The History of the Amiga

Part 1: The Early Days

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Part 2: The Commodore Years

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Part 3: The P.C. Era

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The History of the Amiga: Part 1 (page 2)
 

1984: What the hell is that?

The public got its first look at Lorraine on January 4th, 1984 at the Consumer Electronic Show in Chicago. The prototype was a bit rough and the custom chips weren't finished, but it still managed to evoke a lot of interest from the crowd. This may be because the whole system was held together by four breadboards and looked more like a crashed UFO than a computer, but hey, interest is interest. The Amiga team was desperate to make a big splash at the show because they had nearly burned through all of their money and were hoping to lure some new investors. Apparently $7 million didn't go very far, even back in the 80's.

"Lorraine." It aspired to someday be a computer.

Desperate to impress, RJ Mical and Dale Luck wrote what would become known as "the Boing demo" during the show. A 3D rotating red and white checkered ball casting a shadow on a gray and purple grid drew gasps from the crowd of onlookers and instantly became the stuff of computer legend. It might not sound like much now, but apparently it was the most impressive thing anyone had ever seen at the time. Hey, it was the 80's. Rubik's cube was considered great entertainment back then. At any rate, the boing ball would become a permanent part of Amiga lore and would eventually be used as the company logo.
 

The infamous boing ball demo.

RJ Mical, perhaps inspired by what he'd been able to do at the show in very little time, tackled the Amiga's file and window system when the team returned to its secret lair in Santa Clara. Three weeks later, he'd finished it, dubbing it 'Intuition'. Its name was truly fitting, and no other OS has quite matched its design to this day. I imagine he celebrated this accomplishment by getting intolerably drunk and vomiting on the real Lorraine at a company party before beating a mime to death with a novelty rubber chicken. Of course, I have an overactive imagination.

Money continued to be an issue, however, and debt had begun to suck the life out of the festive atmosphere. The various members of the Amiga team did whatever they could to raise money and keep the dream alive. Dave Morse even took out a second mortgage on his house. History doesn't tell us what the real Lorraine thought of this...

On the hardware front, the custom chips underwent a final redesign and were transformed into real chips. The Amiga team figured this was a good time to show off the system again.

Desperate for cash, Amiga Inc. appealed to Apple, Sony, Silicon Graphics, and many other major players in Silicon Valley. In one of those ironic twists usually reserved for an M. Night Shalayman film, the only company who expressed an interest was... Atari. Yes, the same idiots who shitcanned the idea back when Jay Miner was their employee. Now apparently they wanted a piece of what could have been theirs all along. At some point a conversation like this may have occurred:

Atari: This is an intriguing idea. I wish our employees had come up with something like this...

Miner: Actually, I...

Atari: I mean, really, what are we paying people for?

Miner: As a matter of...

Atari: Hey, you look familiar. Weren't you the janitor here once?

Miner: GRAA! (being restrained by the rest of the team)

Atari loaned Amiga $500,000 in exchange for the right to use their custom chips, and Jack Tramiel, head of Atari, took the Amiga project under his wing.

I couldn't find a picture of Jack Tramiel, so here's a picture of a vampire instead. Enjoy!

No, the evil Atari empire hadn't grown any wiser in the years that had passed. Their motivation was pure industrial-grade spite. As it turns out, Tramiel had formed Commodore Business Machines back in 1955, and apparently he was hell bent on destroying his former company. Rumor has it he would bite into an executive's neck and suck their blood if they dared to mention "Commodore" without adding "those bastards". It should be noted, however, that I'm the one who started this rumor, and I have nothing to back it up.

Commodore had started out as a typewriter company, but in the early 80's had taken the home computing market by storm with the C64. At the top of Commodore's success, Tramiel had a disagreement with a major share holder, Irvin Gould, and left the company. A few months later he bought Atari. Now he had a chance for sweet revenge.

If you recognize this screen, you're officially 0ld sk00l.

You see, Commodore was working on a 16 bit Unix box at this time, and Atari decided they wanted to beat them into the 16 bit market. Hence, the deal with Amiga. It quickly became obvious to the Amiga team, however, that Atari had no real interest in them and merely wanted to prostitute the technology that they had worked so hard on.

Atari, realizing that Amiga probably wouldn't be able to pay back the money they'd lent them, started to play dirty, and offered an insultingly low 98 cents per share for the company. Amiga, facing financial meltdown, was forced to accept the lowball offer, but desperately kept looking for other investors while the deal was still being hammered out.

At this point in history, it looked as though the first Amiga would have an Atari logo on the case. Could imitation wood grain be far behind?

An artist's conception of what the Atari Amiga might have looked like.

To add insult to injury, the Amiga's very existence was then put in doubt. On Tuesday, July 3rd, Atari announced in an internal memo that all 8-bit projects had been cancelled and the Amiga project was on hold. Facing cancellation, the Amiga team gave up on trying to find new investors and began searching for another buyer instead. If they failed, all could be lost.

Atari was not willing to let Amiga slip out of their evil grasp without a fight, however. On August 13th, 1983, Atari filed a $100 million breach of contract suit in the Santa Clara County Superior Court against Amiga Corporation. Atari claimed that Amiga had fraudulently dealt with other potential buyers after agreeing to license microprocessors to them in return for a $500,000 advance payment. Although Amiga had returned the $500,000 advance by the end of June, Atari sought damages as well as an injunction preventing Amiga from delivering or selling chips to anyone but them.

Just two days later, Commodore made a surprise announcement that they were going to buy Amiga Inc. In response, Atari's management fell off of their collective chairs. Jack Tramiel went one better and turned into a bat.

The Amiga team had managed to convince Commodore to raise its bid to $4.25 per share, and just before the deadline ended Commodore gave them $1,000,000 to pay back Atari on the condition that they could then buy Amiga Inc. Apparently, the Amiga team had remembered the old adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". The Amiga team moved to the newly created subsidiary, Commodore-Amiga Incorporated, and continued their work with 27 million dollars of extra development money. The Amiga had been saved. Beer flowed like wine, and wine flowed like the money from Commodore's deep pockets.

However, Commodore management quickly became dissatisfied with what they saw as lack of progress. Originally intended as an entirely mouse driven system, AmigaOS was far behind schedule. In their first official stupid move, Commodore decided to employ an outside developer, MetaComCo, to port a version of TripOS and incorporate it into the existing code. The result was far below the expectations of Jay Miner and his team, lacking many of the features that they had intended (resource-tracking, etc.).

When Amiga enthusiasts try to point to the time when the ideal of the Amiga first became tainted, they usually don't go back this far, but this could be seen as the first of many bad decisions which would eventually add up to... well, I'm getting ahead of myself...

1985: Greatest computer... ever?

The Lorraine prototype machine quickly became the Commodore-Amiga 1000. It had many characteristics of a high-end workstation of the time. Greeted by great speculation from the computer industry,  the Amiga 1000 was officially unveiled on July 23rd at the Lincoln Centre in New York and released in September of that same year.

The Amiga's advanced graphics and intuitive graphical user interface made the Apples and PCs of the time look decidedly primitive. The PC was limited to 8 color CGA, and still used an old fashioned command line interface. Apple had a graphical interface, but it was black and white, and extremely limited. AmigaOS had other advantages, like true preemptive multitasking (running more than one program at once for you rookies.) The PC world wouldn't see true preemptive multitasking for another decade, and Apple even longer. The custom sound chip in the Amiga was capable of a full rich stereo sound which blew away anything else on the market. The Amiga could also connect to a TV and be used for editing video.

 
MacOS and a typical MacOS game of that era...

 
MSDOS and a typical PC game of that era...

 
AmigaOS and a typical Amiga game of that era... Any questions?

With all of the advantages the Amiga had, it looked poised to rule the home computing market...

...and thus ends my first installment of the History of the Amiga. Ok, so you may have noticed I never got to the catchy dance number. I figured I'd stop here before this thing gets too big. At some point I may post a second installment covering the Commodore years, a sexy tale of critical success and bitter downfall. And then, assuming that ever happens, I may even post a third installment covering the antics of the post-Commodore era, which, yes, includes the infamous dance number. Until then, be afraid...