October 11, 2018 • 38 mins
The Amiga computers had a reputation for being incredibly powerful, particularly for video applications. But numerous problems at Commodore meant the system was living on borrowed time. What happened?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Stuff Works dot com. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in Love all Things Tech. As I
watched my producer lip sync my intro with me, I
guess that's a comment about how predictable I've become. It
(00:26):
doesn't matter. We're talking about Amiga. We're wrapping up the
discussion on Amiga. We're going to be cramming a whole
lot of history in this episode, because we focused a
lot on the politics that surrounded the launch of the
Amiga one thousand and then the Amiga five hundred and
two thousand. By the time the Amiga five hundred in
(00:47):
two thousand had debuted in seven, the story of Amiga
had changed considerably. The original people who had led the
design of that first computer, that Amigo one thousand, we're
pretty much out of the picture. There still a few
Amiga engineers and developers who were around and we're working
at Commodore, but they had been more or less incorporated
(01:08):
into Commodore's larger structure. The Amiga five hundred debuted at
a pretty attractive price, It was sold for the princely
sum of six hundred dollars. If we use an inflation
calculator to figure out how much that would be in
today's money, that would be close to about one thousand,
five hundred seventy bucks. The Attari st had debuted at
(01:31):
one hundred dollars more, but it also came with a monitor,
and that was for the monochromatic version. If you wanted
the color monitor version, it was three hundred dollars more
than the Amiga five hundred. But again, if you bought
an Amiga five hundred, you had also get a monitor,
so you could also use a television if you really
wanted to. Unlike the Amiga one thousand, which Commodore had
(01:52):
only sold in computer stores, the Amiga five hundred actually
found its way onto retail shelves like in sears. The
lower cost and the superior performance in graphics and audio,
and the wider availability made it a popular gaming platform,
particularly over in Europe. It did okay in the United States,
(02:13):
it always did better in Europe than did in the US.
Developers like Bill Williams would create games that could leverage
the specialized chip set in the Amiga five hundred to
accomplish stuff that left the Macintosh and the IBM compatible
machines of that era in the dust. It was around
this time that I first got a chance to play
stuff on an Amiga. I was immediately floored with how
(02:36):
advanced gaming was on those machines compared to the Apple
two that I had at home, or even the IBM
two eighty six that my father was using to write books,
and whenever he wasn't writing, I was playing games on it.
It was like nine day when you compared the Amiga
to other computers. At that time, I could not understand
(02:57):
why the Amiga was not the dominant computer in the
consumer market. But to be fair, I was also twelve
years old, so my capacity for understanding the complexities of
corporate maneuvers was even less developed than it is now,
and that's saying something, but I was incredibly impressed. Some games,
like Williams's title mind Walker, would allow the user to
(03:18):
run other applications in the background, so you could actually
take advantage of the Amiga's multitasking capabilities. But soon among
game developers it became common practice to create software that
would tap directly into Amiga's hardware. Bypassing the operating system
and locking the computer into a single task just playing
(03:39):
a really awesome game. It was a justifiable trade off,
and I'm pretty sure most gamers didn't really care. Other
games like Defender of the Crown showcase the Amiga's ability
to present high resolution, colorful images. Defender of the Crown
was a strategy game in which you would lead armies
in a contest for the Crown of England. That game
launched as an Amiga exclusive, but later ports of the
(04:01):
game made their way onto lots of other platforms, including
the IBM PC and even the Nintendo Entertainment System. There
were lots of other games coming out for the Amiga
five hundred. The computer system gave developers the chance to
make really creative choices without being restrained by the hardware
limitations that were everywhere else. So you had games like
Shadow of the Beast, which included the ability to incorporate
(04:24):
up to twelve layers of parallax scrolling, and you might
wonder what the heck does that mean. Well, parallax scrolling
is when you can create different speeds of scrolling for
different layers of an image on a screen. Gives you
the overall impression of movement. So a lot of side
scrolling games would use this to create a more compelling experience.
It's kind of an old trick. You have stuff that's
(04:46):
in the foreground so close to the viewer moving at
a faster speed than stuff that's in the background, and
it gives you the sense that the stuff that's in
the background actually is further away. That's why moving past
it takes longer. And uh the uh. The Shadow of
the Beast could actually have up to twelve layers of this.
(05:06):
That's pretty much unheard of during that time. The popular
game series Limmings also debuted on Amiga gosh. I love
that game. This was one of the games that my
friend had. Limings. That game, in case you're not familiar,
was one where you have a group of critters Limmings,
little green haired creatures that it was your job to
(05:28):
move them from one part of a level to the
exit of that level, and you did this by giving
different limings various jobs, like they might have to dig
through earth to get to the end part, or they
might have to parachute to get down to another level
and build a platform back up so that the other
Limings can get down and if you lost too many
(05:48):
lemmings because they were very fragile, then you would fail
the level. And I just I can still remember the
sound they would make when you would tell them to
self destruct. They do a little no and then pop
out of existence with confetti. But while games were starting
to take off of the Amiga fire, the system did
not become a mega hit in the US. A different
(06:10):
product would really show off how powerful the Amiga platform was,
and it would ultimately become a combination of an expansion
card and some software, and it was called the Video Toaster.
And this was for the Amiga two thousand and here's
where the story of Amiga's past really would come into play.
The original intent for the Amiga, back when it was
(06:33):
first in the design phase, before any hardware had been built,
was that it was going to primarily be a video
game system, and as part of that, from the beginning,
it was made to be compatible with television frequencies, meaning
you could hook it directly up to a TV. Other
computers were reliant on computer monitors, and you had sinking
(06:54):
issues if you wanted to send a signal out from
a computer to a television. Often the frequencies didn't match up.
The gen lock in the Amiga two thousand would let
a user overlay graphics on top of a video signal
in either in TSC or PAL formats. A guy named
Tim Jensen, was an electrical mechanical engineer, would take advantage
(07:14):
of this capability. He had already created a program called
digit View that would allow him to take a snapshot
of a video so he could run a video on
his Amiga. Use this program and capture a single frame
and save that to an Amiga floppy disk. He saved
some images to a disk which also happened to have
(07:34):
his contact information stored on that disc, and he shared
it with a guy named Jeff Bruett who worked for Commodore.
Soon his work was being spread around, and because his
information was still on that disc, he started getting contacted
by people who wanted to explore the possibilities of using
the Amiga to work with video in a more robust way.
(07:55):
Jennison founded a company called new Tech. His programs did
Your You and digit Paint We're both big hits. And
then a guy named Paul Montgomery, who really wanted to
develop a tool that would allow for video manipulation and
editing joined New Tech, and he came up to Jennison
and he said, what if we made a program that
(08:18):
would let you do stuff like squish a video image
or even flip it. So now you're looking at the
mirror image of that video. What would it take to
do that? And Jennison's initial response was, you take a
hundred thousand dollars. I mean, you're talking about the capabilities
that a video editing studio running hardware that's dollars easy,
(08:40):
plus software that's way more expensive than that. It's just
it's it's financially impossible. But Jennison became obsessed with this idea, like,
maybe maybe I could figure out a way to do
this using an Amiga. You know, do the same thing
that these specific purpose workstation do, but I can do
(09:01):
it with a general purpose computer like the Amiga. So
he started thinking about this and Montgomery, Jennison, and a
guy named Brad Carvey, who trivia here is the brother
of comedian Dana Carvey got together and started working out
what it would take to allow an Amiga to manipulate
video this way. They created a hardware design that would
interface through an expansion slot on the Amiga, and they
(09:24):
created some software to give them some early primitive capabilities.
They built out a prototype of this concept and in
November they showed off their idea at the Comdex computer
trade show. The demonstration was a huge hit, and the
team continued to work on their idea with the goal
of creating an expansion card and software kit that would
be able to handle all the tasks that you would
(09:46):
find in a network video editing bay. And it would
take three years total and three fifty thousand lines of code,
much of which was written in the assembly language of
the Motorola sixty eight thousand chip empowered the Amiga. When
the product finally came out, it cost just under two thousand,
(10:06):
four hundred dollars. But if you bought Video Toaster, you
would get an expansion card, you would get a collection
of eight floppy disks holding a set of programs, and
you would suddenly have the power to do video editing
like a full system. Um. But here's the things that
even if you bought a brand new Amiga two thousand
(10:28):
and a copy of Video Toaster, that would set you
back less than five thousand dollars. That was a fraction
of what it would cost if you wanted a professional system,
and yet you would have all the capabilities of a
professional system. This turned the Amiga two thousand into the
go to computer system if you were working in video.
These days, the Mac platform is frequently favored by people
(10:50):
who edit video or audio, including people here at how
stuff Works. The Mac isn't quite as dominant in that
position as it used to be, thanks to some advances
in PC software suits over the last several years, not
to mention some decisions that Apple has made with some
of its editing software that has let's say, cheese off
(11:12):
some long time editors. But you know, for the longest time,
you'd say the Mac was the dominant video and audio
editing platform. Well, in the nineties it was the Amiga
two thousand. I've got more to say, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The Amiga
(11:37):
and Video Toaster had an immediate effect on the appearance
of video because producers now had access to video effects
that would have previously cost them tens of thousands of
dollars to use, which led to a saturation of certain
video effects. You started to see them everywhere, to the
point where they became cliched and a joke. So today,
(11:59):
if you were to see a star wipe in a video,
you would probably hear a lot of people chuckling, especially
anyone who had worked in video editing. That is a
very dated kind of look. It's cheesy, but that's largely
because that effect got so much use in the nineteen
nineties because the Amiga and video Toaster made it so accessible. Meanwhile,
(12:20):
back in the executive offices over at Commodore, chief executive
Irving Gould would hire Max Toy to become the president
and chief operating officer of the company in the fall
of nine. Toy would say that no contract would be
necessary to guarantee his loyalty. That was obviously a dig
at at Ratigan, the former CEO of Commodore, who had
(12:43):
been fired by Irving Gould earlier that year, and he
said that the day he would require a contract would
be the last day he would ever work at Commodore.
And I guess that day must have happened two years later,
because that's when he got fired. He got the boot,
and Commodore then hired a guy named Harold Copperman from IBM,
and also he had worked at Apple and now he
(13:07):
was there to lead the United States division of Commodore.
So why was Max Toy dismissed? Well, for one thing,
Irving Gould was still extremely impatient, and he still wanted
results super fast some people would say unreasonably fast. And
for another, Toy was apparently on the losing side of
(13:28):
an internal disagreement within Commodore, one that would actually revolve
around the Amiga. So the disagreement kind of split the
company into two big camps. In one camp where the
engineers and developers who wanted to continue to develop the
Amiga platform, they saw a potential in building out a
powerful machine that could outpace all competitors in the consumer market,
(13:51):
specifically when it came to graphics and audio. That camp
felt the reason that Commodore continued to struggle as a
company was not due to the quality of its products
so much, but more in how those products were being
marketed and sold. They were sure that the Amiga approach
would win out if it was just given the proper
chance and promotion. The other camp in which Toy was
(14:13):
entrenched was that Commodore should just abandon the Amiga platform
and instead concentrate on producing IBM compatible machines. This was
the era of the IBM clone. IBM had used off
the shelf components to build its personal computers, so that
meant that you could buy those same off the shelf
components and build your same machines, very similar to diabem.
(14:36):
More importantly, IBM had failed to secure an exclusive license
from Microsoft for MS DOSS, so you could then license
ms DOS from Microsoft yourself and sell your own cheaper
version of IBM computers to customers. This would technically have
been easier for Commodore to do than to create new
(14:58):
architecture based off the Amiga architecture, but critics of that
plan said, yeah, it's easier, but the profit margins are
also much lower. Commodore would have to pit its IBM
clones against all the other IBM clones that were flooding
the market, and ultimately this side lost, and so did
(15:19):
Max Toy. Harold Copperman would come on board. Copperman's appointment
was met with some trepidation from outside the company. I
read an article that was very skeptical about the whole
situation because at this point the company had a reputation
now for having a revolving door. When it came to
chief executives because you had Jack Tramiel and Thomas Rattigan,
(15:40):
you had Max Toy and now Harold Copperman, all filling
that role since nineteen four and now it's nineteen eighty nine.
Nine had seemed to start off well for Amiga. Commodore
had announced in January nine nine that one million Amiga
computers had been sold up to that point. Also, one
(16:01):
other executive took a position at the top of Commodore
in early nineteen eighty nine. That would be Medi Ali.
That was the man who had come on board of
with Commodore as a consultant. He had been an advisor
to Irving Gould, and he was the one who told
Gould to fire former CEO Ratigan just a few years earlier. Well,
now Ali was able to convince Gould to hire Ali
(16:26):
on as the President of Commodore International, which was largely
a vacant position for most of Commodore's existence, but now
made a Ali would inhabit it. Copperman would be president
and CEO of Commodore's US operations. In November nine, Commodore
announced the Amiga twenty five hundred. This was essentially an
(16:47):
Amiga two thousand with a new pair of coprocessors, so
just a modest improvement over the Amiga two thousand. In
n Commodore would offer Amiga one thousand owners a thousand
dollar trade and deal if they would upgrade to an
Amiga two thousand machine. This is also when the video
toaster products became official and you can actually go out
(17:08):
and buy it. The company would then announce the Amiga
three thousand. This was a slightly bigger upgrade than the
still a modest one, had a new CPU and also
had a new chip set, and a brand new Amiga
three thousand with a monitor would set you back four
thousand one dollars. Truly a princely sum. Commodore would hold
(17:31):
a swanky presentation to show off the three thousand. Kind
of reminds me of the initial Amiga launch that came
out back in Copperman gave the presentation that night, and
the focus was on multimedia applications, something the Amiga was
particularly well suited for. There were more changes in executive leadership.
(17:54):
Copperman resigned, perhaps he was blamed for the moderate performance
of the Amiga three thous and never really took off
in sales and it turned out that only the hardcore
Amiga fans were buying those computers. Other people were happy
to stick with the Amiga five or the Amiga two thousand.
James Dion would be named General Manager of US Sales
(18:16):
slash Head of the United States part of Commodore. At
this point, it gets real tricky to talk about titles
because they seem to be somewhat nebulous at the executive
level at Commodore. There were also some pretty dark jokes
going around at Commodore at this point because they had
seen so many leaders go in and out of that position.
(18:37):
So the joke was, if you were named the head
of Commodore US, you would move into your executive office
and on your desk there will be three envelopes that
say open in case of financial emergency, and they'd be
labeled one, two, and three. So the first time you
hit a rough patch, you open envelope number one, and
inside there's a message that says, blame your predecessor, so
(18:58):
you would lay all the aim of all the problems
on the guy who was in that position before you.
The second time you encounter a rough financial patch, you
open up envelope two, and that one says, blame your
vice presidents. So then you go blaming all the people
who work underneath you. The third time you hit a
financial rough patch, you open envelope three and a message
inside says, prepare three envelopes. It seemed like working for
(19:22):
Gould was tough, and it probably didn't help that Irving
Gould was frequently changing his base of operations. He was
moving around a lot, and I saw at least one
guy say that he suspected the reason Irving Gould would
pick up stakes and move to a different place and
then force shareholder meetings to take place wherever he happened
to be at the time was so that he could
(19:44):
take advantage of the most favorable tax policies at any
given time, so essentially sheltering himself from having to pay
too much tax. That was the allegation. I have no
idea if it's true, but he certainly did pop around
a lot. Coming or introduced three new computers in the
Amiga line. You had the Amiga six hundred, which was
(20:04):
a low cost machine that had a base price of
five hundred dollars and actually had fewer features than the
Amiga five hundred, so very confusing. Higher number, fewer features,
and the initial cost at that point, the Amiga five
hundred was actually cheaper than the Amigas six hundred. When
the six hundred launched, because the five d been out
for a couple of years, not many people wanted to
(20:25):
get an Amiga six hundred. There was very little reason too,
why would you want a computer that was less powerful
than an older machine that was actually less expensive. At
that point, the company started producing more Amiga six hundreds.
Then it was producing Amiga five hundreds. Technically both were
still in production, but they began to scale back on
the five hundreds. That actually led to losses because again
(20:45):
people didn't want the six hundreds. Later, the Amiga four
thousand would debut. It had a more powerful processor and
it had a boosted chip set. The chips had names
like super Gary, Super Ramsey, and super Amber, and there
was also Alice Lisa at Good Old Paula. And at
the end of nineteen nine two the Amiga twelve hundred
(21:07):
came out. The twelve hundred would be a pretty successful machine,
but the company was making more Amiga six hundreds than
five hundreds or twelve hundreds, so the computers that people
wanted were being made in fewer quantities than the computers
nobody wanted. By nine two, Amiga sales were on the rise,
with a seventeen percent over figures, and it looked like
(21:31):
it could be a turning point for a Commodore, And
I guess it kind of was, except it wasn't a
good turning point. In James Dion would resign as the
head of US operations, so once again that place was vacant.
So now we have Tramuel Ratigan, Toy Copperman, and Dion
(21:51):
as the various heads of Commodore in the United States,
since medi Ali and Irving Gould were still at the
tippy top. Gould was still the dire act. Medi Ali
was still the head of Commodore International. During all of this,
the engineers and developers who were down at the base level,
we're still doing their best to make the Amiga platform
(22:11):
as good as they could possibly make it with the
resources that they had available to them, but those resources
were getting cut back year over year. It was getting
increasingly difficult to do. Commodore also had a reputation for
not treating their engineers and programmers very well. They were
underpaid compared to others in their industry, although just to
(22:33):
be totally fair, most of their competing companies were based
in California, and that's a more expensive place to live
than Pennsylvania, so some of that was cost of living,
but they were still underpaid compared to their peers. In ninete,
Commodore would post a loss of three hundred sixties six
million dollars. Sales dropped by twenty percent. In nineteen, after
(22:59):
the first quarter of the fiscal year, Commodore posted another loss.
This time it was eight point two million, which was
technically an improvement from the previous year, but still a loss.
And then Commodore sent out a warning message to investors
saying that the company might have to prepare for bankruptcy proceedings,
and the stock price took a nose dive. It all
(23:22):
came to a head on April nine. That's when Commodore
International Limited stated it would begin liquidating all assets and
would file for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, including Amiga, was at
the beginning of the end, but not quite the end.
Amiga would limp on sword of I'll explain more in
(23:46):
just a second, but first let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. Now, these episodes are supposed to
be about Amiga, not Commodore. But to understand why Amiga
never managed to establish itself as a viable alternative to
(24:08):
the Macintosh or the IBM PC clone here in the
United States requires a lot of talk about Commodore because
the problems were largely based in corporate politics. Again, not
the technology of the Amiga, which was pretty darn cool,
but because of managers and executives and the shuffling that
(24:28):
was going on constantly at Commodore. Irving Gould, the investor
who had been pulling the strings at Commodore ever since
he convinced the board to kick founder Jack Tramial to
the curb, is often blamed for Commodore's ultimate failure. Now,
he didn't take a hands on approach to managing the
day to day operations of the company. He had no
interest in doing that. But at the same time, he
(24:50):
wanted dramatic and rapid returns on his investment, and when
he didn't see results that were fast enough for him,
he would come in and change leadership. Those leaders would
often make changes themselves sometimes that helps establish their new
role at a company. You probably have experienced something like
this at the point, you might have gotten a new
(25:11):
boss sometime or seen a new boss come in and
make seemingly unnecessary changes to a away a company or
a division does things. Sometimes that's to make a mark
on a business, to say, well, this way I can
set myself apart from my predecessor. Often it means disrupting things,
sometimes just so that you can establish yourself, and meanwhile
(25:34):
the company starts to fall behind. Well, that happened a
lot at Commodore because Gould kept replacing the head of
US operations, and he would get impatient when he wasn't
seeing good results, and he would do it all over again,
and that would just keep things going in a state
of chaos over at the corporate level. In addition, Commodore
(25:55):
owed debts to many companies, and several of those companies
happened to be owned by Irving Gould himself. So back
when Jack Tramiel was still with Commodore, the founder of Commodore,
when he was the head, he argued that Commodore should
issue more shares of stock. At one point, what he
wanted to do was issue shares of stock to raise
(26:16):
more money to pay off some of Commodore's debts. So
essentially he was saying, let's increase the percentage of ownership
out there on the market. Irvin Gould said, no, that's dumb.
But he was doing that for two very selfish reasons.
One was, Irvin Gould was a majority shareholder in Commodore.
So if you put more stocks out there on the market,
(26:38):
offering up more ownership of Commodore, that means that Gould's
percentage would get smaller because now there's more of the
ownership out there on the market, and unless Gould was
to buy up those shares, it would mean he would
have less leverage over the company. Secondly, he didn't want
those debts paid off because it gave him leverage over
(27:00):
the company, so he would shoot down this idea of
issuing more shares of stock. Then you had Medi Ali,
the consultant who was picked by Gould to serve as
the head of Commodore International. He also played a really
large role in Commodore's failure. According to many people who
worked for Commodore, one of Ali's big moves as leader
(27:21):
was to increase his own salary and that of Irving
Gould's as well. The two wouldn't make an awful lot
of money. They were making more money than pretty much
every other CEO in the computer industry, so that money
had to come from somewhere. One source was Commodore's research
and development departments. Ali would gut the funding for that
(27:41):
over the years, cutting back research and development year over year,
but he also torpedoed what could have been a lucrative
licensing deal. There was a point where Sun Microsystems wanted
to license a Mega technology and use them in their workstations,
but Ali said, oh, sure, we'll let you do that,
but he set an unrealistic fee, a ridiculously high licensing fee,
(28:05):
and Sun microsystem said, pound sand, We're going to go
somewhere else, and they left. When the company would actually
fall apart, there was a new chip set that was
actually in development at that time. It was called the
Advanced Amiga Architecture or Triple a A. It was the
most dramatic overhaul of the original Amiga chip set to date.
(28:28):
The previous chips that had been tweaked in the past
had all been what they called enhanced versions of the
earlier architecture that J. Minor and his team had developed
in the nineteen eighties. But while this project was in development.
Medi Ali kept cutting the department's funding, so by the
time Commodore was declaring bankruptcy, there was only one engineer
(28:50):
left working on that project. And as you can imagine,
having a project to redesign the architecture of chips fall
on one person shoulders means that it's never gonna get done.
There's just only so much work one person can do. Meanwhile,
PC graphics were starting to catch up to Amiga's position.
(29:11):
The v g A graphics standard allowed PC manufacturers to
incorporate hardware that was capable of running fast action games
at a pretty low resolution three by two pixels with
two fifty six colors. And I know that sounds like
nothing compared to today's graphics, and it really isn't anything
compared to today's graphics, but back then it was a
(29:31):
big deal. Just trust me on this. Now. Amiga, however,
could display up to four thousand, ninety six colors if
it was running in HAM mode, but that mode could
not respond rapidly to changes, so while it could show
more colors than PCs, it couldn't do it in these
applications like a fast action game. It was fine for
(29:55):
slower moving games, but the fast action. The computer just
couldn't keep up with it, so you wouldn't be able
to play a game like Doom with four thousand, ninety
six colors on an Amiga. You would have to have
something to make the Amiga run faster, so it could
not do the same thing that the IBM PC could
do um without running at a severe disadvantage where it's
(30:18):
displaying like thirty two colors on the screen st of
two fifty six. So it was just starting to fall behind,
and Commodore wasn't giving the assets to developers to counteract that.
When Commodore was going out of business, there were still
engineers hoping to create the next generation of Amiga computers.
There was the Ombre project that was meant to incorporate
(30:41):
a three D graphics accelerator card with a powerful processor
to make the Amiga top in the realm again when
it came to graphics, but the project lacked the funding
it needed to make any progress and ultimately fell apart.
Following bankruptcy was a long process to figure out how
to auction off Commodore's us as sets. This was more
(31:01):
complicated than most companies, largely because commodore structure was particularly tricky.
I've seen some people suggest that this was by design
so that it would provide Irving Gould the equivalent of
a tax shelter. I do not know if that's the truth.
What I know is that it took a long time
to sort everything out so that the auction could actually happen.
(31:23):
Things were different in Europe. By the way. Commodore UK
had managed to stay profitable while the U S branch
was flailing around, So Commodore UK was still fine, and
so if you lived in the UK you could still
go out and buy Amiga computers from Commodore while the
US side was fading away. The head of UK operations
was a guy named David Pleasants, and he had a
(31:44):
grand plan. He wanted to purchase the assets of all
of Commodore at auction, including Amiga. So he went to
some investors and raised some money, and he reached out
to a company in China called new Star Electronics, and
his goal was to continue Commodore operations, not just own
the assets, but keep building Commodore machines and even develop
(32:08):
new computer systems based on that architecture, so the Amiga
could potentially have a future. There were a few other
contenders that also we're vying to purchase Commodore's assets. One
was Dell Computer, but its bid actually was too late
for consideration. Another was a company called s Com, which
made PCs in Europe. As COM's bid was lower than
(32:30):
the one that pleasants As Group had made, But then
just a couple of days before the auction was to
actually take place, the Chinese company New Star would back
out of the deal, and Pleasants was forced to cancel
his bid, and so s Com would end up getting
possession of Commodore brand and all of its assets in
the US. As COM's leader, this guy named Manfred Schmidt,
(32:53):
who had split Commodore's assets and create two companies. One
of those two companies was Amiga Technologies. He put a
guy named Petro Ti Schinko, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing
that name. It has got way too many letters in
it for a ignorant Americans such as myself to say properly,
(33:13):
so I'm just gonna call him Petro. The Amiga would
continue on in Europe for a little while longer, but
there were no manufacturing facilities left after the collapse of Commodore,
so there's no place to make new computers. They could
sell the ones that were in inventory, but they couldn't
really make more of them. Work was being done to
bring new facilities online, but for the most part the
(33:34):
company was existing off selling the Amiga twelve hundred. They
did do some tweaks to the twelve hundred to try
and remain relevant because the system was quickly aging out.
It was a few years old, so they had to
keep making minor changes to it, but they couldn't just
make something new yet. S Com, the parent company of
(33:56):
Amiga Technologies, followed in the footsteps of Commodore, falling prey
to what some people called the Commodore curse, and it
too declared bankruptcy. The company had expanded too quickly, it
had overextended its reach, and the Amiga assets again went
to auction. This time, the company Gateway two thousand, later
known just as Gateway, would win the intellectual property and
(34:17):
Amiga brand in and the new philosophy would require a
huge change in direction for Amiga. The idea was that
Gateway was going to create a line of Amiga products,
ranging from tablets to workstations to set top boxes, all
of them would run on the same operating system. This
(34:38):
would have required new architecture and new software, and so
it would not be based off the old Amiga design,
but it was meant to follow a philosophy similar to
the one that Amiga embodied. Sadly, apart from some prototypes,
this never really got off the ground. Management changed at
Gateway and the project was ultimately scuttled as the company
(34:59):
moved to all off Amiga to someone else. This time
there were fewer contenders. The Amiga was rapidly heading toward obsolescence.
The last new machine to come out was the Amiga
twelve hundred, and that had come out in n So
a couple of former Gateway employees were able to put
together a new company called Amino Development, and they got
(35:21):
some investors and they purchased the non patent technologies of Amiga.
Then they changed their company name to Amiga Technologies later
Amiga Incorporated. They had big plans, but apart from a
game pack that could turn a p d A into
an Amiga compatible gaming system, it didn't really pan out.
The dot com crash dealt another huge blow. The company
(35:44):
partnered with some manufacturing facilities to make some motherboards, and
there was a software developer called Hyperion Entertainment out of Belgium.
I believe it was that was designed to or designated
to make the next generation of the Amiga operating system,
Amiga OS four, but the whole system never really quite coalesced.
(36:05):
Amiga Incorporated existed at least in name until two thousand sixteen,
but then the owner did not renew the copyright on
the name, and now that's essentially gone as well. You
can get hold of some of those motherboards, and the
Amiga OS four point oh still exists. But a lot
of people say that Amiga is kind of stuck in
(36:26):
time now because there's just not enough development behind it,
so there's not gonna be any advance in Amiga technology.
You could use an emulator and play old Amiga games,
but no new ones are going to be developed most likely,
or if they are developed, they're gonna have to exist
on that older architecture because there's no one there to
develop the next generation. So it's pretty sad. It was
(36:48):
a tough, tough story. I mean, it was one of
those things that started off so promising back in the
early eighties, but multiple setbacks leg Demiga throughout its history.
From the video game crash of three, to declaring Commodore
declaring bankruptcy, and to this essential fizzling out in two
(37:11):
thousand and sixteen, although you could argue that the company
was long gone before that. Anyway, maybe one day we'll
see a re emergence of the Amiga brand in a
serious way. Maybe it will be able to to hold
true to j Minors vision when he first founded the
company back in the early eighties. But for now, that
(37:33):
is the end of the Amiga story and the end
of this series of episodes. If you guys have any
suggestions for future topics, whether it's a company, a technology,
someone in tech, maybe there's someone you want me to interview,
send me a message let me know. The email address
for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or you can draw me a line on
Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those is
(37:55):
tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to check out the
merchandise over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff.
I know you've always wanted a tech Stuff T shirt.
Can't blame you. They look awesome. I love mine. Actually
bought two of them, and that's not that's not an exaggeration.
Actually bought them but go check those out. Every purchase
you make helps the show out a little bit. I've
(38:16):
helped the show now you can too, and don't forget.
You can follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk
to you again really soon. For more on this and
thousands of other topics because it how stuff works. Dot
com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Stuff Works dot com. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in Love all Things Tech. As I
watched my producer lip sync my intro with me, I
guess that's a comment about how predictable I've become. It
(00:26):
doesn't matter. We're talking about Amiga. We're wrapping up the
discussion on Amiga. We're going to be cramming a whole
lot of history in this episode, because we focused a
lot on the politics that surrounded the launch of the
Amiga one thousand and then the Amiga five hundred and
two thousand. By the time the Amiga five hundred in
(00:47):
two thousand had debuted in seven, the story of Amiga
had changed considerably. The original people who had led the
design of that first computer, that Amigo one thousand, we're
pretty much out of the picture. There still a few
Amiga engineers and developers who were around and we're working
at Commodore, but they had been more or less incorporated
(01:08):
into Commodore's larger structure. The Amiga five hundred debuted at
a pretty attractive price, It was sold for the princely
sum of six hundred dollars. If we use an inflation
calculator to figure out how much that would be in
today's money, that would be close to about one thousand,
five hundred seventy bucks. The Attari st had debuted at
(01:31):
one hundred dollars more, but it also came with a monitor,
and that was for the monochromatic version. If you wanted
the color monitor version, it was three hundred dollars more
than the Amiga five hundred. But again, if you bought
an Amiga five hundred, you had also get a monitor,
so you could also use a television if you really
wanted to. Unlike the Amiga one thousand, which Commodore had
(01:52):
only sold in computer stores, the Amiga five hundred actually
found its way onto retail shelves like in sears. The
lower cost and the superior performance in graphics and audio,
and the wider availability made it a popular gaming platform,
particularly over in Europe. It did okay in the United States,
(02:13):
it always did better in Europe than did in the US.
Developers like Bill Williams would create games that could leverage
the specialized chip set in the Amiga five hundred to
accomplish stuff that left the Macintosh and the IBM compatible
machines of that era in the dust. It was around
this time that I first got a chance to play
stuff on an Amiga. I was immediately floored with how
(02:36):
advanced gaming was on those machines compared to the Apple
two that I had at home, or even the IBM
two eighty six that my father was using to write books,
and whenever he wasn't writing, I was playing games on it.
It was like nine day when you compared the Amiga
to other computers. At that time, I could not understand
(02:57):
why the Amiga was not the dominant computer in the
consumer market. But to be fair, I was also twelve
years old, so my capacity for understanding the complexities of
corporate maneuvers was even less developed than it is now,
and that's saying something, but I was incredibly impressed. Some games,
like Williams's title mind Walker, would allow the user to
(03:18):
run other applications in the background, so you could actually
take advantage of the Amiga's multitasking capabilities. But soon among
game developers it became common practice to create software that
would tap directly into Amiga's hardware. Bypassing the operating system
and locking the computer into a single task just playing
(03:39):
a really awesome game. It was a justifiable trade off,
and I'm pretty sure most gamers didn't really care. Other
games like Defender of the Crown showcase the Amiga's ability
to present high resolution, colorful images. Defender of the Crown
was a strategy game in which you would lead armies
in a contest for the Crown of England. That game
launched as an Amiga exclusive, but later ports of the
(04:01):
game made their way onto lots of other platforms, including
the IBM PC and even the Nintendo Entertainment System. There
were lots of other games coming out for the Amiga
five hundred. The computer system gave developers the chance to
make really creative choices without being restrained by the hardware
limitations that were everywhere else. So you had games like
Shadow of the Beast, which included the ability to incorporate
(04:24):
up to twelve layers of parallax scrolling, and you might
wonder what the heck does that mean. Well, parallax scrolling
is when you can create different speeds of scrolling for
different layers of an image on a screen. Gives you
the overall impression of movement. So a lot of side
scrolling games would use this to create a more compelling experience.
It's kind of an old trick. You have stuff that's
(04:46):
in the foreground so close to the viewer moving at
a faster speed than stuff that's in the background, and
it gives you the sense that the stuff that's in
the background actually is further away. That's why moving past
it takes longer. And uh the uh. The Shadow of
the Beast could actually have up to twelve layers of this.
(05:06):
That's pretty much unheard of during that time. The popular
game series Limmings also debuted on Amiga gosh. I love
that game. This was one of the games that my
friend had. Limings. That game, in case you're not familiar,
was one where you have a group of critters Limmings,
little green haired creatures that it was your job to
(05:28):
move them from one part of a level to the
exit of that level, and you did this by giving
different limings various jobs, like they might have to dig
through earth to get to the end part, or they
might have to parachute to get down to another level
and build a platform back up so that the other
Limings can get down and if you lost too many
(05:48):
lemmings because they were very fragile, then you would fail
the level. And I just I can still remember the
sound they would make when you would tell them to
self destruct. They do a little no and then pop
out of existence with confetti. But while games were starting
to take off of the Amiga fire, the system did
not become a mega hit in the US. A different
(06:10):
product would really show off how powerful the Amiga platform was,
and it would ultimately become a combination of an expansion
card and some software, and it was called the Video Toaster.
And this was for the Amiga two thousand and here's
where the story of Amiga's past really would come into play.
The original intent for the Amiga, back when it was
(06:33):
first in the design phase, before any hardware had been built,
was that it was going to primarily be a video
game system, and as part of that, from the beginning,
it was made to be compatible with television frequencies, meaning
you could hook it directly up to a TV. Other
computers were reliant on computer monitors, and you had sinking
(06:54):
issues if you wanted to send a signal out from
a computer to a television. Often the frequencies didn't match up.
The gen lock in the Amiga two thousand would let
a user overlay graphics on top of a video signal
in either in TSC or PAL formats. A guy named
Tim Jensen, was an electrical mechanical engineer, would take advantage
(07:14):
of this capability. He had already created a program called
digit View that would allow him to take a snapshot
of a video so he could run a video on
his Amiga. Use this program and capture a single frame
and save that to an Amiga floppy disk. He saved
some images to a disk which also happened to have
(07:34):
his contact information stored on that disc, and he shared
it with a guy named Jeff Bruett who worked for Commodore.
Soon his work was being spread around, and because his
information was still on that disc, he started getting contacted
by people who wanted to explore the possibilities of using
the Amiga to work with video in a more robust way.
(07:55):
Jennison founded a company called new Tech. His programs did
Your You and digit Paint We're both big hits. And
then a guy named Paul Montgomery, who really wanted to
develop a tool that would allow for video manipulation and
editing joined New Tech, and he came up to Jennison
and he said, what if we made a program that
(08:18):
would let you do stuff like squish a video image
or even flip it. So now you're looking at the
mirror image of that video. What would it take to
do that? And Jennison's initial response was, you take a
hundred thousand dollars. I mean, you're talking about the capabilities
that a video editing studio running hardware that's dollars easy,
(08:40):
plus software that's way more expensive than that. It's just
it's it's financially impossible. But Jennison became obsessed with this idea, like,
maybe maybe I could figure out a way to do
this using an Amiga. You know, do the same thing
that these specific purpose workstation do, but I can do
(09:01):
it with a general purpose computer like the Amiga. So
he started thinking about this and Montgomery, Jennison, and a
guy named Brad Carvey, who trivia here is the brother
of comedian Dana Carvey got together and started working out
what it would take to allow an Amiga to manipulate
video this way. They created a hardware design that would
interface through an expansion slot on the Amiga, and they
(09:24):
created some software to give them some early primitive capabilities.
They built out a prototype of this concept and in
November they showed off their idea at the Comdex computer
trade show. The demonstration was a huge hit, and the
team continued to work on their idea with the goal
of creating an expansion card and software kit that would
be able to handle all the tasks that you would
(09:46):
find in a network video editing bay. And it would
take three years total and three fifty thousand lines of code,
much of which was written in the assembly language of
the Motorola sixty eight thousand chip empowered the Amiga. When
the product finally came out, it cost just under two thousand,
(10:06):
four hundred dollars. But if you bought Video Toaster, you
would get an expansion card, you would get a collection
of eight floppy disks holding a set of programs, and
you would suddenly have the power to do video editing
like a full system. Um. But here's the things that
even if you bought a brand new Amiga two thousand
(10:28):
and a copy of Video Toaster, that would set you
back less than five thousand dollars. That was a fraction
of what it would cost if you wanted a professional system,
and yet you would have all the capabilities of a
professional system. This turned the Amiga two thousand into the
go to computer system if you were working in video.
These days, the Mac platform is frequently favored by people
(10:50):
who edit video or audio, including people here at how
stuff Works. The Mac isn't quite as dominant in that
position as it used to be, thanks to some advances
in PC software suits over the last several years, not
to mention some decisions that Apple has made with some
of its editing software that has let's say, cheese off
(11:12):
some long time editors. But you know, for the longest time,
you'd say the Mac was the dominant video and audio
editing platform. Well, in the nineties it was the Amiga
two thousand. I've got more to say, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The Amiga
(11:37):
and Video Toaster had an immediate effect on the appearance
of video because producers now had access to video effects
that would have previously cost them tens of thousands of
dollars to use, which led to a saturation of certain
video effects. You started to see them everywhere, to the
point where they became cliched and a joke. So today,
(11:59):
if you were to see a star wipe in a video,
you would probably hear a lot of people chuckling, especially
anyone who had worked in video editing. That is a
very dated kind of look. It's cheesy, but that's largely
because that effect got so much use in the nineteen
nineties because the Amiga and video Toaster made it so accessible. Meanwhile,
(12:20):
back in the executive offices over at Commodore, chief executive
Irving Gould would hire Max Toy to become the president
and chief operating officer of the company in the fall
of nine. Toy would say that no contract would be
necessary to guarantee his loyalty. That was obviously a dig
at at Ratigan, the former CEO of Commodore, who had
(12:43):
been fired by Irving Gould earlier that year, and he
said that the day he would require a contract would
be the last day he would ever work at Commodore.
And I guess that day must have happened two years later,
because that's when he got fired. He got the boot,
and Commodore then hired a guy named Harold Copperman from IBM,
and also he had worked at Apple and now he
(13:07):
was there to lead the United States division of Commodore.
So why was Max Toy dismissed? Well, for one thing,
Irving Gould was still extremely impatient, and he still wanted
results super fast some people would say unreasonably fast. And
for another, Toy was apparently on the losing side of
(13:28):
an internal disagreement within Commodore, one that would actually revolve
around the Amiga. So the disagreement kind of split the
company into two big camps. In one camp where the
engineers and developers who wanted to continue to develop the
Amiga platform, they saw a potential in building out a
powerful machine that could outpace all competitors in the consumer market,
(13:51):
specifically when it came to graphics and audio. That camp
felt the reason that Commodore continued to struggle as a
company was not due to the quality of its products
so much, but more in how those products were being
marketed and sold. They were sure that the Amiga approach
would win out if it was just given the proper
chance and promotion. The other camp in which Toy was
(14:13):
entrenched was that Commodore should just abandon the Amiga platform
and instead concentrate on producing IBM compatible machines. This was
the era of the IBM clone. IBM had used off
the shelf components to build its personal computers, so that
meant that you could buy those same off the shelf
components and build your same machines, very similar to diabem.
(14:36):
More importantly, IBM had failed to secure an exclusive license
from Microsoft for MS DOSS, so you could then license
ms DOS from Microsoft yourself and sell your own cheaper
version of IBM computers to customers. This would technically have
been easier for Commodore to do than to create new
(14:58):
architecture based off the Amiga architecture, but critics of that
plan said, yeah, it's easier, but the profit margins are
also much lower. Commodore would have to pit its IBM
clones against all the other IBM clones that were flooding
the market, and ultimately this side lost, and so did
(15:19):
Max Toy. Harold Copperman would come on board. Copperman's appointment
was met with some trepidation from outside the company. I
read an article that was very skeptical about the whole
situation because at this point the company had a reputation
now for having a revolving door. When it came to
chief executives because you had Jack Tramiel and Thomas Rattigan,
(15:40):
you had Max Toy and now Harold Copperman, all filling
that role since nineteen four and now it's nineteen eighty nine.
Nine had seemed to start off well for Amiga. Commodore
had announced in January nine nine that one million Amiga
computers had been sold up to that point. Also, one
(16:01):
other executive took a position at the top of Commodore
in early nineteen eighty nine. That would be Medi Ali.
That was the man who had come on board of
with Commodore as a consultant. He had been an advisor
to Irving Gould, and he was the one who told
Gould to fire former CEO Ratigan just a few years earlier. Well,
now Ali was able to convince Gould to hire Ali
(16:26):
on as the President of Commodore International, which was largely
a vacant position for most of Commodore's existence, but now
made a Ali would inhabit it. Copperman would be president
and CEO of Commodore's US operations. In November nine, Commodore
announced the Amiga twenty five hundred. This was essentially an
(16:47):
Amiga two thousand with a new pair of coprocessors, so
just a modest improvement over the Amiga two thousand. In
n Commodore would offer Amiga one thousand owners a thousand
dollar trade and deal if they would upgrade to an
Amiga two thousand machine. This is also when the video
toaster products became official and you can actually go out
(17:08):
and buy it. The company would then announce the Amiga
three thousand. This was a slightly bigger upgrade than the
still a modest one, had a new CPU and also
had a new chip set, and a brand new Amiga
three thousand with a monitor would set you back four
thousand one dollars. Truly a princely sum. Commodore would hold
(17:31):
a swanky presentation to show off the three thousand. Kind
of reminds me of the initial Amiga launch that came
out back in Copperman gave the presentation that night, and
the focus was on multimedia applications, something the Amiga was
particularly well suited for. There were more changes in executive leadership.
(17:54):
Copperman resigned, perhaps he was blamed for the moderate performance
of the Amiga three thous and never really took off
in sales and it turned out that only the hardcore
Amiga fans were buying those computers. Other people were happy
to stick with the Amiga five or the Amiga two thousand.
James Dion would be named General Manager of US Sales
(18:16):
slash Head of the United States part of Commodore. At
this point, it gets real tricky to talk about titles
because they seem to be somewhat nebulous at the executive
level at Commodore. There were also some pretty dark jokes
going around at Commodore at this point because they had
seen so many leaders go in and out of that position.
(18:37):
So the joke was, if you were named the head
of Commodore US, you would move into your executive office
and on your desk there will be three envelopes that
say open in case of financial emergency, and they'd be
labeled one, two, and three. So the first time you
hit a rough patch, you open envelope number one, and
inside there's a message that says, blame your predecessor, so
(18:58):
you would lay all the aim of all the problems
on the guy who was in that position before you.
The second time you encounter a rough financial patch, you
open up envelope two, and that one says, blame your
vice presidents. So then you go blaming all the people
who work underneath you. The third time you hit a
financial rough patch, you open envelope three and a message
inside says, prepare three envelopes. It seemed like working for
(19:22):
Gould was tough, and it probably didn't help that Irving
Gould was frequently changing his base of operations. He was
moving around a lot, and I saw at least one
guy say that he suspected the reason Irving Gould would
pick up stakes and move to a different place and
then force shareholder meetings to take place wherever he happened
to be at the time was so that he could
(19:44):
take advantage of the most favorable tax policies at any
given time, so essentially sheltering himself from having to pay
too much tax. That was the allegation. I have no
idea if it's true, but he certainly did pop around
a lot. Coming or introduced three new computers in the
Amiga line. You had the Amiga six hundred, which was
(20:04):
a low cost machine that had a base price of
five hundred dollars and actually had fewer features than the
Amiga five hundred, so very confusing. Higher number, fewer features,
and the initial cost at that point, the Amiga five
hundred was actually cheaper than the Amigas six hundred. When
the six hundred launched, because the five d been out
for a couple of years, not many people wanted to
(20:25):
get an Amiga six hundred. There was very little reason too,
why would you want a computer that was less powerful
than an older machine that was actually less expensive. At
that point, the company started producing more Amiga six hundreds.
Then it was producing Amiga five hundreds. Technically both were
still in production, but they began to scale back on
the five hundreds. That actually led to losses because again
(20:45):
people didn't want the six hundreds. Later, the Amiga four
thousand would debut. It had a more powerful processor and
it had a boosted chip set. The chips had names
like super Gary, Super Ramsey, and super Amber, and there
was also Alice Lisa at Good Old Paula. And at
the end of nineteen nine two the Amiga twelve hundred
(21:07):
came out. The twelve hundred would be a pretty successful machine,
but the company was making more Amiga six hundreds than
five hundreds or twelve hundreds, so the computers that people
wanted were being made in fewer quantities than the computers
nobody wanted. By nine two, Amiga sales were on the rise,
with a seventeen percent over figures, and it looked like
(21:31):
it could be a turning point for a Commodore, And
I guess it kind of was, except it wasn't a
good turning point. In James Dion would resign as the
head of US operations, so once again that place was vacant.
So now we have Tramuel Ratigan, Toy Copperman, and Dion
(21:51):
as the various heads of Commodore in the United States,
since medi Ali and Irving Gould were still at the
tippy top. Gould was still the dire act. Medi Ali
was still the head of Commodore International. During all of this,
the engineers and developers who were down at the base level,
we're still doing their best to make the Amiga platform
(22:11):
as good as they could possibly make it with the
resources that they had available to them, but those resources
were getting cut back year over year. It was getting
increasingly difficult to do. Commodore also had a reputation for
not treating their engineers and programmers very well. They were
underpaid compared to others in their industry, although just to
(22:33):
be totally fair, most of their competing companies were based
in California, and that's a more expensive place to live
than Pennsylvania, so some of that was cost of living,
but they were still underpaid compared to their peers. In ninete,
Commodore would post a loss of three hundred sixties six
million dollars. Sales dropped by twenty percent. In nineteen, after
(22:59):
the first quarter of the fiscal year, Commodore posted another loss.
This time it was eight point two million, which was
technically an improvement from the previous year, but still a loss.
And then Commodore sent out a warning message to investors
saying that the company might have to prepare for bankruptcy proceedings,
and the stock price took a nose dive. It all
(23:22):
came to a head on April nine. That's when Commodore
International Limited stated it would begin liquidating all assets and
would file for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, including Amiga, was at
the beginning of the end, but not quite the end.
Amiga would limp on sword of I'll explain more in
(23:46):
just a second, but first let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. Now, these episodes are supposed to
be about Amiga, not Commodore. But to understand why Amiga
never managed to establish itself as a viable alternative to
(24:08):
the Macintosh or the IBM PC clone here in the
United States requires a lot of talk about Commodore because
the problems were largely based in corporate politics. Again, not
the technology of the Amiga, which was pretty darn cool,
but because of managers and executives and the shuffling that
(24:28):
was going on constantly at Commodore. Irving Gould, the investor
who had been pulling the strings at Commodore ever since
he convinced the board to kick founder Jack Tramial to
the curb, is often blamed for Commodore's ultimate failure. Now,
he didn't take a hands on approach to managing the
day to day operations of the company. He had no
interest in doing that. But at the same time, he
(24:50):
wanted dramatic and rapid returns on his investment, and when
he didn't see results that were fast enough for him,
he would come in and change leadership. Those leaders would
often make changes themselves sometimes that helps establish their new
role at a company. You probably have experienced something like
this at the point, you might have gotten a new
(25:11):
boss sometime or seen a new boss come in and
make seemingly unnecessary changes to a away a company or
a division does things. Sometimes that's to make a mark
on a business, to say, well, this way I can
set myself apart from my predecessor. Often it means disrupting things,
sometimes just so that you can establish yourself, and meanwhile
(25:34):
the company starts to fall behind. Well, that happened a
lot at Commodore because Gould kept replacing the head of
US operations, and he would get impatient when he wasn't
seeing good results, and he would do it all over again,
and that would just keep things going in a state
of chaos over at the corporate level. In addition, Commodore
(25:55):
owed debts to many companies, and several of those companies
happened to be owned by Irving Gould himself. So back
when Jack Tramiel was still with Commodore, the founder of Commodore,
when he was the head, he argued that Commodore should
issue more shares of stock. At one point, what he
wanted to do was issue shares of stock to raise
(26:16):
more money to pay off some of Commodore's debts. So
essentially he was saying, let's increase the percentage of ownership
out there on the market. Irvin Gould said, no, that's dumb.
But he was doing that for two very selfish reasons.
One was, Irvin Gould was a majority shareholder in Commodore.
So if you put more stocks out there on the market,
(26:38):
offering up more ownership of Commodore, that means that Gould's
percentage would get smaller because now there's more of the
ownership out there on the market, and unless Gould was
to buy up those shares, it would mean he would
have less leverage over the company. Secondly, he didn't want
those debts paid off because it gave him leverage over
(27:00):
the company, so he would shoot down this idea of
issuing more shares of stock. Then you had Medi Ali,
the consultant who was picked by Gould to serve as
the head of Commodore International. He also played a really
large role in Commodore's failure. According to many people who
worked for Commodore, one of Ali's big moves as leader
(27:21):
was to increase his own salary and that of Irving
Gould's as well. The two wouldn't make an awful lot
of money. They were making more money than pretty much
every other CEO in the computer industry, so that money
had to come from somewhere. One source was Commodore's research
and development departments. Ali would gut the funding for that
(27:41):
over the years, cutting back research and development year over year,
but he also torpedoed what could have been a lucrative
licensing deal. There was a point where Sun Microsystems wanted
to license a Mega technology and use them in their workstations,
but Ali said, oh, sure, we'll let you do that,
but he set an unrealistic fee, a ridiculously high licensing fee,
(28:05):
and Sun microsystem said, pound sand, We're going to go
somewhere else, and they left. When the company would actually
fall apart, there was a new chip set that was
actually in development at that time. It was called the
Advanced Amiga Architecture or Triple a A. It was the
most dramatic overhaul of the original Amiga chip set to date.
(28:28):
The previous chips that had been tweaked in the past
had all been what they called enhanced versions of the
earlier architecture that J. Minor and his team had developed
in the nineteen eighties. But while this project was in development.
Medi Ali kept cutting the department's funding, so by the
time Commodore was declaring bankruptcy, there was only one engineer
(28:50):
left working on that project. And as you can imagine,
having a project to redesign the architecture of chips fall
on one person shoulders means that it's never gonna get done.
There's just only so much work one person can do. Meanwhile,
PC graphics were starting to catch up to Amiga's position.
(29:11):
The v g A graphics standard allowed PC manufacturers to
incorporate hardware that was capable of running fast action games
at a pretty low resolution three by two pixels with
two fifty six colors. And I know that sounds like
nothing compared to today's graphics, and it really isn't anything
compared to today's graphics, but back then it was a
(29:31):
big deal. Just trust me on this. Now. Amiga, however,
could display up to four thousand, ninety six colors if
it was running in HAM mode, but that mode could
not respond rapidly to changes, so while it could show
more colors than PCs, it couldn't do it in these
applications like a fast action game. It was fine for
(29:55):
slower moving games, but the fast action. The computer just
couldn't keep up with it, so you wouldn't be able
to play a game like Doom with four thousand, ninety
six colors on an Amiga. You would have to have
something to make the Amiga run faster, so it could
not do the same thing that the IBM PC could
do um without running at a severe disadvantage where it's
(30:18):
displaying like thirty two colors on the screen st of
two fifty six. So it was just starting to fall behind,
and Commodore wasn't giving the assets to developers to counteract that.
When Commodore was going out of business, there were still
engineers hoping to create the next generation of Amiga computers.
There was the Ombre project that was meant to incorporate
(30:41):
a three D graphics accelerator card with a powerful processor
to make the Amiga top in the realm again when
it came to graphics, but the project lacked the funding
it needed to make any progress and ultimately fell apart.
Following bankruptcy was a long process to figure out how
to auction off Commodore's us as sets. This was more
(31:01):
complicated than most companies, largely because commodore structure was particularly tricky.
I've seen some people suggest that this was by design
so that it would provide Irving Gould the equivalent of
a tax shelter. I do not know if that's the truth.
What I know is that it took a long time
to sort everything out so that the auction could actually happen.
(31:23):
Things were different in Europe. By the way. Commodore UK
had managed to stay profitable while the U S branch
was flailing around, So Commodore UK was still fine, and
so if you lived in the UK you could still
go out and buy Amiga computers from Commodore while the
US side was fading away. The head of UK operations
was a guy named David Pleasants, and he had a
(31:44):
grand plan. He wanted to purchase the assets of all
of Commodore at auction, including Amiga. So he went to
some investors and raised some money, and he reached out
to a company in China called new Star Electronics, and
his goal was to continue Commodore operations, not just own
the assets, but keep building Commodore machines and even develop
(32:08):
new computer systems based on that architecture, so the Amiga
could potentially have a future. There were a few other
contenders that also we're vying to purchase Commodore's assets. One
was Dell Computer, but its bid actually was too late
for consideration. Another was a company called s Com, which
made PCs in Europe. As COM's bid was lower than
(32:30):
the one that pleasants As Group had made, But then
just a couple of days before the auction was to
actually take place, the Chinese company New Star would back
out of the deal, and Pleasants was forced to cancel
his bid, and so s Com would end up getting
possession of Commodore brand and all of its assets in
the US. As COM's leader, this guy named Manfred Schmidt,
(32:53):
who had split Commodore's assets and create two companies. One
of those two companies was Amiga Technologies. He put a
guy named Petro Ti Schinko, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing
that name. It has got way too many letters in
it for a ignorant Americans such as myself to say properly,
(33:13):
so I'm just gonna call him Petro. The Amiga would
continue on in Europe for a little while longer, but
there were no manufacturing facilities left after the collapse of Commodore,
so there's no place to make new computers. They could
sell the ones that were in inventory, but they couldn't
really make more of them. Work was being done to
bring new facilities online, but for the most part the
(33:34):
company was existing off selling the Amiga twelve hundred. They
did do some tweaks to the twelve hundred to try
and remain relevant because the system was quickly aging out.
It was a few years old, so they had to
keep making minor changes to it, but they couldn't just
make something new yet. S Com, the parent company of
(33:56):
Amiga Technologies, followed in the footsteps of Commodore, falling prey
to what some people called the Commodore curse, and it
too declared bankruptcy. The company had expanded too quickly, it
had overextended its reach, and the Amiga assets again went
to auction. This time, the company Gateway two thousand, later
known just as Gateway, would win the intellectual property and
(34:17):
Amiga brand in and the new philosophy would require a
huge change in direction for Amiga. The idea was that
Gateway was going to create a line of Amiga products,
ranging from tablets to workstations to set top boxes, all
of them would run on the same operating system. This
(34:38):
would have required new architecture and new software, and so
it would not be based off the old Amiga design,
but it was meant to follow a philosophy similar to
the one that Amiga embodied. Sadly, apart from some prototypes,
this never really got off the ground. Management changed at
Gateway and the project was ultimately scuttled as the company
(34:59):
moved to all off Amiga to someone else. This time
there were fewer contenders. The Amiga was rapidly heading toward obsolescence.
The last new machine to come out was the Amiga
twelve hundred, and that had come out in n So
a couple of former Gateway employees were able to put
together a new company called Amino Development, and they got
(35:21):
some investors and they purchased the non patent technologies of Amiga.
Then they changed their company name to Amiga Technologies later
Amiga Incorporated. They had big plans, but apart from a
game pack that could turn a p d A into
an Amiga compatible gaming system, it didn't really pan out.
The dot com crash dealt another huge blow. The company
(35:44):
partnered with some manufacturing facilities to make some motherboards, and
there was a software developer called Hyperion Entertainment out of Belgium.
I believe it was that was designed to or designated
to make the next generation of the Amiga operating system,
Amiga OS four, but the whole system never really quite coalesced.
(36:05):
Amiga Incorporated existed at least in name until two thousand sixteen,
but then the owner did not renew the copyright on
the name, and now that's essentially gone as well. You
can get hold of some of those motherboards, and the
Amiga OS four point oh still exists. But a lot
of people say that Amiga is kind of stuck in
(36:26):
time now because there's just not enough development behind it,
so there's not gonna be any advance in Amiga technology.
You could use an emulator and play old Amiga games,
but no new ones are going to be developed most likely,
or if they are developed, they're gonna have to exist
on that older architecture because there's no one there to
develop the next generation. So it's pretty sad. It was
(36:48):
a tough, tough story. I mean, it was one of
those things that started off so promising back in the
early eighties, but multiple setbacks leg Demiga throughout its history.
From the video game crash of three, to declaring Commodore
declaring bankruptcy, and to this essential fizzling out in two
(37:11):
thousand and sixteen, although you could argue that the company
was long gone before that. Anyway, maybe one day we'll
see a re emergence of the Amiga brand in a
serious way. Maybe it will be able to to hold
true to j Minors vision when he first founded the
company back in the early eighties. But for now, that
(37:33):
is the end of the Amiga story and the end
of this series of episodes. If you guys have any
suggestions for future topics, whether it's a company, a technology,
someone in tech, maybe there's someone you want me to interview,
send me a message let me know. The email address
for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works
dot com, or you can draw me a line on
Facebook or Twitter. The handle at both of those is
(37:55):
tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to check out the
merchandise over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff.
I know you've always wanted a tech Stuff T shirt.
Can't blame you. They look awesome. I love mine. Actually
bought two of them, and that's not that's not an exaggeration.
Actually bought them but go check those out. Every purchase
you make helps the show out a little bit. I've
(38:16):
helped the show now you can too, and don't forget.
You can follow us over on Instagram and I'll talk
to you again really soon. For more on this and
thousands of other topics because it how stuff works. Dot
com
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com