS)DOS, and supports text mode without flickering just like (MS)DOS did. (Only difference being going beyond monochrome cost you $1000 extra...)
4. At any point your father could have bought an expansion card to get even higher-res, "for serious work", non-interlaced modes - not that WordPerfect would support it, just like it didn't on PC. Application support was equally bad for Amiga and PC at the time - with the Mac, as ever, not supporting anything...

So, no. Even if Denise is what actually let your father do workstation work at the fraction of price, print to matrix printers, run WordPerfect, etc, your father's explanation rings completely false.

I'm very curious. Ask your father if he stopped doing video titling, after which he switched platform because of a printer driver. (This is what my crystal ball says to me.)