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 2 - The Commodore Years
 

Ah, history... it's not only entertaining, but educational. Take the Titanic, for example. Not only did it spawn the highest grossing movie of all time, but it also alerted us to the dangers posed by large floating chunks of ice. Personally, I never get into a boat without first scanning the horizon for icebergs, warm climate be damned. And I'm happy to report that so far, thanks to history, I've never struck a single one. Yeah, that's history, baby.

As promised, it's time for part two of the History of the Amiga... The Commodore Years. In part one we left off with Commodore purchasing Amiga Corp and releasing the Amiga 1000, a system vastly superior to the Macs and PC’s of the time. Could world domination be far behind?

Alas, as we'll soon discover, the more Commodore tightened their grip, the more the computer market slipped through their fingers...

The Titanic. It sunk.

1985: Atari raids the scrap heap

It was 1985 and Commodore had saved the Amiga. The future looked bright, so bright in fact that Jay Miner is rumored to have had to wear shades. Commodore looked poised to lead the world into the 16-bit market, and they'd be doing it in style.

But what of Amiga’s bitter enemy? What of Atari? Did they drift away quietly after losing out on owning the Amiga? Did they disappear without a trace, like donuts at a fat farm? No, not bloody likely. If anything, Jack Tramiel and his lackeys were that much more obsessed with dominating the impending 16-bit market. Tramiel knew with vampiric certainty that his best bet was to get his 16-bit system out first, no matter how shitty it might be. And make no mistake, it would be epic in its shittiness.

The pinheads at Atari knew that they couldn’t possibly assemble a new system that could compete with the technical capabilities of the Amiga in such a short timeframe. So, using off-the-shelf hardware and software, Atari hacked together their 16-bit platform in much the same way a bum might construct a home from discarded boxes and street trash. For the hardware, they used standard parts which were already being used in the 8-bit market. For the OS they used a 68k port of the CP/M operating system which was integrated with the GEM user interface. In case you didn't know, the GEM user interface had been around since the Xerox days and is said to have inspired the first versions of MacOS. In other words, it was a clumsy early effort at a GUI, completely outdated, and had been pretty much abandoned as a historical footnote. Atari decided it was perfect for their next generation system.

GEM, the user interface for the Atari ST (and also the old 8-bit Amstrad). Yes, it was shit.

So while the Amiga had an elegant and innovative OS which could multitask, the Atari had a single tasking OS which looked like a GEOS reject. Where the Amiga had an advanced custom chipset which was way ahead of its time, the Atari had standard chips any idiot could order from Radio Shack.

Tramiel had obtained his objective though and is said to have cackled with glee at the speed with which the system came together. Atari's hastily assembled machine was dubbed the "Atari ST" and was released months before the Amiga.

I'm not sure what the "ST" was supposed to stand for, but for the sake of this story we'll assume it stands for "Scrapped Together."

By the time the Amiga was released, 11 months after Commodore had bought the company, the Atari "Scrapped Together" had already established a strong market presence. The Amiga team at Commodore were unfazed by this and assumed things would change quickly once people saw their system. After all, who wanted a Yugo pretending to be a Lamborghini when you could just get the Lamborghini?

With much fanfare and more media coverage than it would ever get again, Amiga went ahead with its launch on July 23rd, 1985 at the Lincoln Center in New York City. Commodore figured they needed some big name celebrities to add some interest to the proceedings, so they hired Andy Warhol (hippy pop culture artist) and  Deborah Harry (former Playboy playmate and lead singer of pop group "Blondie") to represent the company at the unveiling.

No. I'm not making that up.

Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry. "Uh, why are we here again?"

The Amiga actually hit store shelves in September of that year with a  price of $2800 (£1,500). For those who were wondering, the worlds first Amiga magazine, Amiga World, was launched in America soon after.

The price put the Amiga in the high end market occupied by the Apple Macintosh. Rather than market it as a high end professional machine, however, Commodore decided to set their sites on Atari's hunk of junk which, rather appropriately, was selling for less than half of the price of the Amiga. Hey, you get what you pay for. This, however, was a key marketing decision in the history and eventual downfall of the Amiga, so let's sum up what Commodore had decided to do:

1. Create a high end computer which destroys everything else on the market.

2. Price it around the same as the other computers on the market which are considered high end, but which are inferior to yours.

3. Instead of competing with and comparing your product with the other high end machines in the market (which you clearly have beat), market your product so that it appears it's in the same category as a hunk of garbage released by Atari which happens to cost 1/3 as much as your system.

4. Watch as people buy the hunk of junk instead, because it's a lot cheaper and they assume your system is a similar hunk of junk because of your idiotic marketing.

So really, point 3 is where it all went horribly wrong. If Commodore had been wise enough to aggressively go after Apple's market at this point instead of jumping down into the slums with Atari, we'd be living in a decidedly different future right now. Unfortunately, it wasn't the last stupid decision Commodore would make.

Of historical note, it was around this time that the Juggler demo was released. It consisted of a character juggling reflective balls in a 3D environment, and really showed off the Amiga's superior graphical capabilities. The way the 3D environment was accurately and dynamically reflected in the glass balls hadn't been seen before. Reportedly it so impressed the people at Electronic Arts that they decided to completely rewrite their IBM PC package, Prism, and release it for the Amiga. They called the result Deluxe Paint and it came out the same month as the Amiga 1000. It began a long tradition of superior graphics applications written for the Amiga, and EA became the first of many large software developers who would get their start coding for the precocious new machine.

Not as famous as the boing ball demo, but hey, the boys at EA liked it.

1986: Zee Germans

Up until this point, the whole Amiga phenomenon had been a completely American endeavor. You may, however, encounter some misguided fools who insist the Amiga is German. While not technically true, a German team did come into the picture in 1986 and contribute to the Amiga's history.

Commodore, to it's credit, was not content to just sit back and relax after the Amiga 1000 was released. They wanted to develop a new system, which they would call the Amiga 2000 and would feature more expandability. For reasons not entirely clear, but in hindsight probably related to stupidity and the ingestion of too much alcohol, they had two separate teams design the Amiga 2000. Perhaps they figured a little competition would result in a better design. Then again, perhaps they forgot they'd already assigned it to a team when they assigned it to the second team. Trust me, it was entirely possible.

The first team consisted of the original Amiga creators in Los Gatos, California. The second team... was in Germany. One would assume the original team would have been given the reigns in this situation and zee Germans would have been politely told to fuck off. After all, the Los Gatos team had started the whole ball rolling. Who knew more about the Amiga than them? Unfortunately, Commodore had other ideas.

For "cost-cutting reasons", the Los Gatos facility was closed down and much of the original Amiga crew was laid off. By default, this meant the German design would have to be chosen. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with the original Amiga team. They were already pissed at Commodore for the lousy way they were marketing the Amiga 1000, and now a path had been chosen which was far less innovative than what they'd had in mind for the next Amiga. And, yeah, I suppose being laid off didn't exactly make their day either. Jay Miner reportedly felt the Amiga 2000 the Germans designed wasn't a suitable follow-up to the 1000, but he was pleased with the emphasis on expandability and didn't complain too loudly. Or maybe he did complain loudly and it was just muffled by his enormous beard. Nobody could be sure.

The Amiga 2000 was the result of German engineering. Of course, so was the holocaust.

Personally, I suspect the original team's idealism and eye to the future scared the suits at Commodore, so they went with the safer, more pliant German team who had less of an emotional connection to the machine. Commodore likely had puppet strings firmly attached to the German team, and laying off the U.S. team and closing Los Gatos was just a convenient way to avoid answering difficult questions.

Meanwhile, the inferior Atari ST was still beating the Amiga 1000. The gaming market was leaning toward the Atari at this time, releasing games on the ST first then porting them to the Amiga. The most successful market for the Amiga was America, but Commodore showed an incomprehensible reluctance to market the Amiga as a serious machine. While IBM and Apple began to gain strong footholds at businesses, schools, and moved into the home, Commodore seemed content to push the Amiga as an expensive toy and ignored the more serious and lucrative markets entirely.

Ultimately, only Amiga users and developers seemed to realize the incredible power and potential of the Amiga. Commodore, for their part, seemed to want to keep the machine's abilities a secret. At one point they even considered stamping all Amiga cases with the message "Nothing to see here. Please move on," but rejected the notion because the stamps might draw too much attention. Ok, I made that last bit up, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if an internal memo was  discovered which proved it really happened. The point here is that Commodore was wasting a golden opportunity. Screw that, gold is down today. They were wasting a zinc opportunity... maybe even a platinum opportunity. Really, just pick a mineral and combine it with opportunity. It doesn't matter, they were wasting it.

As a result of all of this, the Amiga began to slowly drift away from the mainstream computer world. After all, if Commodore didn't take its system seriously why should anyone else?

1987: The Amiga 500.. one Amiga to rule them all

Despite Commodore's marketing buffoonery, 1987 proved to be a good year for the Amiga. The 2000 was released to very little fanfare, but what truly began to turn things around was the Amiga 500. With its small form factor and built in keyboard, it evoked comparisons to the c64, a computer that had taken the world by storm.

By this time, the unique abilities of the Amiga had spread by word of mouth and through the various Amiga-related magazines that had begun to dot the publishing landscape. Computer users who had been clinging to their 8 bit machines finally saw a desirable upgrade path in the Amiga 500, and though it was still a bit pricier than the Atari ST, it began to surpass the ST in sales. When this happened, gaming companies took notice and began to develop their games for the Amiga first. This forced them to discover the machine's superior abilities and finally the Amiga began to get a decent flow of games which took advantage of its advanced technology. This further pushed the Amiga 500's sales advantage over the ST as many of the games released could simply not be done on the ST's inferior hardware. This period was the golden age of Amiga gaming, and many of the top coders running the gaming industry today first cut their teeth on the Amiga.

The Amiga 500... also known as the ST killer.

Ultimately, though, the success of the 500 may have sealed the Amiga's eventual fate. Commodore saw their sales pass the ST and figured it validated their whole baffling marketing approach. Never mind that the 500 did nothing to address the exponential growth of the PC and Mac markets. Commodore figured they had another c64 on their hands and turned a blind eye to the changing world of the desktop computer market. For now the Amiga was a success, but dark clouds were on the horizon.

1989: Game over, man...

By the time 1989 hit, Atari was pretty much dead. Imagine that... the most innovative computer of all time had beaten a hunk of quickly assembled junk. Really, it shouldn't have been surprising, but Commodore treated it like the end of an epic quest. They acted like they had hurled the One Ring into the lava of Mt. Doom and vanquished the Dark Lord Sauron himself. The suits in the executive offices sat back in their plush leather chairs and breathed a sigh of relief. They had won. It was all over now... everything would be easy from here on out... right?

Apparently nobody within the company had the guts to point out that they'd merely beaten a piece of garbage that they shouldn't have been competing with in the first place. And while Commodore gloated and ordered another round of martinis, Microsoft and Apple began to take over the workplace. Commodore seemed not to notice, or even be aware that Microsoft and Apple existed.

The Commodore executives sat back in their corner offices and likely made proclamations like these:

"You mean people use computers at work? Preposterous!"

"Microsoft? What are you talking about? We beat Atari! ATARI! Now be a pal and get me some more Champagne..."

So content was Commodore with slaying Atari that they allowed hardware development to stagnate for awhile. Other than the Amiga chipset being upgraded to allow for 1MB of Chip Ram, things pretty much stayed where they had been for the last couple of years. And ultimately, not much had changed with the hardware since the original a1000. The Amiga was still ahead of it's time, but it had done little to build its lead during half a decade under Commodore.

1990: Entertainment system...?

Finally, in 1990 the Amiga market saw movement forward. The Amiga 3000, considered by some to be the most well designed Amiga ever made, was introduced. It boasted 32-bit technology, SCSI and the first major upgrade to the operating system since it had been released. Workbench 2 had a much more professional look than earlier versions, and introduced a bevy of modern features. In what was becoming typical ham-fisted Commodore fashion, however, Commodore vehemently denied the Amiga 3000 existed just 30 minutes before they announced its release. I don't have a transcript of what was actually said, but it pretty much amounted to this:

Commodore: "Rumors of an Amiga 3000 are completely untrue. Completely ridiculous, even. Utterly silly. Please, don't make us laugh. We're insulted you'd even take such a wild rumor seriously. Laughable, man. Ha ha! Laughable! If there was such a thing, don't you think we'd know about it? I mean, we run the damn company. Laughable, I tell you."

30 minutes pass.

Commodore: "Ahem... We're pleased to announce the Amiga 3000."

Yes, this was a savvy company that knew what it was doing. Ultimately though, the A3000 would be the only intelligent thing Commodore did all year. In somewhat of a surprise move, they also announced the A3000UX, a version of the Amiga 3000 which ran an implementation of UNIX. Could it be that Commodore was going after the server and business markets?

Amiga users hoped the A3000 heralded a new era of Amiga dominance. It didn't.

1990 also saw the release of CDTV. Promoted as a CD entertainment system, Commodore never seemed too sure of what purpose the unit would ultimately serve and consumers had no idea either. Internally, the CDTV was just an Amiga 500 with a CD-ROM drive, but Commodore insisted it not be referred to as a computer. They gave strict instructions to retailers that the unit was not to be placed within 5 meters of the computing section of the store. Commodore's cunning plan, you see, was to market it to the mainstream public who knew nothing of computers. How did they accomplish this plan? By advertising it in Amiga magazines. Yes, that would reach the mainstream non-computer using public. Ah, those marketing geniuses.

It did sell ok to Amiga users at first, but soon they realized they'd just overpaid for what was essentially a less expandable Amiga 500 with less RAM and the older version of the OS. Soon, a collective "d'oh" could be heard bubbling up from the Amiga community and talk of lynch mobs began to be bandied about.

With no accompanying marketing campaign to explain what it was to the general public, the CDTV died a quick and painless death and would be recorded as one of the first of Commodore's truly bad hardware decisions. Yes, more would follow.

Commodore had a vague vision of the CDTV replacing the VCR, though it couldn't play or record movies.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems attempted to get an OEM license to produce A3000UX computers as low end UNIX workstations. It could have been a lucrative deal that would have helped Commodore for some time and opened up new markets for the Amiga hardware. At that time, Amiga actually had the best Unix implementation yet seen, beating Intel and several mainframe developers.

For reasons inexplicably to most, but probably related to increased martini consumption, Commodore management publicly expressed interest in the deal, but then privately told Sun to fuck off. No major company came calling again. The A3000UX was later scrapped.