Continuing the discussion from here: https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=45508&forum=16&start=500&viewmode=flat&order=0#880974

@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: Who was the (technical) responsible for that? Was it Porter again? After the C65's 8-bitplane chipset reveal and Rubin's approval, AGA ASIC R&D was done by a CSG LSI team member.

Which proves that there was the possibility to have a new Amiga chipset.
Quote:

AA3000 and AA1000plus are system integration projects.

What's the point here? It's normal that a product is made of different components which are assembled & work together to fit the project scope.

BTW, I'm System Integration Test Lead at BMW, and I'm working on exactly this area (e.g.: SERVING the System Integration by testing the assembled products).
Quote:

AA3000 acted as the primary system integration test platform for AGA.

That's normal: you need a testing platform for the product coming from the system integration (process).

I'm also responsible and manage/handle/steer the entire test farm for BMW's Infotainment system, so I know very well this topic, too.
Quote:

Jeff Porter was a task allocator within the system engineering group within the bounds of management directives e.g. Herni Rubin's monochrome hi-res management directive.

So, it was a project manager which roughly acted also as a "scrum master" (!).
Quote:

Herni Rubin has other directives, not just monochrome hi-res.

Nothing to say, here: we know that Commodore was working at several projects in parallel, and he was responsible for some of them.
Quote:

Quote: The hierarchy was defined, but the technical people were incompetent and not even able to agree on the SPECs of a project... Wrong. Similar-ranked headstrong engineers are not cooperating, which needs proper leadership i.e. the captain is missing in action. A1000's project had Jay Miner as leader for both system integration and custom ASIC design for both ICS and OCS (drop-in 64 color EHB improvement).

I agree on that. There were too many engineers which had completely different ideas on how (IF) to evolve the platform, which stalled its development.

Managers need a single point of contact as a reference regarding technical topics, and this was clearly missing.

I manage several engineers working on different areas / work packets, and I've a responsible for each of them to whom I talk about the activities to be performed, issues, etc.. I don't need to talk with every single engineer regarding topics on a specific area, neither I need the technical knowledge (they are responsible and are paid for that, and they should deliver the expected results).
Quote:

After the A1000 project, the monochrome hi-res mandate was Herni Rubin's.

Like for other projects.
Quote:

Quote: This furtherly proves how engineers were doing whatever they wanted, even against what managers had said them to do. Managers are oblivious to PC graphics.

As you reported from the book, no: it wasn't the case. Managers knew PC graphics (and Mac graphics as well), and they started meetings for discussing the specs of the Next Big Thing exactly with the purpose of contrasting the competition which became very serious.
Quote:

Quote: In fact, Hedley haven't proved why this ‘bitplane to pixel converter’ was so important for the... CDTV. Which was Commodore's multimedia machine. 1. For the CDTV-CR project after CDTV. 2. Improved PC graphics handling without modifying the core Amiga graphics.

Again, that wasn't the purpose for those specific products, as I've already tried to explain.
Quote:

Quote: He has wasted time and resources for the company just to play with his idea... Amiga's multimedia group can only modify surrounding chips (i.e. system integration), and they don't have the mandate to change the core Amiga graphics design e.g. AGA R&D needs Henri Rubin's approval. Amiga's multimedia group only has a system integration mandate. Remember, the system engineering group was responsible for CBM's 8-bit business desktops and C900's system integration. The system engineering group created a VLSI team for AAA and Hombre. VLSI team recycled some engineers from the CSG LSI team. VLSI team is under the system engineering group's administration. The CSG's LSI team is responsible for VIC-20 and C64 for both AISC and system integration R&D, which largely kept the CIC group alive until the A500 takeover. The problem is the weak business plan after A500. Corporate structure limitation is an executive board management problem. It was the executive board that deleted the original Los Gatos Amiga team.

Rubin's reaction to the LSI's C65 has shown that this mandate was certainly possible (e.g.: putting people from different teams together to work on a specific project).
Quote:

The Amiga lacks Ken Kutaragi's leadership capability.

Kutaragi was also a very good engineer, and Commodore clearly lacked them, as it was proven.

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: Kutaragi was also a very good engineer, and Commodore clearly lacked them, as it was proven.

Commodore had good engineers. If they didn't then we would have all the awesome stuff they produced - 9 wonderful Amiga models that all worked as intended and are still working 30+ years later! Plus many expansion cards and peripherals that were all competently designed.

Tramiel era machines weren't so great though. The C64 was Commodore's most popular model, and yet was full of design flaws and bad engineering. But that was largely due to Tramiel pressuring them to get stuff out the door ready or not.

Commodore's engineers had their faults, but bad engineering wasn't one of them - at least not during the Amiga years. They certainly weren't any worse than the engineers who designed the infamous Apple III and IBM PCjr, or even the Mac and PC, or the Ti-99/4a, Timex Sinclair 2068, Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC to name just a few others with significant design flaws.

@bhabbott

Quote:

bhabbott wrote: @cdimauro Quote: cdimauro wrote: Kutaragi was also a very good engineer, and Commodore clearly lacked them, as it was proven. Commodore had good engineers. If they didn't then we would have all the awesome stuff they produced - 9 wonderful Amiga models that all worked as intended and are still working 30+ years later! Plus many expansion cards and peripherals that were all competently designed. Tramiel era machines weren't so great though. The C64 was Commodore's most popular model, and yet was full of design flaws and bad engineering. But that was largely due to Tramiel pressuring them to get stuff out the door ready or not.

Which kind of innovations brought the Amiga engineers after the Amiga 1000?

Kutaragi brought the first Playstation and all its innovations. The Amiga engineers?
Quote:

Commodore's engineers had their faults, but bad engineering wasn't one of them - at least not during the Amiga years.

Please, tell me more about the Slow Mem which was worse than Chip and Fast Mem, the ECS (after FIVE years from the OCS) with its ridiculous 4 cycles Chip mem & registers access time for the 68020, the Amber chip (instead of integrating a scan doubler to che chipset), Super Buster and its "awesome" memory bandwidth, the FrankenPatchwork which AGA represents which was still a 16-bit chipset and most of the things left untouched, Akiko (crappy C2P WITHOUT using the integrated DMA controller), and Hombre with the HP PA-RISC with its ridiculous amount of caches.

Just to report the first ones which come immediately to my mind.
Quote:

They certainly weren't any worse than the engineers who designed the infamous Apple III and IBM PCjr, or even the Mac and PC, or the Ti-99/4a, Timex Sinclair 2068, Acorn Electron, Amstrad CPC to name just a few others with significant design flaws.

Compare them to the OVERALL stupidities that Commodore engineers have made in just 9 years, and draw your conclusions...

Hint: April 1994...

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: Please, tell me more about the Slow Mem which was worse than Chip and Fast Mem,

a) it wasn't worse, it combined the flaws of the 2
b) it was a significant cost cutting measure (no need for a separate controller) that had minimal performance impact on 68000 systems.
c) it was only meant to be in the low cost A500, the A2000A had real 512k FAST in the MMU slot. The A2000B was a rushed fix for the A2000A failure
d) once Agnus went 1MB C= never again shipped a system with SLOW. A500 of that time needed to have just one Jumper cut when upgraded with a trapdoor card.

Plenty worse WFTs in pretty much every piece of HW of that period.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@cdimauro

in my view management was most to blame. The main problem was, there was no real longterm plan where to go. Amiga was just one product, 16bit home computer. Most money was earned with C64. And they also sold PCs but they were too small for that. They certainly had losses there. But in the company they used PCs for administration, not amigas. For them the amiga was just a toy system they could sell at young people, not a key technology for Commodore to survive. Additionally they did a lot of costly wrong decisions. certainly engineers have a tendency to overengineer and develop products nobody want to buy being too expensive or set wrong priorities. But even for that is management to blame. There must be competent project managers who oversee a project and report to the top management.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 08-Sep-2025 at 09:07 PM.

@cdimauro

Quote:

As you reported from the book, no: it wasn't the case. Managers knew PC graphics (and Mac graphics as well), and they started meetings for discussing the specs of the Next Big Thing exactly with the purpose of contrasting the competition which became very serious.

Managers rejected an immediate solution for PC graphics handling. Akiko's C2P is abstracted by an API anyway. CDTV-CR/CD32's multimedia team doesn't have the mandate to modify the core Amiga graphics design.

The Next Big Thing like the AAA project is tainted with a crazy high-end 64-bit VRAM-equipped workstation when the mainstream SVGA with improved FPM DRAM is the immediate competitive threat. Commodore HR failed to hire enough chip engineers when there was a single engineer bottleneck for C65, AAA, and ECS Agnus B. Brain drain is real.

AAA scales from 32-bit FPM DRAM to 64-bit VRAM with up to 16MB Chip RAM (dual 32-bit AAA chipset mode), while projects like Amiga ICS/OCS and 3DO focus on cost-effective single memory configuration.

Early SVGA chipsets such as ATI VGA Wonder (Q1 1988) and ET3000AX (Q4 1987) have the fastest FPM DRAM for their time without using expensive VRAM.

For CeBit 1988, Commodore PC engineers and Herni Rubin were impressed with ATI's 1988 era SVGA chipsets(e.g. VGA Wonder), so they demoed them instead of the Amiga 500 with a flicker fixer, even though it was Herni Rubin who issued the monochrome hi-res directive in 1986.

System engineering leadership ignored the following arguments:
1. 1987 era 32-bit chipset evolution argument = ignored.
2. 1987 era 8-bitplane chipset evolution argument = ignored.
3. 1987 era 16-bit (65,536 colors) graphics chipset evolution before moving into 24-bit graphics argument = ignored.

The Unix camp wanted the high-end workstation. The Amiga Unix (Make AT&T Great Again) project is another C900 mk2 distraction that departed from Commodore's core market and mass production strengths.

There are many other project distractions e.g. C64GS with C65's cartridge size support, PC genlock, various mice control devices, A2410 TiGA, A2024 monitor with 5000 production scale, x86 sidecart for A1000, system integration Commodore PC clones, and many others.

Mac LC II's best-selling Mac model for 1992 was done with a modest 256-color and 65,536-color display modes.

Commodore management failed to replace Jay Miller's Amiga OCS and CSG's C64 core business.

Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 01:29 AM.

_________________

@cdimauro

Quote:

Kutaragi brought the first Playstation and all its innovations

Most of PlayStation 1's innovations were done by external party IP i.e. LSI Coreware CPU and Toshiba GPU.

With a DSP ASIC background for SNES, Kutaragi provided good leadership direction for various entities to work together.

Kutaragi stated that most of his Sony meetings are dominated by price vs performance debates.

Quote:

Please, tell me more about the Slow Mem which was worse than Chip and Fast Mem, the ECS (after FIVE years from the OCS) with its ridiculous 4 cycles Chip mem & registers access time for the 68020, the Amber chip (instead of integrating a scan doubler to che chipset),

1MB ECS Agnus A in a 512KB Chip RAM + 512KB Slow RAM configuration can still access the slow RAM as Chip RAM. This feature only works for ECS Agnus A.

1989 era A500 Rev6A is the de facto Amiga configuration standard.

Amber chip with high-speed serial frame buffer is a workaround for "read my lips, no new chips" with the Amiga graphics context.

Quote:

Super Buster and its "awesome" memory bandwidth, the FrankenPatchwork which AGA represents which was still a 16-bit chipset and most of the things left untouched, Akiko (crappy C2P WITHOUT using the integrated DMA controller),

AGA was a rush job to save the system engineering administration's ego against C65's reveal. Corporate politics and "losing/saving face" (ego) are real.

Akiko C2P has to overcome management roadblocks.

The "read my lips, no new chips" with the Amiga graphics context was removed with the C65 reveal, hence AA3000's orginal Q4 1991 release was the fix against press criticism for A3000's lacking 256 color mode.

Quote:

and Hombre with the HP PA-RISC with its ridiculous amount of caches.

Commodore's PA-RISC selection is Hitachi PA/50. Hombre's L1 cache structure resembles PA/50's.

Commodore's RISC selection is with the "cheap" RISC camp since Motorola 88000's asking price is anti-game console price.

Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 01:57 AM.

_________________

@cdimauro

Quote:

cdimauro wrote: @bhabbott Which kind of innovations brought the Amiga engineers after the Amiga 1000?

You know what kinds. I sense what you are really asking is why didn't they make the kinds of innovations you think they should have made.

To understand the engineers actions after the A1000 we need to look at what came before it. The C128 was launched on June 2, 1985 at the Chicago CES. At the show Commodore CEO Thomas Rattigan announced that 100,000 pre-orders had already been taken, and that 15% of C64 users were expected to upgrade to it within the year (which turned to be an accurate prediction). The C128 was much more successful than the engineers expected, eventually selling 4 million units by the end of 1989 (almost as many as the entire Amiga range up to 1994).

The A1000 was released a month later with big fanfare. However it was expensive to produce so the price was well above most other home computers, and Sanyo had limited production capacity so they couldn't sell many even they had customers for them. With $55 million spent on advertising and only 70,000 sold they lost money on every unit. Reducing manufacturing cost was essential if the Amiga was to survive.

The next model could have the OS in ROM (once it was finished) which removed one the expensive parts of the A1000. But that wouldn't be enough. Atari was doing well with the much lower cost ST, then introduced the 1040ST which was the first home computer to have 1MB for 'under' $1000. The lower cost Amiga would be competing against it and the C128.

The Los Gatos 'innovators' who had designed the original Amiga were tasked with designing a lower cost A1000, but they stuck closely to the original design and were not able to save much. So the Commodore engineers at West Chester decided to work on their own lower cost model. A few of them dismantled a 520ST and compared it the A1000. The ST had far fewer parts. They figured that a form factor similar to the ST or C128 was what would sell to the masses. As well as making the keyboard integral they would need to integrate as much of the discrete logic as possible. Thus Fat Agnus and Gary were conceived. the 84 pin PLCC Agnus (the first PLCC and largest custom chip Commodore had made to date) integrated the clock logic, while Gary incorporated the expensive power-hungry PALs and other logic into a low cost low power gate array.

When the Los Gatos Amiga team found out about the A500 they scoffed, suggesting that Fat Agnus wouldn't work and that removing the WCS was a mistake. This shows that Commodore's engineers were more innovative than Jay Miner's engineers.

You may complain that they didn't innovate on enhanced features, but that was not what was needed. The A1000 got developers familiar with the Amiga's custom chips and OS so they would be able to produce software that made best use of it. By 1987 when the A500 was released a number of titles were showing what the Amiga could do, making ST users jealous.

The A500 was not the machine to change the ends again, but to consolidate the architecture and bring the A1000's capabilities to the masses. It's just unfortunate that IBM released VGA with 256 colors in the same year, though it took several years to become popular and couldn't match the Amiga in action games until the 90's (when x86 CPUs got powerful enough to make up for not having a blitter etc.).

Quote:

Please, tell me more about the Slow Mem which was worse than Chip and Fast Mem

SlowRAM was an innovation. You may scoff, but the Amiga needed a cheap way to get 1MB to counter the 1040ST. FastRAM wasn't cheap because it needed a dedicated DRAM controller. SlowRAM was practically free to implement, and made the expansion board cheap to manufacture. They added a RTC at the same time because the OS needed it for serious applications. This was also very cheap to implement because it only needed a few more pins on the trapdoor connector and Gary did the I/O address decoding.

You say SlowRAM was worse than ChipRAM or FastRAM, but it was no worse than ChipRAM for code and non-custom chip data. Most games would compress data anyway to save memory, and didn't need that much actual ChipRAM. SlowRAM gave customers a 1MB expansion at the lowest possible price with performance equal to the base machine. Games and apps that didn't push the bandwidth too high wouldn't be slowed by a noticeable amount compared to FastRAM.

In practice nobody but people like you got upset about it. Fans were happy to get 1MB cheaply for software that needed it, and it didn't make their machine any slower than it already was. If they wanted more then they could always install a RAM expansion on the Zorro slot like A1000 owners did. In 1989 Commodore provided up to 2MB of true FastRAM in the A590, along with a 20MB hard drive and DMA SCSI interface. That turned the A500 into a very capable machine for 'serious' use. And yes, that was innovation too!

Quote:

the ECS (after FIVE years from the OCS) with its ridiculous 4 cycles Chip mem & registers access time for the 68020, the Amber chip (instead of integrating a scan doubler to che chipset), Super Buster and its "awesome" memory bandwidth, the FrankenPatchwork which AGA represents which was still a 16-bit chipset and most of the things left untouched, Akiko (crappy C2P WITHOUT using the integrated DMA controller), and Hombre with the HP PA-RISC with its ridiculous amount of caches.

No, the 4 cycle ChipRAM access was not 'ridiculous ' just because you had an 020 (which needed 3 cycles) running at a higher clock speed. By that logic anyone with an 060 would expect ChipRAM to be doing single cycle access at 50MHz. Once the chipset was designed to work with that timing it had to keep it for compatibility, just like ISA bus video cards did (which BTW were no faster than AGA - actually slower unless the ISA bus was overclocked, which might stop other cards from working).

Just because the engineers didn't implement what you think they should have doesn't make them bad engineers. It's actually quite arrogant to suggest that you could have done a much better job. You spew out 'Integrated AMBER' and 'DMA Akiko' as if these things would be a doddle, then dump on Dave Haynie for not managing to get real silicon running at the theoretical maximum speed of Zorro III. Let's see your designs to do this - I'm sure the community would welcome them. Should be a doddle with the chips we have today, right?

Quote:

Compare them to the OVERALL stupidities that Commodore engineers have made in just 9 years, and draw your conclusions... Hint: April 1994...

Ti was out of the home computer business with their tail between their legs by 1981. Sinclair sold out to Amstrad in 1986 for a mere £5 million. Amstrad stopped making home computers after the CPC Plus line flopped in 1990. the Acorn Electron was almost a complete disaster with missed launch dates, ULA reliability problems and less than half the performance of the BBC micro (partly due to using 4-bit RAM!).

And that's just a few of the horror stories about home computer engineering. Commodore was by no means the worst.

Last edited by bhabbott on 09-Sep-2025 at 02:55 AM.

@bhabbott

Quote:

The A500 was not the machine to change the ends again, but to consolidate the architecture and bring the A1000's capabilities to the masses. It's just unfortunate that IBM released VGA with 256 colors in the same year, though it took several years to become popular and couldn't match the Amiga in action games until the 90's (when x86 CPUs got powerful enough to make up for not having a blitter etc.).

286-16 with VGA clone is enough for the Body Blows game port from the Amiga 500.

It's programming mastery on VGA's Mode X / Mode Y.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o9yOBBWPgM
This YouTube video shows a 286 PC clocked at 16 MHz with VGA and Sound Blaster adapters

10:00 Tubular Worlds,
15:54 Body Blows,
31:46 Gods,
44:47 Pinball Fantasies,
58:52 Prehistorik 2 with background parallax.

VGA is more than Atari ST's effort.

Read https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch24/24-01.html
Title: Parallel Processing with the VGA.

This heading refers to the ability of the VGA chip to manipulate up to four bytes of display memory at once. In particular, the VGA provides four ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Units) to assist the CPU during display memory writes, and this hardware is a tremendous resource in the task of manipulating the VGA’s sizable frame buffer.

The latches can be used to perform 4-byte-at-a-time (one byte from each plane) block copying.



https://youtu.be/NudEusAMzr0?t=5671
Am386DX-40 with 256K L2 cache and "SpeedStar 24" ET4000AX running Star Wars Dark Forces (1995). Escom's Cx486DX-40/S3 805-based PC is also compared.

32-bit S3 805 VLB is shipped with 60 ns or 70ns FPM DRAM memory chips. S3 805's 86C801 chipset has a full 32-bit graphics architecture.

Acutiator's 68EC040-25 configuration was designed to compete against the fast 386DX-40 and low-end 486SX.

From Commodore - The Final Years

Their architecture required three custom chips: EPIC, AMOS, and
SAIL. In cost comparisons, Haynie calculated that the Acutiator
architecture would add approximately $125 to a system (including
the cost of a 68EC040 chip),


Notice PC's mainstream SVGA used lower latency FPM DRAM in a 32-bit architecture. FPM DRAM was replaced by EDO DRAM e.g. S3 Trio 64UV+.

At the higher end, VRAM was replaced by SGRAM (SDRAM for graphics, SGRAM is single-ported, which can open two memory pages simultaneously). SGRAM was a precursor to Graphics Double Data Rate (GDDR) memory.

PlayStation 1 replaced expensive VRAM with cheaper SGRAM. My point, VRAM was replaced by DRAM-based SGRAM.

On price, PC's mainstream SVGA with FPM DRAM has undercut IBM's 8514 with VRAM.

In modern times, Apple M-series silicon uses mainstream DDR5 with a 256-bit bus to undercut GDDR6. AMD responded with Strix Halo's mainstream DDR5 with a 256-bit bus.

About finding a sweet spot between performance vs cost. HBM has a high-end graphics memory position.

A500's original success was about good performance vs cost.

Quote:

Once the chipset was designed to work with that timing it had to keep it for compatibility, just like ISA bus video cards did (which BTW were no faster than AGA - actually slower unless the ISA bus was overclocked, which might stop other cards from working).

ISA's 8.3 Mhz x 16 bit is 16.6 MB/s bandwidth. ET4000AX enables zero wait state on the ISA bus.

MCA has 10 Mhz. If the add-on card's chipset is designed for MCA and ISA, the ISA card variant can also do 10 Mhz.

https://www.deltabeta.it/2010-2016/corso_rete/varie%20-%20connettori/connettori/co_ISA_Tech.html

8.3 MHz is specified as the maximum, but many systems allow this clock to be set to 12 MHz and higher.


ET4000AX supports both MCA and ISA bus types, hence it's tolerant of 10MHz.

Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 05:51 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 05:27 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 05:24 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 04:42 AM.

_________________

@bhabbott

Quote:

The next model could have the OS in ROM (once it was finished) which removed one the expensive parts of the A1000. But that wouldn't be enough. Atari was doing well with the much lower cost ST, then introduced the 1040ST which was the first home computer to have 1MB for 'under' $1000. The lower cost Amiga would be competing against it and the C128. The Los Gatos 'innovators' who had designed the original Amiga were tasked with designing a lower cost A1000, but they stuck closely to the original design and were not able to save much. So the Commodore engineers at West Chester decided to work on their own lower cost model. A few of them dismantled a 520ST and compared it the A1000. The ST had far fewer parts. They figured that a form factor similar to the ST or C128 was what would sell to the masses. As well as making the keyboard integral they would need to integrate as much of the discrete logic as possible. Thus Fat Agnus and Gary were conceived. the 84 pin PLCC Agnus (the first PLCC and largest custom chip Commodore had made to date) integrated the clock logic, while Gary incorporated the expensive power-hungry PALs and other logic into a low cost low power gate array. When the Los Gatos Amiga team found out about the A500 they scoffed, suggesting that Fat Agnus wouldn't work and that removing the WCS was a mistake. This shows that Commodore's engineers were more innovative than Jay Miner's engineers. You may complain that they didn't innovate on enhanced features, but that was not what was needed. The A1000 got developers familiar with the Amiga's custom chips and OS so they would be able to produce software that made best use of it. By 1987 when the A500 was released a number of titles were showing what the Amiga could do, making ST users jealous.

A500's original success was between the Los Gatos Amiga team and the system engineering group.

Amiga ICS and OCS core graphics R&D are credited to the Los Gatos Amiga team.

Amiga 500's cost-reduced system integration work is credited to the system engineering group.

Amiga needs both groups to balance the leading-edge R&D, cost reduction, and system integration.

Ex-Los Gatos Amiga leadership was able to complete 3DO (completed in 1993) and 3DO M2 (completed in 1995, sold to Panasonic for $100 million). 3DO MX was led by an ex-SGI engineer and assimilated into Xbox.

Last edited by Hammer on 09-Sep-2025 at 06:19 AM.

_________________

@OlafS25

I don't think so. After reading the Bagnall's books, as everybody has already done here I believe, it seems the truth is in the middle as usual. Yes, they were brilliant and talented engineers but also youngsters, full of egos and weird, that lead to nonsense engineering decisions - because they felt cool putting questionable stuff (like CP/M in C128...) and ignoring and staying far away from marketing/executives guys' scrutiny as much as possible. Commodore was a kind of creative magnet for all those strange guys that didn't want to wear suits. Indeed, we had the various Bill Herd and his Animals team, G. Robbins, D. Needle, the two guys who worked on C65, and so on... often they all had erratic, drunk and even violent behaviours. On the other hand the toxic/very demanding environment in Commodore didn't help at all, thanks to Tramiel's legacy, too.
In the 80s Commodore executives felt the Amiga was designed to be only a high-end system, Los Gatos team was even more intransigent about this - only D. Morse wanted Amiga as a game machine, but he left in 1985. Irving Gould pushed personally to make the A2000. Clearly Commodore wanted to distance itself from the world of games, after the infamous crash of 1984, at least until late 80s, when A500 started to invade the world.
The fact the "they used PCs for administration because they didn't believe in Amiga" is just a BS, they were already using mainly VAX/Unix machines and still some PETs, as a lot of other companies at that time. It was a nonsense to replace the IT infrastructure with machines that lacked of software. Amiga never had serious productivity software, I mean, to manage a billion dollar company like Commodore.

Last edited by dipsomania on 09-Sep-2025 at 09:45 AM.
Last edited by dipsomania on 09-Sep-2025 at 09:43 AM.
Last edited by dipsomania on 09-Sep-2025 at 09:41 AM.
Last edited by dipsomania on 09-Sep-2025 at 09:39 AM.