The History of the Amiga

Part 1: The Early Days

• Page 1
• Page 2

Part 2: The Commodore Years

• Page 1
• Page 2

Part 3: The P.C. Era

• Page 1
• Page 2

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

While Commodore busily did their best to fuck themselves in the ass, a small company named Newtek revitalized the Amiga community and gave the Amiga a professional identity that Commodore had done their best to avoid. The Video Toaster was released and instantly created a buzz in the tech community. By working closely with the Amiga's advanced hardware, the team at Newtek had been able to produce a board which made professional video production possible on an Amiga for a previously unheard of low price. I seem to recall the ads saying something like "An $80,000 video production facility in a $4000 board," but don't quote me on those exact figures. Ok, you can quote me, but I expect royalties. The point is, a video production revolution had just occurred, and only Amiga made it possible.

The board's abilities were most famously employed to create the special effects in the TV series "Babylon 5", and though that show sucked previously unheard of levels of ass, the effects were good, and it became an issue of pride for Amiga users. Here was their system, which nobody gave the proper respect, being used for high profile Hollywood productions. In fact, some Amiga user is probably reading this paragraph right now and turning a nice rosy shade of red because of my less than reverent assessment of Babylon 5. Sorry man, the show wasn't very good. Wooden acting and uninspired scripting. Deal with it.

The special effects in Babylon 5 were done with an Amiga and a Video Toaster. Unfortunately, they were the only good thing about the show.

"Damn, I just realized we're a Star Trek ripoff! Get me my agent!"

At any rate, the Amiga played a large role in the early days of CGI effects, and had things gone differently, would probably still be at the forefront. No thanks to Commodore, the Amiga had finally entered a serious, professional market which it owned by itself. Newtek had dragged them into it though, and would quickly regret it. The Video Toaster was as groundbreaking in terms of technology as the original Amiga had been, but Commodore's incompetence was growing at such an alarming rate that Newtek soon wished to avoid any association with the name "Commodore" or "Amiga". Commodore was sort of like that drunken uncle you try to avoid at family reunions.  Newtek began to cover the Amiga logo on their toaster systems with stickers and sell them simply as Toaster machines. At industry shows when confronted about their use of Amiga systems, Newtek either downplayed the association or even flat out denied it.

Kiki Stockhammer was the face of Newtek. She was also the tits and ass of Newtek.

By this time the influx of Amiga 500 users had died down and the Amiga market was becoming an underground movement. Amiga users began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Because of a general lack of advertising, marketing, or even a cogent business plan, the general population had no idea what an Amiga was. Conversations like this began to happen:

"What kind of computer do you have?"

"I have an Amiga."

"Omega? What's that?"

Commodore's poor decisions were beginning to catch up with them. The console gaming market experienced a resurgence, and many of the people who had once turned to the Amiga for gaming were now buying console systems instead. Computers were still being purchased, but they had expanded beyond mere game machines. People used PC's at work and when they decided they needed a system at home, they went with what they were familiar with from work. Microsoft had wisely targeted the professional market and it was paying huge dividends. Apple, for their part, had steadfastly carved out niches in schools and desktop publishing. The only market the Amiga had was video production, a very small niche market, and Newtek did their best to deny Amiga even existed. And so, to the computer world, Amiga pretty much didn't exist.

Owning an Amiga in the early 90's was like owning a Lamborghini. Not only did most people choose the car on the right, they didn't even know the car on the left existed.

It was an odd feeling to be an Amiga user at the time. The Amiga, even 5 years after its introduction, was vastly superior to any other system on the market, and yet nobody knew about it. Commodore had been given gold and turned it into lead.

The Amiga awareness gap began to give Amiga users a bit of a complex. Amiga users felt like the enlightened few, wandering in a world of complete ignorance. It was like having the wheel while the rest of the cavemen were pushing around their wagons on squared off boulders. And when Amiga users would point out the superiority of their systems, they were widely dismissed as fools.

1992: Gaga for AGA

1992 proved that Commodore still didn't get it. The management at Commodore seemed completely unaware of the direction computers were going, and continued to ignore Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft had already begun to grow into the behemoth it would eventually become, but its early versions of Windows were so primitive compared to AmigaOS that Commodore still could have taken over the entire computer industry if they'd shown any desire to. A simple widespread campaign comparing Windows to AmigaOS would have ended Microsoft's run right then and there and, yes, we would be living in a decidedly different future right now.

Instead, the geniuses at Commodore focused on the game console industry and decided Sega and Nintendo were the enemy. The management at Commodore still considered their technical marvel to be just a toy and were intent to prove they were right, even if it killed them. This led to the release of the Amiga 600, widely reviled as the worst Amiga ever built.

Employing surface mount technology for the first time, what Commodore had essentially done was shrink the Amiga 500 motherboard and hack off the numeric keypad. The A600 would go down in history as the least expandable Amiga, and seemed to be an odd system to release at that point. Here it was, 1992, and the a600 was in many ways just a cut down version of a system that had been around since 1987. Commodore decided to market the machine as a console with a keyboard, hoping to take a chunk of Nintendo and Sega's sales. That's how they said they'd market it anyway. As with the CDTV, however, the general public was never actually informed the product existed. Mention of the A600 could only be found in Amiga magazines.

I suppose it's important to note that these bad decisions were being made entirely in the upper echelons of Commodore's management and marketing teams. The Amiga tech department, toiling in thankless anonymity, were actually quite skilled at what they were doing, but were as much the victims of Commodore's bad decisions as anyone else. Projects like the A600 were forced on Commodore's beleaguered engineers, who then had to drop more compelling projects which could have pushed the Amiga to the next level of technical greatness. There are, in fact, too many examples of this to list. The situation was sort of like being asked to stop building a nuclear bomb in order to work on a slingshot. Surprisingly, no Commodore engineer ever killed a member of Commodore management. I'm sure many murderous scenarios were discussed when the orders came down for the A600 though...

Commodore was determined to prove that the Amiga was just a toy, and not to be taken seriously. The A600 was all the proof most people needed.

This was the ad that Commodore ran in Amiga magazines for the A600. The message seems to be that the Amiga is an expensive games machine designed for kids. Sigh...

What made the release of the a600 that much more inexplicable was the announcement that a new line of Amiga's was on the horizon with a brand new chipset. On September 11th, in Pasadena California, Commodore announced the AA (Advanced Amiga) chipset. It would be the first real upgrade of the Amiga's graphics since the Amiga had first been released in 1985.

In 1985, the Amiga's custom graphic chipset had an enormous lead over the graphic chipsets of  the PCs and Macs of the day. By 1992, however, those advantages had shrunk considerably. The PC no longer used just 8 colors, and instead ran quite comfortably with 256. Though the old Amiga chipset could do 4096 colors, HAM was too slow for apps and most games and was designed more for the static display of images and less intensive tasks. The Amiga's 32 color mode (64 colors with extra halfbrite) was thus the mode of choice for most games and apps, which technically meant the PC now had superior graphics for most things. Games began to be coded first for the PC in 256 color VGA and then ported in a downgraded 32 color version for the Amiga.

The AA chipset, later renamed to AGA, appeared to address this problem by moving the Amiga's 32 color mode up to 256 colors, and upgrading HAM mode from 4096 colors to 256,000 colors. AGA was backwards compatible with the old ECS chipset and ran the older modes faster than the original ECS chipset did. The AGA chipset also ran at 31khz which allowed use with more modern computer monitors without the added hardware of a flicker fixer which the company had been forced to include standard with the Amiga 3000. A feature of AGA called "Mode Promotion" allowed the old 15khz screen modes to be upgraded to 31khz.

On the surface, it seemed to be a nice upgrade, but there were some rumblings within the Amiga community. Amiga users had become accustomed to having better graphics than everyone else, but this upgrade seemed to just bring the Amiga level with the PC. Amiga users wanted a chipset which put the Amiga as far ahead as it had been in 1985.

Internally, it turned out the Amiga tech team felt the same way, and had been designing a chipset designed to do just that. They had dubbed it the AAA chipset, and had been working on it since 1989. The goal was to propel the Amiga's graphics at least another 5 years ahead of everyone else. But Commodore management, in another of their classic moves, scrapped AAA and instead demanded a much less ambitious chipset which could be ready sooner. And so the world got AGA.

I couldn't find a picture of the Amiga tech department circa 1992, so here's some angry muppets instead. Enjoy!

If nothing else, the move to AGA seemed to indicate that Commodore was finally aware that PCs existed. Along with the new chipset, version 3 of the operating system was announced. The release featured CrossDOS (allowing access to PC disks), datatypes (an attempt at adding system-wide plugins), localization (allowing multi language configuration), a standard installer utility, improvements to the file system, and much more...

As they had in 1987, Amiga released two systems in 1992. The Amiga 4000 was the modern AGA equipped equivalent of the Amiga 2000. The Amiga 1200 was the modern AGA equipped equivalent of the Amiga 500. Amiga users rushed to upgrade to the new machines. The rest of the world, meanwhile, had forgotten Commodore had ever existed and Commodore made no attempt to remind them.

1993: Let's try this again

Looking back, Commodore had a disturbing trend of repeating themselves. One would have thought the CDTV debacle, later followed by the Amiga 600 debacle, would have taught them something. Instead, Commodore acted like a retarded lab rat getting shocked by repeatedly hitting the wrong switch. So it shouldn't have been a surprise when, in the midst of mounting financial loss, Commodore announced the CD32.

It was another Amiga in disguise with a built in CD-ROM drive. This time it was an Amiga 1200 inside and Commodore designed it to look like a game console. Yes, Commodore refused to let the game console idea go. Ironically, the Amiga, which had started life as a game console idea, had finally been turned into what it had originally been envisioned as.

In America, Sega and Nintendo owned the console market and had huge advertising budgets to go with widespread distribution of their products. The CD32, on the other hand... yes, you guessed it... was advertised in Amiga magazines and was available only from scattered Amiga dealers. The resulting lack of sales was no surprise to anyone.

The CD32. It might have stood a chance if anyone had known about it besides Amiga users.

1994: The end of all things

1994 proved to be the year all of Commodore's bad decisions caught up with them. In March, they announced a fourth AGA based machine, the Amiga 4000T. It would prove to be the final Amiga they produced. Continuing losses made it impossible for Commodore to produce more than a small handful of the machines. On April 29th, (at 4:10 p.m. for the obsessed) Commodore filed for bankruptcy.

Fittingly enough, two months later Jay Miner died of heart failure in an El Camino hospital. His beard growing days had ended and so had his creation.

The final Commodore Amiga. It's also the rarest.

Even though the Amiga community had long been displeased with Commodore management, the bankruptcy announcement came as a shock. There had always been the feeling that if only Commodore could do something right, things would turn around. After all, one look at Windows 3.1 proved that AmigaOS was still the best OS around by far. As it turned out, Commodore had been given the biggest technological head start in computer history, but hadn't had the vision to do anything with it. Microsoft, meanwhile, began to spread across the globe like a virus. It seemed to be the end of the Amiga story.

Or was it? Stay tuned for the third and final wacky installment of the history of the Amiga. Until then, be afraid... be very afraid.