On the 40th birthday year of the Amiga and with the 23rd July creeping ever closer, thoughts of the A1000's launch come to mind!

One of the highlights of the New York launch event was obviously Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry making art on the Amiga. While it looks like they are using Deluxe Paint, it was actually a program called GraphiCraft; an internally developed Commodore program made by RJ Mchal and Barry Walsh!

What became of this product and why didn't Commodore continue to develop it? Compared to Apple they stopped most internal software development other than the OS itself! Very odd strategy! Deluxe Paint was huge but C= seemingly didn't want a piece of the software market!

Last edited by BigD on 02-May-2025 at 05:18 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

According to this site,
Quote:

GraphiCraft was initially commissioned to Island Graphics, where it was agreed that a simple and an advanced version of the program would be created. The simple version would be called GraphiCraft. The advanced version would be called ProPaint, with more tools. Because of delays in development, RJ Mical rewrote GraphiCraft, along with Barry Walsh, after getting Intuition completed, while ProPaint continued development at Island Graphics under the wing of Robert Leyland, Mathias Genser, and Mike Gomez. ProPaint would ultimately be licensed by Aegis, and released as Aegis Images.

Commodore didn't intend to develop GraphiCraft internally, they were forced to because Island Graphics wasn't getting the job done.

Island Graphics was the creator of Micro Illustrator and Koala Painter for various 8-bit computers. They may have found the Amiga a bit daunting to program compared to the 8-bit systems they were familiar with. R J Mical wrote Intuition, so whipping up a user interface for GraphiCraft would be easy for him.

Commodore didn't develop much in-house productivity software for their other lines either, which is fair enough because home computers were supposed to be a low cost platform for 3rd party software, not a turn-key solution with all the apps you wanted included. The Plus 4 was an exception to that, and it didn't help. The built-in apps weren't impressive enough to justify the higher price.

@BigD

My 1989 Amiga 500 starter pack has a Fusion Paint bundle instead of EA's Deluxe Paint.

Beyond 1986, Commodore's software development and HR focused on updating Coherent for the 68K Amiga, a UNIX-like operating system. The disconnect is that the Amiga chipset wasn't optimized for running the color chunky-pixel X Window System.

Henri Rubin wanted to focus on business x86 PC clones and the Unix markets.

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@bhabbott

Great info, thanks! It was still a missed opportunity not to have an internal software team at Commodore in my view.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios