@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: A500 game packs driven 1990 and 1991 boom sales are hiding Commodore PC's inventory control debacle.

So?

It's not about how many Amigas or PCs they sold, or even if they made a profit or not.

It's about whether either side of the business had any prospects of keeping them up for the long term which neither did for reasons long before 89.

The only "healthy" market they had was low cost easy to pirate for home computers a market about to taken over by PC for which they had no answer.

Could've would've should've a 1990 A1200 release made any difference? In the short term maybe....

Could've would've should've a 1986 C900 made any difference? Only if they had kept their business costumers happy in the years prior.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

Let's compare the specs of the C900 and the original Macintosh/Macintosh 512K

Yeah, let's compare a 1984 product by a company with good reputation to a late 1986 at best but mostly vaporware concept by one with a heavily tarnished reputation.

Also if you consider early Macs as failures (which is debatable) it is clearly not because of specs, it is for one reason and one reason only, a reason that would have been even stronger in 86.

It ain't no (IBM) PC.

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@Kronos

Quote:

Yeah, let's compare a 1984 product by a company with good reputation to a late 1986 at best but mostly vaporware concept by one with a heavily tarnished reputation.

Third quarter of 1985 was the C900 launch date.

Quote:

Also if you consider early Macs as failures (which is debatable) it is clearly not because of specs, it is for one reason and one reason only, a reason that would have been even stronger in 86. It ain't no (IBM) PC.

The early Macintosh sold poorly and it was a failure, end of. It never met Apple's sales projections. Technically, it was a poor product, with no expendability and slow performance, caused by it's system design. The OS was crap(limited by the computer's poor performance), even by 1984/1985 standards. On top of that, it was expensive. Jobs aimed at around 1500-1700$ price at launch, but it ended up being 2500$. Although now rarely mentioned, it was Apple II that saved Apple in the 80s.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

Macintosh(the original) was a complete failure, lacking memory and performance. It didn't sell well and it was one of the main reasons why Jobs left/was fired.

1. Macintosh 512K was released in September 1984 which is followed by 1986's Macintosh 512Ke and Macintosh Plus. Apple didn't stay with Macintosh 128K.

2. Business software partnerships were established before the release of the mentioned 1985 GUI business software. Did you assume software appeared by magic?

3. MacOS's GUI "look and feel" was already established before Steve Jobs's exit from Apple.

4. LaserWriter printer became available shortly after the 512K's introduction. LaserWriter printer has 12 Mhz 68000.

5. 68000 CPU can be upgraded and 3rd parties offered CPU accelerator upgrades. The Amiga wasn't unique in this area.

https://www.thecorporategovernanceinstitute.com/insights/case-studies/why-did-apples-board-fire-steve-jobs-in-1985
Quote:

Sculley would later appreciate Jobs’ effective leadership, calling him “the greatest CEO ever�. However, he also said he was too inexperienced in 1985 to recognise Jobs’ potential role as a visionary. Sculley would also say that he failed to appreciate what effective leadership was. The two men were locked in a power struggle for control of the company. Jobs wanted to move Apple into the realm of personal computers, while Sculley felt that the move had not been a success.

Reminder, SUN-3 has ECC memory support.


Quote:

Macintosh vs C900 CPU: 68K at 7 MHz(no FPU option) vs Z8001 at 10 MHz(FPU coprocessor optional) RAM: 128K/512K, with no expansion vs 512K with up to 2MB expansion HDD: No HDD vs 20 MB HDD standard, up to 67 MB Screen/Graphics:)9" screen with 512X342(used the RAM memory) vs 15" screen 1024X800(dedicated 128 kB 8563 MOS video chip) Floppy drive: 400K vs 1.2 MB OS: single user, no multitasking piece-of-shit vs UNIX, multiuser, multitasking

Useless spec comparison without the proper "next-gen" GUI business software.

September 1984's Macintosh 512K can use 800K FDD and a Hard Disk 20 MB.
Quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_512K The stock 512K could also use an 800 KB floppy disk drive as well as the Hard Disk 20, the first hard disk manufactured by Apple exclusively for use with the 512K, but required a special system file (not required by the 512Ke) that loaded the improved ROM code into RAM, thus reducing the RAM available for other uses. Apple offered an upgrade kit which replaced the floppy disk drive and ROMs, essentially turning it into a 512Ke.

Meanwhile, C900 is missing in action 1984!

Commodore 900's Coherent is not true "Unix" and OS R&D effort by Coherent not by Commodore.

Coherent also runs on standard PCs which directly competes against MS Xenix, hence "so what".

Furthermore, MS Xenix has an AT&T Unix license.

Being "Unix" is nearly nothing without proper middleware layers as shown in NeXTSTEP and MacOS X.

Reminder, SUN-3 workstation has ECC memory support. ECC memory requirement for real workstations hasn't changed since 1984!


Intel PR440FX dual Pentium Pro motherboard has EDO ECC DIMMs support.


My ASUS branded AM4/AM5 motherboards and RTX 4090 have ECC memory support.

Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 09:48 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 09:45 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 09:40 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 09:37 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Commodore 900's Coherent is not true "Unix" and OS R&D effort by Coherent not by Commodore.

Coherent was UNIX. Commodore made a custom GUI to enable less experienced users to launch programs.

Quote:

Coherent also runs on standard PCs

How much money were those PCs in 1985? Add 500$ on top of that for the Coherent license.

On the other hand, you get a complete UNIX machine for 2700$, that actually has decent performance.

Quote:

Furthermore, MS Xenix has an AT&T Unix license.

great, since you can install Xenix on Z8000 machines as Microsoft launched Xenix on Z8000 before x86 CPUs.

Quote:

Reminder, SUN-3 workstation has ECC memory support

SUN-3 is 20 000$+ in 1986. That is not C900's competition.

_________________

@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

Coherent was UNIX. Commodore made a custom GUI to enable less experienced users to launch programs.

Coherent is "Unix-like" i.e. it's an unlicenced Unix clone.

Commodore 900's Coherent 0.7x custom GUI is not a full-blown WIMP GUI.

Coherent doesn't have the right to use the "UNIX" name.

Quote:

How much money were those PCs in 1985? Add 500$ on top of that for the Coherent license.

PCs have "ready-to-go" business software. C900 has a chicken vs egg problem.

Quote:

On the other hand, you get a complete UNIX machine for 2700$, that actually has decent performance.

Coherent is "Unix-like" i.e. it's an unlicenced Unix clone.

For 1985, $2700 USD wouldn't be in my price range.

Coherent failed in 1995 just like Commodore UK's 1995 liquidation.

If multitasking DOS is required, there's Windows 2.x 386.

Quote:

great, since you can install Xenix on Z8000 machines as Microsoft launched Xenix on Z8000 before x86 CPUs.

PC clones dominated due to available business software with killer apps like "Lotus 123" and interoperable standard clonable platform. Microsoft had the proper plan to displace high-resolution text-based business software establishment by recycling the MacOS GUI experience.

Z8000 is a fragmented platform with custom hardware forks. Can you use C900's Coherent release on non-Commodore Z8000?

Unix is important with government and large corporations and these workstations usually have ECC memory requirements e.g. SUN-3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnX1EJHbC0
Steve Job's NextSTEP vs other Unix. In 1991, NextSTEP had the best 3rd party business software support in the *nix market.

It's only a matter of time before the commodity PC clone assimilates ECC memory support.

Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 10:21 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 10:14 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 10:10 AM.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: How much money were those PCs in 1985? Add 500$ on top of that for the Coherent license.

Noone cared for either, 99% of the potential C900 market bought a low spec PC to run DOS.

The rest bought specialty HW for specific tasks where that 500$ would have been a non issue. A market C= couldn't compete in on a bigger scale.
(if were are pedantic we could count the big box Amigas in video editing and the likes to be part of that market).

C= needed something they could sell in millions or would go back in time to fix past mistakes so they could survive on selling far fewer "workstation" class computers.

Even if the had launched the C900 in 85 (wishful thinking) at that price tag including Coherent (doubtful) and ended up being competitive on performance it would still be neither a proper workstation nor something that could be sold at consumer pricing.

Also don't forget that few of the "successful" workstation companies survived C= and even those are long gone.

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@Kronos

Quote:

Noone cared for either, 99% of the potential C900 market bought a low spec PC to run DOS. The rest bought specialty HW for specific tasks where that 500$ would have been a non issue. A market C= couldn't compete in on a bigger scale. (if were are pedantic we could count the big box Amigas in video editing and the likes to be part of that market). C= needed something they could sell in millions or would go back in time to fix past mistakes so they could survive on selling far fewer "workstation" class computers. Even if the had launched the C900 in 85 (wishful thinking) at that price tag including Coherent (doubtful) and ended up being competitive on performance it would still be neither a proper workstation nor something that could be sold at consumer pricing. Also don't forget that few of the "successful" workstation companies survived C= and even those are long gone.

You are wrong, cheap UNIX computers were in demand, especially in academia.

I'm not arguing the C900 line of computers would have saved C=... That's just not possible not due to the machines, but rather management issues... I'm arguing that it was the best way forward in 1985(compared to Lorraine, C128 and other C= projects). Amiga, as good as it was, suffered greatly due to the rushed launch and it was too dependent on Motorola and custom chips. With a UNIX based system, it's much easier to do a CPU transition if needed.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

You are wrong, cheap UNIX computers were in demand, especially in academia.

Academia wanted open-source *nix e.g. Linux or BSD. The point with open source *nix is to learn from it.

Coherent is a close source until 2015 which is too late.

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@Hammer

Linux is years away in 1985

_________________

@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

, but rather management issues...

... that started years prior and had turned to burned bridges in 85...

"academia" was a nice small and crowded market not a viable focus for a company the size of C=

Amiga was dependent on a non C= CPU just like the C900 would have been and the custom chips weren't a HW problem, but one in SW (as demonstrated later with Draco running "clean" Amiga app without them).

For OCS/ECS C= could do them all in house which saved costs not sure if thats true for the C900 HW.
Once their attempts in the workstation market failed (like they were doomed to do, Amiga or C900) cost reducing the Amiga into a viable C64 successor was possible.


If they had gone for C900 instead of Amiga they would have just died 5 years earlier and without a fanbase carrying it's corpse through decades of wannabe innovators and outright scams.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: @Hammer Linux is years away in 1985

Many UNIX variants of that time offered some level of source code access.

Thats why and how BSD could split off (well the whole story is a big mess).

No idea if and how Coherent fits into it.

_________________
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- blame Canada

@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

I'm not arguing the C900 line of computers would have saved C=... That's just not possible not due to the machines, but rather management issues... I'm arguing that it was the best way forward in 1985(compared to Lorraine, C128 and other C= projects). Amiga, as good as it was, suffered greatly due to the rushed launch and it was too dependent on Motorola and custom chips.

Zilog is even worse than Motorola.

Zilog was 1st to ditch Z80 backward compatibility with Z8000 before Motorola's 68K to PowerPC shift. LOL

Z8000 is treated like a completely new CPU family like the other new RISC CPU families.

Quote:

With a UNIX based system, it's much easier to do a CPU transition if needed.

UNIX-based system wouldn't allow system takeover like Amiga's kick-the-OS games which extract the maximum performance from the given hardware.

The PC had its "hit-the-metal" era with VGA-era gaming and it took about seven years to shift from MS-DOS VGA gaming to Windows 95 DirectX/MS DOS 7.0 to Windows XP.

RISCOS has unix compatibility and it's a failure worse than the AGA's install base and that's with UK government support via the education sector's purchases.

MacOS 68K enforced QuickDraw API on userland software with significant overheads i.e. it wasn't good with games on budget-priced hardware.

Unix variant OS entered the game console market during the PS3 era i.e. the base operating system used by Sony for the PlayStation 3 is a fork of both FreeBSD and NetBSD known internally as CellOS or GameOS. PlayStation 3 still allowed hit-the-metal CELL SPU access, but PS3 games couldn't take over the GameOS.

GameOS didn't abstract CELL's SPU difference, hence difficulty with PS3 backward compatibility on PS4. Both PS4 and PS3 have different GameOS versions.

For low cost ARM CPUs, baremetal Emu68 shows superior efficiency over Linux hosted Musashi.

Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 11:01 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 21-Aug-2024 at 10:56 AM.

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@Kronos

Quote:

Amiga was dependent on a non C= CPU just like the C900 would have been

Commodore wanted to buy Zilog if the C900 went into production. They were in discussions during that period.
Because of all of the cuts that Tramiel made after he bought MOS, they didn't have a 16/32 bit inhouse CPU and by this time(mid 80s) the market was moving into that direction. So buying Zilog was their way of a shortcut to their own 16/32 bit CPU.
Another reason was, due to the same cuts at MOS, they had trouble following industry node shrinks and were looking for an outside company to manufacture some of their chips. So buying Zilog was seen as an attractive solution on both fronts.
In the end, it all came to nothing, C900 was dropped and they went with Lorraine.

_________________

BTW, initally, I had the same reaction about the C900. Oh, this doesn't make much sense, Amiga was the better product.

But, digging deeper... While Commodore arguably, despite having "Business" in it's full name, was never really a business computer company and therefore not really expected to do well with a machine like C900... machines like that were in great demand during the 80s. I've read numerous mailing lists and usergroups from that time period(second part of the 80s), and pretty much the most discussed/wanted feature was UNIX and UNIX compatibility, for business and academia especially. And what we do not understand now, getting a UNIX compatible computer, of any kind, was expensive because the software license was prohibitive(Coherent was CHEAP at 500$, that's about 1500$ in 2024 dollars) and most people only used these machines on colleges or big companies.

I do not expect C900 prolonging Commodore's life, like I've said, the management was the issue, not the machines or the engineers. But I still think it was the biggest missed opportunity!

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: Commodore wanted to buy Zilog if the C900 went into production.

Sure and I want to #### ##### ###### (really fill in whatever).

Was Zilog even for sale? At what price? Did C= have the funds to develop followups?
And if so why didn't they just do it on the MOS stuff?

A fantasy on top of another fantasy leading C= to the point where they had to buy what looked like a ready made solution for ct on the $.

_________________
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@Kronos

Quote:

Was Zilog even for sale? At what price? Did C= have the funds to develop followups? And if so why didn't they just do it on the MOS stuff?

I told you why. Tramiel killed most of the R&D at MOS after he bought it and most of the original designers left, some prior to the acquisition, some after. MOS had intentions on designing 16/32 bit chips, but it all ended after Tramiel came in. They also didn't invest into MOS foundries and by the late 80s, early 90s, they had to contract HP to build some of the Amiga chips for them.
I have no doubts Commodore management would have run Zilog into the ground, same as it did to MOS.

_________________

@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: Commodore wanted to buy Zilog if the C900 went into production. They were in discussions during that period. Because of all of the cuts that Tramiel made after he bought MOS, they didn't have a 16/32 bit inhouse CPU and by this time(mid 80s) the market was moving into that direction. So buying Zilog was their way of a shortcut to their own 16/32 bit CPU.

C= ($60 million capitalization) buying MOS ($12 million capitalization) was a share stock merge method.

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: Another reason was, due to the same cuts at MOS, they had trouble following industry node shrinks

CSG wasted the 2-micron node on C65 and ROI sucked since C65 was cancelled. 65CE02 used CGS's 2-micron node.

Amiga used CSG's 5-micron node. Amiga's core graphics/audio architecture didn't exploit CSG's 2-micron node improvements.

Amiga AA used CSG's 1.5-micron node (e.g. Alice) and HP/VLSI's 1.5-micron node (e.g. Lisa).

ET4000AX used a 1.0-micron node from various fab contractors which is similar to C= AAA's 3rd party fab contractor 1.0-micron node.

Original Pentium used 0.8 micron node.

Quote:

and were looking for an outside company to manufacture some of their chips. So buying Zilog was seen as an attractive solution on both fronts. In the end, it all came to nothing, C900 was dropped and they went with Lorraine.

For Atari ST, Shiraz Shivji selected 68000 over Z8000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji
Jack Tramiel's Atari has ex-Commodore engineers who were involved in the C900 project.

C900 was publicly demonstrated for the first time outside the US at the 1985 Hanover Fair, hence potential competition was September 1984 Mac 512K or 1986's Mac Plus and Mac 512Ke.

There's no need to purchase Zilog since Commodore has license rights for Z8001's fabrication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900
Quote:

In early 1983, Commodore announced an agreement with Zilog to adopt the Z8000 family of processors for its next generation of computers, conferring rights to Commodore to manufacture these processors and for Zilog to manufacture various Commodore-designed integrated circuit products. Zilog was to manufacture components for Commodore's computers, allowing Commodore to expand its own semiconductor operation. Commodore had reportedly been developing its own 16-bit microprocessor, abandoning this effort to adopt the Z8000.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Jack Tramiel's Atari has ex-Commodore engineers who were involved in the C900 project.

That is correct. A good portion of the C900 team ended with Tramiel at Atari. And, if I remember whar Dave Haynie said, some of the C900 solutions ended in the ST.


Quote:

For Atari ST, Shiraz Shivji selected 68000 over Z8000.

He did. Zilog was Tramiel's decision, to use/manufacture Z8001(decision made in 1983) and eventually buy Zilog. He was all about vertical integration. When he left Commodore, the idea (of Zilog) left with him.

Last edited by WolfToTheMoon on 21-Aug-2024 at 11:51 AM.

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@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: BTW, initally, I had the same reaction about the C900. Oh, this doesn't make much sense, Amiga was the better product. But, digging deeper... While Commodore arguably, despite having "Business" in it's full name, was never really a business computer company and therefore not really expected to do well with a machine like C900... machines like that were in great demand during the 80s. I've read numerous mailing lists and usergroups from that time period(second part of the 80s), and pretty much the most discussed/wanted feature was UNIX and UNIX compatibility, for business and academia especially. And what we do not understand now, getting a UNIX compatible computer, of any kind, was expensive because the software license was prohibitive(Coherent was CHEAP at 500$, that's about 1500$ in 2024 dollars) and most people only used these machines on colleges or big companies. I do not expect C900 prolonging Commodore's life, like I've said, the management was the issue, not the machines or the engineers. But I still think it was the biggest missed opportunity!

If C900 was being offered, I'm out.

"big companies".... where's ECC memory!

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