for me ... the issue of making new machine with old chips make commodore loose it market...
A600, CDTV and the A1200 too... where the A1200 for my point of view need to have better cpu than the 68020 and fpu plus couple of mb more on board will make it better and more market aggressive

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@BigD

Quote:

In the USA you wouldn't be blamed in thinking the Amiga in the home never existed!!

That's not my recollection. By the late eighties there were three or four Amiga retailers in the area where I lived at the time, and a rather large Amiga user's group as well.

Last edited by bison on 10-Jul-2018 at 09:13 PM.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

Quote:

@BigD Quote: In the USA you wouldn't be blamed in thinking the Amiga in the home never existed!! That's not my recollection. By the late eighties there were three or four Amiga retailers in the area where I lived at the time, and a rather large Amiga user's group as well.

Same here. In the mid- to late 80s several kids at my high school with Amigas. One of them had an A1000 and talked about parking the keyboard under the box, and about how HAM mode wasn't really all that great, at least not if you prioritized games. (Hey, we were kids.) He even talked about how the Transformer made it possible to run MS-DOS software.

I myself was late onto the bandwagon, being a TRS-80 kid myself; with my paperboy earnings I bought a Color Computer 3 and OS-9 Level II from my local Radio Shack in 1986-87, somehow, I kid you not, carrying the thing home on my bike in one piece. But I knew what an Amiga was at the time; I just wanted the CoCo3, which in any case I could actually afford -- unlike the Amiga! I only bought an Amiga 500 around 1992 -- not new, mind, but from another kid who had decided to abandon Amiga for PCs.

I used to rent games from a family-owned store down the street (a family of Nicaraguans, of all things!) and even before I bought an Amiga, the vast majority of their games were Amigas. Everyone knew an Amiga was a great game machine. The idea that Americans didn't know what an Amiga was, or that it was a home computer, is nonsense. To the contrary, that was the problem. People thought it was a home computer, not a game machine, certainly not a "serious" computer. That was an IBM, or a PC-compatible. Why? because it's what all the businesspeople were buying, and if you had one at home, it gave you a leg up at work. Sometimes your business would even pay for one in the home office, and in that case what was the point of buying something else?

You could spend $1000 or more on an Amiga and play games, or you could spend $1000 or more on a PC-compatible and do "serious" things. When I arrived at college I found that my university had labs full of PC compatibles to teach programming classes, and a lab or two of Macs for desktop publishing. if you found an Amiga it might have been in the creative arts department, for video and the like. Acquaintances of mine at the university had parents who made big bucks by doing their accounting on a PC; one even wrote tax software and routinely burned out a hard drive every year by working it too hard.

Yeah, the problem was that Amiga was seen as "just" a home computer. Why would anyone buy one? Games? What, are you kidding? You could get games for the PC. Amiga developers like Psygnosis had no qualms about porting to the PC, and by the start of the 90s many developers were targeting the PC first, and the Amiga was lucky if a port appeared. Wing Commander, for instance, made the Amiga look like an amateur. It may well have dug the Amiga's grave long before it became apparent Amiga was dying, especially as Amiga version was worse than the original. (I found it unplayable on the A500: not because the A500 couldn't handle it; to the contrary. Origin had botched the timing routines, and the game played too fast.)

People are morons. You can't underestimate the bandwagon effect. Commodore had no serious business plan for dealing with the commodification of hardware, for reducing their costs, and for the PC's inevitable migration from the office to the home. I repeat, they had no serious plan. None. Like Tandy, they thought it would be business as usually; they'd just get into the PC-compatible market and take a slice of that pie. Unlike Tandy, C= couldn't even be bothered to produce a terribly good product.

As I wrote before, there's a reason Apple survived, even if barely: they nurtured their niche and remained faithful to it. Commodore and Tandy couldn't be bothered to do that, and it burned them in the end. Much to my dismay, on both counts.

Last edited by simplex on 11-Jul-2018 at 02:21 AM.

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I've decided to follow an awful lot of people I respect and leave AmigaWorld. If for some reason you want to talk to me, it shouldn't take much effort to find me.

@simplex

Quote:

To the contrary, that was the problem. People thought it was a home computer, not a game machine, certainly not a "serious" computer. That was an IBM, or a PC-compatible. Why? because it's what all the businesspeople were buying, and if you had one at home, it gave you a leg up at work. Sometimes your business would even pay for one in the home office, and in that case what was the point of buying something else? You could spend $1000 or more on an Amiga and play games, or you could spend $1000 or more on a PC-compatible and do "serious" things.

But that wasn't the truth was it? The Amiga wasn't JUST a games computer and the PC wasn't a very good home computer. Just because the perception was one thing doesn't mean that Europeans couldn't see through the misinformation. The A500 version of Wing Commander was passable and the CD32 version was great though the Akiko coding was bodged. Wing Commander didn't show the Amiga platform as antiquated (the AGA Amigas were in by that point) however Doom did eventually in 1993. Until then, there was also plenty of native "serious stuff" on the Amiga and the ability to take work from the PC and carry on with it at home. Even PCTask and PC Bridge Boards if you had to use PC native software etc!

The PC was a dull substandard addition to any household until at least 1993 and the multimedia functions of the operating system weren't up to snuff until Windows XP a decade later. The American potential Amiga customers were deluded following the herd like sheep and buying whatever their boss told them they needed to get ahead rather than actually researching what a great 'home computer' the Amiga was. If it was any different there would be far more love in contempory American culture for the Amiga than there is. You'd think Commander Keen was the best platformer available on any 'computer' back then and that if you wanted to play games at home you 'obviously' bought a NES! Were there not Psygnosis demos playing in American computer shops in the late 80s and early 90s? Did no one get excited about Deluxe Paint or PageStream or Photogenics? Yes, the Video Toaster was great but I can't see anything in U.S. popular culture that will remember the Amiga beyond NewTek's Toaster equipment and that's sad because Nintendo was pretty much irrelevant here in the UK in the 1980s and 'home computers' were a BIG thing which sparked new creative companies and kickstarted careers.

P.S. The A500 was substantially cheaper than an equivalent PC on release considering what it could do. I guess Americans couldn't stomach the form factor but it was their loss and there were animators in the media saying what a bargain it was at the time!!! I guess no one got fired buying IBM hey?!

Amiga Animation Software Reviewed in 1990 TV Slot

Last edited by BigD on 11-Jul-2018 at 10:23 AM.
Last edited by BigD on 11-Jul-2018 at 09:10 AM.
Last edited by BigD on 11-Jul-2018 at 09:07 AM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
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@tlosm

Quote:

for me ... the issue of making new machine with old chips make commodore loose it market...

Agree 1000%, and would add that it should have been AAA or hombre (i know it was not finished at that time, but they should have put more resources to finish it sooner), not Aga, which I like, but it was the "cheap" version of them.

Pcs at that time had already VGA cards and started to get 16 bit colour modes. Amiga had to continue its advantage in tech features to keep being attractive to big audiences (imagine Amigas showing up their advantage in 3D and video, and rendering or processing faster than the best pc, it would have sold millions

Last edited by vision on 11-Jul-2018 at 09:44 AM.

@BigD

Quote:

The Amiga wasn't JUST a games computer and the PC wasn't a very good home computer.

Early on, perhaps, but that perception changed a lot in 1992 when Wolfenstein 3D was released, and even more so in 1993 when Doom was released. PCs had 256-color packed-pixel graphics from 1987, and yet Commodore just seemed to ignore that for years. They should have been selling an updated A500 with competitive graphics by 1989 at the latest.

_________________
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@bison

Quote:

PCs had 256-color packed-pixel graphics from 1987, and yet Commodore just seemed to ignore that for years. They should have been selling an updated A500 with competitive graphics by 1989 at the latest.

PCs never impressed until Doom in 1993 IMHO. Even if their graphics achieved some sort of blocky parity in 1991 or so their sound support was abysmal and didn't touch Paula sound until the mid-90s. I really think the general consumer was sold an absolute crock of *&$! until they were actually released a good PC Home computer with the invention of Windows XP. DirectX was a start but Windows 95 and 98 were not good candidates for stable, useful and fun home use!

_________________
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@BigD

You aren't reading what we're writing very carefully, and you aren't even thinking about what you are reading carefully.

Quote:

The Amiga wasn't JUST a games computer and the PC wasn't a very good home computer.

First, think about what "home" computer means. It means different things to different people. In the 80s -- let's take a breath now -- most people did not own computers. To start with, they were too expensive. Why would you need one? What would you do with one?

For many people, the impetus to buy a home computer was to play games. Their first exposure to a real computer was probably in a retail store. There was a large market for that. It was fractured among several competitors, each with incompatible software even among their own offerings. (For instance, software written on a Tandy Model I did not run on a Tandy Color Computer.) They cost hundreds of dollars, which is nothing to sneer at now but was even less to sneer at then.

For an increasing number of people, however, their first exposure to a real computer was at work, because businesses started going in for computers big-time. Having a computer at home was seen as an increasingly useful thing, for various reasons (some of which I mentioned above).

Now, if you need a computer at home, and it would be a really good idea to have one that was compatible with whatever you had at the office, and your computer at the office was a PC-compatible, what is the rational choice to make if you have to spend hundreds of dollars? The question answers itself.

One might complain that, well, the problem is with the businesses. Not really: for what a business needed, any computer would do, and IBM was literally the top computer maker in the world for pretty much every market, a respected name which backed its products with first-class service. You could count on IBM producing a product that worked well and got the job done.

So, if you need a computer at the office, and it would be a really good idea to have one that is backed by literal decades of experience, which already has thousands of software titles that address your needs, what is the rational choice to make?

Before you answer, I point out to you, again, that when the Amiga came out in 1985 (really in 1986, because Commodore didn't manufacture things quite fast enough) the PC was already well-established as the market leader for business; there were already thousands of software titles, and people were locked in to the software.

What did the Amiga have? When it came out, it had nothing. What rational businessman would buy an Amiga to conduct accounting tasks, to type reports, etc.? Pretty much everything he saw was that it could do graphics and, hey, games. So what? He doesn't want his employees diddling around during the day drawing pictures and playing games.

When the Amiga started playing the business game, it had already lost. Things like Transformer and PC Task were too little, too late, and didn't work all that well, anyway: Transformer would run most software, but it was an additional cost on top of the Amiga, and a Compaq would run all of the same software for about the same cost as the Amiga.

Come on, the choice is obvious. Don't insult people who acted rationally just because the rational choice to them was inconvenient to you.

Quote:

their sound support was abysmal and didn't touch Paula sound until the mid-90s

Clearly you never heard of Sound Blaster. What it produced was at least as good as Paula to the average computer user.

Quote:

PCs never impressed until Doom in 1993 IMHO.

No, I repeat: Wing Commander came out in 1990, it was completely unlike anything available on Amiga at the time, and the Amiga port didn't come out until 1992. Let me emphasize that: the Amiga port came out two years after the PC port.

Wing Commander was an absolute phenomenon with multiple sequels. Wing Commander II came out before the Amiga port of the original Wing Commander. The franchise was such a phenomenon that game development was for ever changed: "good" games were expected to be interactive movies. They even made a major motion picture, for goodness' sake (which failed miserably, and was pretty much the end of the franchise, as far as I can tell).

I'll grant that Amiga had a few games that were like interactive movies, but can you name a single one that led to a major motion picture? Think about that fact: you are deeply undervaluing the effect of Wing Commander and other games like it -- essentially, the effect of VGA.

If after all this you insist on maintaining that the PC "never impressed" until Doom in 1993, then either you never saw Wing Commander in 1990 and how it compared to everything else on the market (including the Amiga), in which case you clearly have no idea what you're talking about, or you are living in a fantasy world that bears little resemblance to reality.

Last edited by simplex on 11-Jul-2018 at 03:51 PM.
Last edited by simplex on 11-Jul-2018 at 03:48 PM.

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@BigD

Quote:

DirectX was a start but Windows 95 and 98 were not good candidates for stable, useful and fun home use!

No indeed! Windows 95 drove me to Linux.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

Quote:

simplex wrote: As I wrote before, there's a reason Apple survived, even if barely: they nurtured their niche and remained faithful to it. Commodore and Tandy couldn't be bothered to do that, and it burned them in the end.

That is without a doubt the main reason behind Commodore failure. Although it hard to qualify what that niche would have been.

IMO. Between 1990 and 1994 the A2000, and subsequently the A4000, with NewTek Video Toaster were absolutely the best and most affordable video editing 3d modeling video expansion computers. Costing thousands less than the PC counterpart. Tv stations and movie producing companies were using the Amigas as a more affordable and practical means to generate graphic models and CGI characters. Amiga broke the ground for the term "multimedia computer".

Instead of wasting time and money with the PC compatible line, those bridgeboards, and MS-DOS compatibility, Commodore should have expanded and pursued the videos / movies / TV production part of the business.


The second reason, very simply put, is that Steve Jobs went back to Apple to revive the company with his vision.

Unfortunately Jack Tramiel never went back to Commodore.

@vision

AGA was too little too late

the design was ready for one year already, instead they published A600 with old hardware

So I do not think AGA was mistake, it should be available much earlier

AAA was at that time (as I understand it) nothing more than some interesting papers, far away from being something you can buy. Commodore needed something to earn money and of course all resources should have been invested in innovative developments

@BigD

Quote:

Advertising was the issue NOT the product.

Actually, the product was also an issue - the Amiga wasn't suitable for businesses, for a myriad of reasons:

• single manufacturer (with zero commercial grade support) vs. many competiting suppliers


• "nobody got ever fired for buying IBM"


• six years late to the market (talking A500/2000 here)


• tons of software for PC, almost nothing for Amiga


• lack of compatibility with existing PC/DOS environments


• big box Amigas weren't actually cheaper than PCs once you added a monitor and a 2nd disk drive

@Nonefornow

Quote:

Instead of wasting time and money with the PC compatible line, those bridgeboards, and MS-DOS compatibility, Commodore should have expanded and pursued the videos / movies / TV production part of the business.

+10^6

And let's not forget that when Commodore released the A4000, they had the "foresight" to engineer the box too small to fit a Video Toaster card into it.

Quote:

The second reason, very simply put, is that Steve Jobs went back to Apple to revive the company with his vision. Unfortunately Jack Tramiel never went back to Commodore.

I agree about Jobs. I'm not sure Tramiel's absence was all that bad for Commodore in the end; after all, he wasn't able to revive Atari, either, and from what I've read he was generally hated by retailers. But I could be wrong.

A bigger problem at Commodore was the people hired after Tramiel (often at Irving Gould's prodding). Mehdi Ali, for instance, seems to have been an unmitigated disaster. I think that's the guy's name: he was hired away from IBM after having overseen the "PC jr.", which had been a disaster for IBM, and his big idea at Commodore was the Amiga 600, which the trade press derided as the "Amiga jr." Instead of spending R&D on AAA or other improvements to the Amiga, C= was squandering its cash on products inferior to what they already sold.

Last edited by simplex on 11-Jul-2018 at 06:44 PM.

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@simplex

Quote:

This would be the same America where, today, market share for the Mac has increased 50% over the last 5 years (8%-12%), making Apple usage here significantly higher than the rest of the world?

Yeah, due to advertising not them actually being good machines. Macs have got significantly worse in the last 5 years with less features (unless you count less aluminium being a feature ) for more money. OpenGL development has stalled, you can't update your own Mac anymore not even Ram or hard drives and Apple is out of ideas with the pointless Touch Bar. However, due to advertising, pandering to hipsters and the iPhone hype train Americans are buying more Macs despite this fall from grace

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

@simplex

Quote:

No, I repeat: Wing Commander came out in 1990, it was completely unlike anything available on Amiga at the time, and the Amiga port didn't come out until 1992.

It did not create major ripples in the same ways as Doom did. I was playing MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy in 1990 on the Atari ST and didn't think I missed out on Wing Commander by holding out for the CD32 version to be honest.

I'd argue the American market didn't understand the Amiga's strengths rather than I don't understand how great Wing Commander was. Wings from Cinemaware was released in 1990 and is more atmospheric with better story telling IMHO and was best on the Amiga.

Was the PC version of Deluxe Paint any good? No.

Was a 1988 PC a good investment over an A500 or A2000 for home use? No.

Did C= fail to communicate these benefits to the American home user? Undoubtedly yes

Last edited by BigD on 11-Jul-2018 at 08:17 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 11-Jul-2018 at 08:15 PM.

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

@itix

Quote:

itix wrote: "By 1988 PC compatibles were the largest and fastest-growing home and entertainment software markets, displacing former leader Commodore.[47] The company was still selling 1-1.5 million worldwide each year of what Computer Chronicles that year called "the Model T of personal computers".[48] Epyx CEO David Shannon Morse cautioned, however, that "there are no new 64 buyers, or very few. It's a consistent group that's not growing … it's going to shrink as part of our business".[49]"

The two facts from that statement: 1) IBM compatibles were the largest market (they had definitely become this by 1987). 2) C= was still selling a lot of their 8-bit line.

What I'm trying to determine though is in 1988, not what the largest market was, but what manufacturer had the largest PIECE OF THE PIE. On the IBM-compatible market, in 1988, the largest manufacturer was IBM, but that share was still relatively small as the IBM-compatible market was split between dozens of different manufacturers. I believe at that time the second largest IBM-compatible manufacturer was Compaq, though this title would be traded around a lot later with HP, even Packard Bell at one point, etc.

In other words to answer my question, I want to know which number was greater in 1988:

1) Number of IBM-compatible personal computers that IBM sold (they sold no other kind of personal computer)

or

2) Number of IBM-compatible computers + 8-bit personal computers + Amiga computers that Commodore sold, added together.

Or to put it another way, would the top 3 ranking in 1988 be

#1 Commodore, #2 IBM, #3 Compaq **OR**
#1 IBM, #2 Commodore, #3 Compaq **OR**
#1 IBM, #2 Compaq, #3 Commodore

(replying because for some reason edit button is returning a blank page, something is messing up the markup I think)

In other words, what I'm looking for is something like this -- here's who shipped the most systems in 2017 (according to Wikipedia):

1 HP 20.8%
2 Lenovo 20.0%
3 Dell 15.2%
4 Apple 7.4%
5 Asus 6.8%
6 Acer 6.5%

Now obviously the IBM-compatible market is huge, such that even though the Macintosh market is #2, Apple only ranks #4. (We'll ignore the fact that even Macs could be technically considered IBM-compatible these days.)

But what if the Mac market were three times larger (22.2%)? Mac market share, overall, would *still* be in the minority, with IBM compatibles taking up 78.8% of the market, but Apple would be the #1 manufacturer of computers.

THAT is the situation that Commodore was in in 1987. IBM-compatibles as a whole had the largest market share, but Commodore still shipped more systems than any other company. What I want to know is if -- in 1988 -- Commodore shipped more systems (OF ANY KIND) than IBM, like they did in 1987.

@AmigaHope

Quote:

What I want to know is if -- in 1988 -- Commodore shipped more systems (OF ANY KIND) than IBM, like they did in 1987.

Look in the same place you found the 1987 stats

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

@BigD

Quote:

It did not create major ripples in the same ways as Doom did.

Really? How many major motion pictures were made out of Doom?

(added in edit:) I just checked, and there was one, also a bomb, but it took them a lot longer to get around to making it, which illustrates my point. If Doom were that much bigger a success as you maintain, they'd have made a film sooner.(end edit)

I'll grant happily that Doom made big waves, maybe bigger than Wing Commander, but you're missing the point. The graphics on Wing Commander were at least as good as Doom's, possibly better (certainly better IMHO), and Wing Commander came out years earlier. That's the relevant metric: great graphics and gameplay on an IBM PC at a time when Commodore was make-or-break.

WC had multiple expansion packs and a sequel with multiple expansion packs all in the first year. Origin was making so much money that they were able to sit back and release WCIII with at least one major movie star (Malcolm McDowell) in 1994. I'm not aware of a single Amiga game that could boast that (though I could be wrong).

Quote:

Was the PC version of Deluxe Paint any good? No.

Again, you're missing the point. How many potential home users needed Deluxe Paint? versus, How many potential home users needed accounting and word processing software that was compatible with what they had at work?

What would have been the point of Deluxe Paint for most users, anyway? And reflect on the fact that Photoshop was available for the Mac within two years of the Amiga's release, making a switch less necessary for Mac users.

Quote:

Was a 1988 PC a good investment over an A500 or A2000 for home use? No.

Again, you're missing the point: what is home use? If "home use" means bringing home work so I spend less time in the office, the PC is a much, much better investment than any Amiga. If "home use" means games, then heck, the Nintendo and the Sega were dedicated to that, and cost less than an Amiga.

Get out of the box you've constructed to define "home use", get out of the confines of your personal preferences, and perhaps -- just perhaps -- you'll start to see why the PC market was the rational choice for many people, especially -- especially -- because C= sat on their hienies for years and let the competition catch up to their technology.

Last edited by simplex on 11-Jul-2018 at 10:35 PM.

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I've decided to follow an awful lot of people I respect and leave AmigaWorld. If for some reason you want to talk to me, it shouldn't take much effort to find me.

@simplex

Quote:

Get out of the box you've constructed to define "home use", get out of the confines of your personal preferences, and perhaps -- just perhaps -- you'll start to see why the PC market was the rational choice for many people, especially -- especially -- because C= sat on their hienies for years and let the competition catch up to their technology.

You know what? Fine, you yanks were perfectly rational in consigning the greatest 'home computer' ever designed to the trash can because it didn't run Microsoft Word or the accounting program you used at work!!

Can you see how moronic that was! I will repeat: The home computer scene in Europe sowed the seeds for so many great software development talent and company start ups it's untrue. In America most people ignored the Amiga bought an accounting package and kept living the (dull) American dream which translates as working every hour God gives to please your boss and get ahead rather than see the design and beauty in products and computers. The Amiga was fun, productive and promoted creativity. I'm glad it didn't play nice with IBM compatible accounts spreadsheets and only opened Word files it it's own (better) home grown programs. It promoted 'thinking' and that's worth more than all the back slaps from big corporate American managers and bonuses from doing extra accounts at home!!

The success of 1980s and 1990s PC compatibles at the expense of the Amiga put 'home computing' back a decade and forever made desktop / home computers dull compared to consoles or 'home computers' of the past. They are the reason I' not interested in a career in the IT industry and why I now hate my day to day working life when having to interact with 'business computers'. They are horribly designed and even worse now that the OS thinks it should ape Phone Apps!!! That's true of OS X and Windows 10. Horrible clunky machines that are always updating bloated buggy hunks of code for no foreseeable benefit to mankind save keeping people in jobs and allowing humanity to drag itself into a weird autonomous web based nightmare where human interaction in service sector transactions is to be avoided at all costs and the personal information database is king.

The rise of the PC Compatible, who was the real winner? Big corporate social media, search companies and anyone with the ability to spy on us and collect huge corporate databases to second guess what we want to buy before we've thought about it! Jay Miner even foresaw this evil which proves the man had our best interests at heart to actually design something to be fun and easy to use rather than a functional behemoth whose design will be regurgitated for eternity with nothing but minaturisation and minor CPU/GPU design reiterations to a creaking design leaning on decades of back compatible code that we are convinced we need in order to function.

But hey if stale cold corporate control is your thing then let's toast to the success of the PC master race! Always inevitable and foolish to think otherwise or buy anything else ever

Last edited by BigD on 11-Jul-2018 at 11:56 PM.

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