October 10, 2018 • 38 mins
Following the somewhat disappointing performance of the Amiga 1000, Commodore released two new computers to try and capture both the high-end market and the budget computer customer. We look at these two legendary systems and the politics that interfered with them.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
over at How Stuff Works and a lot of all
things tech. And we are continuing our discussion about Amiga.
(00:24):
We have this episode and one more to go, because
that story is crazy complicated, not from a technology standpoint
so much as from a business standpoint, because Amiga was
so involved in the political maneuverings of other companies like
Atari and Commodore. But in the last episode, I left
off with the debut of the Amiga one thousand, the
(00:48):
initial original Amiga computer. Commodore, the electronics and computer company,
had purchased Amiga in four and had saved it from
being gutted by Atari and hold out all the stops
to show off this new computer in a lavish presentation
at the Lincoln Center in New York City. And I
talked all about that in the last episode, and the
computer was heading towards store shelves eventually, And because it's
(01:13):
going to come back in this episode a lot, here's
a quick reminder. Jack Tramiel was the founder of Commodore,
but he was forced to resign by the board of
directors UH, led by investor Irving Gould, after Tramuel had
led Commodore to push Texas Instruments out of the computer
business using drastic competition and price cutting. But Tramuel then
(01:37):
went on to go to Warner Communications, which owned Atari,
and in the wake of the video game crash in Nree,
that company seemed to be worth very little. So Tramuel
bought the video game console and computer divisions of Attari
from Warner Communications for no down payment, and he was
the one who would really go after Amiga, using a
(02:00):
five thousand dollar loan to Amiga, and if Amiga was
not able to pay that loan back, Atari was going
to get control of Amiga's chip set design. But then
Commodore got into the picture and ended up buying Amiga
for twenty four million dollars. And all of that is
important to remember when we talk about the things that
(02:20):
happened in the next couple of years. So while the
folks at Amiga continued to work to get their Amiga
one thousand ready to ship, they had shown it off
at a big press event, but it still wasn't ready
to buy in stores. Commodore was going through a bit
of a cash crisis. The Commodore sixty four was the
best selling computer of all time, but one of the
(02:43):
reasons it sold so well was that Tramuel had been
so aggressive pricing the Commodore sixty four at a low
fee in order to fight off Texas instruments that the
computers really popular, but the profit margin was pretty low,
so they weren't making a lot of money per sale.
Commodore had launched several eight bit computers to follow up
(03:04):
on the Commodore sixty four. Commodore sixty four was also
an eight bit computer. These computers were technically competing against
the Commodore sixty four, which was a bit strange, and
some of them were a little interesting. There was the
Commodore s X sixty four. That one was a semi
portable PC. I called semi portable because it weighed more
(03:25):
than twenty pounds and you had to plug it into
a an a c uh wall outlet. There there was
no onboard battery that would let you work with it
without it being plugged in. It was interesting but didn't
sell very well. Commodore would discontinue it in nineteen eighties six,
but they also launched the Commodore Plus Slash four four.
(03:48):
This was built on an earlier computer architecture called the
Commodore sixteen. Commodore sixteen was a holy incompatible architecture with
the Commodore sixty four. You could not run software written
for the Commodore sixty four on the Commodore sixteen. The
same was true for the Commodore Plus Slash four You
could not run Commodore sixty four software on it. And
(04:09):
so there really was no place in the market for
this odd computer, and so it didn't sell well either.
The question came up, why would I buy this other
eight bit based computer if it's not compatible with this
really popular one, And no one really had the answer
to that. And then there was the Commodore one. This
was still an eight bit computer, and you might wonder,
(04:31):
why are you we calling them eight bit computers if
you have Commodore sixty four a Commodore. Well, that actually
referred to the amount of RAM or read access memory
in the machine, not not the the processor, but the
actual amount of memory. So the Commodore had a D
twenty eight kilobytes of memory. It actually had two processors,
(04:52):
one of those was meant to handle processes or applications
that were associated with Commodore sixty four, and the other
was meant to handle Commodore one eight software, so we
could work on both. Unlike many of Commodore's other computers,
this one was actually backwards compatible. It sold modestly well.
But the one came out just at the end of
(05:14):
the eight bit computer era, so it was kind of
a and also ran because there were more advanced computers
coming out immediately following that. So Commodore was a company
that was not making much from its products. In five
and it purchased Amiga for twenty four million dollars, but
(05:36):
Amiga did not yet have a computer available on the market.
There You couldn't buy an Amiga yet, not until late night.
And meanwhile, Jack Tramuel was suing the heck out of
Commodore for forcing amount of the company. All of that
meant Commodore wasn't able to dedicate the resources that the
Amiga team needed to get the Amiga one thousand out earlier.
(05:59):
They were able to develop it, but they weren't able
to produce it as fast as they wanted to. Amigo
was finally ready to take orders for the Amigo one
thousand in August nineteen five, but Commodore was strapped and
couldn't actually move into high capacity production yet, so in
October they had only managed to produce fifty of the
(06:22):
Amigo one thousand computers. Five zero, just that many. That's it. Now.
None of those were actually in customer hands. They were
all internal computers. They were either being used to develop
software or they were used to give demonstrations to potential
customers and to make matters worse over at Atari, Jack
Tremuel had been busy in nineteen eighty five. He had
(06:43):
pushed his engineers and programmers, a lot of whom had
left Commodore to follow Tramuel after he had been ousted
from the company, even pushing them really hard to rush
a new computer system to market and get ahead of
the Amigo one thousand. Jack trying Meal was always one
of those people who took these things very personally, and
(07:05):
so he thought, well, if you're gonna force me out
of my company, I'm going to come back and launch
a computer that's going to completely take the wind out
of your sales. So in the spring of nineteen five,
months before the Amiga would come to market. Atari introduced
the Atari ST computer and the ST stood for sixteen
(07:25):
thirty two. That meant it was a PC with a
CPU that had sixteen and thirty two bit components or
or busses, that's the facilitators for a communication between different
components within a computer. This would be the Motorola sixty
eight thousand CPU. That's the same chip that served as
the CPU for the Amiga one thousand. And the Atar
(07:47):
E ST also had a graphical user interface or g
u I or gooey. It also had a mouse, and
it had a color monitor option, although the base model
was monochromatic and it was relatively inexpensive, so it is
a true shot across the bow of Commodore. Now. Atari
had a head start, but Commodore got more units moving
(08:09):
and by November it was actually finally possible for your
average customer to go and buy an Amigo one thousand
at a computer store. But that late entry was still
a disadvantage. It was not able to take the full
advantage of the holiday shopping season because it came out
so late. And also Commodore made another very odd decision,
(08:30):
and I honestly don't know what the logic was behind it.
They decided to only sell the Amigo one thousand in
computer stores. And the reason why I say that's weird
is because back in the eighties you could find computers
in lots of different places, including big department stores, and
Commodore had previously used big department stores to sell their computers.
(08:55):
The department store Sears had even offered to carry the
Amigo one thousand in its store, and Commodore declined the offer.
So if you went into a Sears and you went
to their computer section, you could find the Attar e
st but not an Amigo one thousand. And Commodore also
did not do a really good job on the marketing
front for this computer either. For one thing, the ads
(09:17):
they debuted all seemed to be a pale imitation of
other ads that were on the market. Specifically, there was
one that was obviously a copy of Apple's famous Night
four ad. And just in case you don't know what
I'm referring to, I'll give a quick rundown. But if
you've never seen this ad, you need to go to
YouTube search Apple commercial. It'll pop right up. It is
(09:41):
one of the most famous commercials ever made in Apple
released a commercial. It was directed by Ridley freaking Scott,
the film director directed this commercial, and it showed a
bunch of people walking down a hallway that had monitors
all over it and their lit in these very kind
(10:01):
of bluish lights. So it's got this very drab gray scene.
Everyone's kind of dressed in uh and very uh dull
clothing and they're all kind of staring lifelessly ahead of themselves.
And then they file into what is essentially like an
amphitheater and they sit down there looking at an enormous
screen with a huge face on it, and it's essentially
(10:24):
a character who's like big Brother in George or And
that is inter cut with shots of a woman who's
wearing like a white tank top and red shorts and
she's running down the hallway and she's carrying an enormous hammer.
She eventually runs into the room with the giant screen
on it and hurls the hammer at the screen and
(10:44):
that shatters the screen. It shocks the lulled people who
had been watching it. And the message was that Apple
was going to break the model of the dull lockdown
in utilitarian PC that had been introduced by IBM. So
IBM was the big brother. Apple was the woman throwing
a hammer through the screen. It made a big impact,
and that was in early so late, we're talking nearly
(11:07):
two years later. Commodore releases an ad during the Christmas
season and it shows a group of emotionless, drone like
people shuffling slowly up some stairs. At the end of
the stairs was a pedestal upon which sat the Amiga
one thousand, and the monitor is just got this blinding
white light coming out of it. So this was clearly
an imitation of the earlier Apple commercial, but not nearly
(11:30):
as impactful. And because it's an imitation, you don't you
don't admire it the way you would with the Apple commercial.
You'd say, oh, they're just copying what's already been done.
They had another commercial that showed an older man walking
through an mc escher light collection of weird staircases. You
get a real Labyrinth vibe from it, although to be fair,
Labyrinth would come out after this ad did. He eventually
(11:51):
gets to a similar pedestal as a computer on it,
also emanating a blinding white light they lost at the screen,
and he smiles, and then the screen cuts to black,
and you then see an illuminated fetus fill the screen. Yep,
little baby fills the screen glowing. It's weird, and it's
obviously an homage to Stanley Kubrick's film two thousand one.
(12:13):
I do not think it made many people want to
buy a computer. I did see one ad from that
era that made me chuckle. There was a man walking
his dog in a suburban neighborhood and inside one of
the houses is a boy who's working on his computer,
and he's created a replica of his own house on
his Amiga one thousand and then he clicks his mouse
and he makes the the image of his house rise
(12:36):
up off the bottom of the the image he's working on.
So he's lifting his house up, and meanwhile his actual
house starts to lift up out into the sky. And
none of that really got me chuckling. But what did
get a reaction out of me as the music that
was playing in the background of the commercial, because I
recognized it and I realized eventually that it was from
(12:57):
the movie score to the film The Goonies, and then
I went and listened to the Goony soundtrack. The ads
were not doing Amiga any favors. By the end of
n Commodore had sold fewer than fifty thousand Amiga one
thousand computers. Now here's hoping this ad break is more effective.
We're going to take our quick break to thank our sponsor.
(13:24):
In addition to the sales and marketing woes, the initial
batch of Amiga one thousand computers had some stability issues.
You might remember from an earlier episode that I talked
about how they had programmed the system crash error to
read Guru Meditation error. It was sort of a tongue
in cheek message. Unfortunately, this particular error was popping up
(13:46):
with frequency, and Amigo one thousand was quickly associated with
not just being unreliable, but this whole Guru Meditation error message.
And the team was able to patch the problem and
address it in future shipments, but the reputation of the
computer was already damaged. People associated the Amiga one thousand
(14:07):
with being unreliable. One product that worked in Amiga's favor
came from Electronic Arts. It was actually some software, so
Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, was impressed by
the Amiga. He had received an Amiga as sort of
a developer kit and was working within playing with it
to figure out what he might be able to make
with it. Over an electronic arts he led his team
(14:29):
to rewrite a program called Prism for the IBM PC
that in turn was already an evolution of an earlier
piece of software called Doodle for the Xerox computer. And
this new product for the Amiga was called Deluxe Paint.
EA produced what was then a truly incredible image of
King Tutin commons golden death mask, and chances are if
(14:53):
you've ever looked at art from earlier computer eras, you've
seen this picture. It was icon It would become a
very important piece of art that Amiga would use in
a lot of its advertising moving forward, and it was
a go to for Amiga for marketing. And Amiga was
in desperate need of good software, because without good software,
(15:15):
your computer doesn't really do any good. You have to
have people develop stuff for it. Developers were less keen
to create software for the Atar e ST largely due
to Jack Tramuel's reputation for being difficult to work with.
So there were developers who were shy about working for
Atar E s T because they didn't want to have
(15:35):
to deal with Tramuel. And there were people who are
getting more and more excited about Amiga. So while the
Autar E S T was priced lower than the Amiga,
it had more trouble getting good software investor. Irving Gould again,
he was the guy who led the effort to force
Jack Tramuel out of Commodore had put a man named
Marshall F. Smith in charge of the company of Commodore.
(16:00):
Smith had previously worked in the steel industry, which, as
you might imagine, is not very much like the computer industry.
In the computer industry, tech changes very quickly and the
business has to adapt to that. Steel does not tend
to change very quickly, and Smith just didn't seem to
quite have the mindset to head up a computer company.
(16:22):
He also made some decisions that some critics would point
out later as being very questionable. So, for example, back
in early at C E S, he got into a
conversation with somebody else, and that someone convinced him that
Commodore's line of portable computers with l C D screens,
which they were showing off at C E S was
(16:42):
going to be terribly unprofitable. They were just going to
end up languishing in the market, and the company was
going to lose money as a result for really backing
a portable computer with an l c D screen, and
Smith took at the heart and he canceled the line
of computers. So while they showed one off like a
prototype over at c E S, it would never become
(17:03):
an actual Commodore product. Here's where people got really upset.
The person who told him that it wasn't going to
be profitable was the CEO of Tandy Tandy Slash radio shack.
That was the company that was making its own line
of pordable computers. So essentially Tandy was able to talk
(17:23):
a competitor out of launching a product that would have
gone toe to toe with their own products, and a
lot of people said that Smith let a competitor sabotage
his own business. Marshall Smith began to cut costs at
the end of nineteen eight five because Commodore was not
going to be profitable unless they were able to trim
(17:44):
a whole lot of the expenses. That included cutting payroll
by forty five per cent. Commodore had suffered losses in
all but the final quarter of five and night at
the last quarter it posted a one million dollar profit.
That was not enough to set off the losses from
the rest of the year, and it had a lot
of debt to pay off as well. So over the
(18:05):
course of the fiscal year of nineteen eighty five, Commodore
lost two hundred thirty seven million dollars. Clearly that was
going to affect Amiga as well as a division of
the company, and commodore struggles in spilled over into nine six.
The company made the decision to skip both c e
(18:26):
S shows that year. Remember the Consumer Electronics Show, which
these days has one show a year. It's in January.
It's in Las Vegas in the United States. There are
some international shows too, but that's the one big one
in the US. Back in these days, it had two shows,
one in the winter one this summer. Well, Commodore skipped
(18:47):
both of them and also skipped Comdex, which was a
huge computer trade show at that time, and it had
always maintained a very large presence during these shows, so
it's absence was notable On the executive side. Over in
the corporate section of Commodore, Chief operating Officer Thomas Radigan
was preparing to move into the role of CEO with
(19:09):
Marshall Smith stepping down. This had been the plan all along.
This was not a sudden decision. It was a long
term strategy, and so rat Agan had been groomed to
become the CEO of Commodore, and he was given a
five year contract that would expire in nineteen and he
assumed the role of Commodore CEO in March nine, and
(19:31):
it was down to him to turn Commodore into a
truly profitable company, which was going to require some really
tough decisions. Rat Agan had previously served as the CEO
of Pepsi co International, which was a pretty interesting move
because Apple had previously hired away Pepsi CEO John Scully
in nineteen eight three, So now you had two former
(19:53):
leaders of Pepsi leading personal computer companies that were in
competition with each other. Ratigan would lead three rounds of layoffs,
and the first round targeted people who were described as layabouts.
So I'm guessing these were folks who are either were
not particularly productive at their jobs or they held jobs
that did not seem to contribute to the bottom line
(20:15):
of Commodore in any real way. So that was the
easiest cut to make and probably was the one that
was making the most sense. From a business standpoint, The
second round of layoffs involved cutting the people who were
working on what were now irrelevant or underperforming projects, so
rad again would discontinue things like the pet or PET
(20:37):
computer line, which had been introduced way back in ninety seven.
He also discontinued the VIC twenty, which came out in
the Commodore sixty four was still selling, so he kept
that going. The Plus Slash four and the Commodore sixteen
models also were cut, and a few other projects that
were for systems that had not yet debuted but were
(20:59):
in development. Those were eventually acted as well, and a
lot of those people, most of them were let go.
The third round of layoffs was the hardest to make
because they're still needed to be cuts in order to
get Commodore back to profitability, but now they were cutting
into people who were contributing directly to Commodore's business. So
(21:20):
a lot of people referred to this as cutting into
the bone because it was It was beyond the the
the folks that you could more easily say goodbye to
because they were not contributing to Commodore's business. So here
was where pro programmers and engineers found themselves out of
a job both at Commodore headquarters in Pennsylvania in Westchester
(21:42):
and the folks over in Las Gatos in California. The
Amiga folks, they all of them, saw cutbacks, but another
big change was coming, and that was that the Amiga
team was told that their operations were going to move
across country and that the team was going to join
the Amadore headquarters in Pennsylvania. People working for Amiga had
(22:04):
to make a decision. They could continue to work for
the company, but that would mean they'd have to move
across country or they were going to have to quit.
J Minor, the guy who had led the design for
the Amiga chip set, the co founder of Amiga, the
one guy who had been a consistent presence at the
company from its start, decided he was done. He resigned
(22:27):
from Commodore as a full time employee. He would continue
to act as a consultant for the company for several
more years, and ultimately J. Minor passed away in due
to kidney failure. One other reason Commodore wanted the Amiga
folks to move closer to their headquarters had to do
(22:47):
with an embarrassing prank that went a little too far,
So the Amiga had a graphical desktop environment that was
called Workbench, and there was a software developer who was
working on an upgrade to work Bench. The you know,
a later version like one point two, and as far
as I can tell, this person's identity has never been revealed.
(23:10):
But this software developer hid a message in the code.
And the only way you would unlock the messages if
you pressed a certain key combination simultaneously. And it wasn't
a common one, so it would require you to know
about it or to have heard about it in order
to do it. And if you did do it, a
message popped up on screen. That message read, and I'm
(23:32):
going to paraphrase a little bit we made the Amiga.
They left it up. The message did not obvious skate
the curse word. They they actually said it in the message.
The head of software over at Amiga was perhaps amused,
but told this developer that the this easter egg was
(23:54):
going to have to go. It could not stay in
the software. And at first it seemed like this engineer
had taken that to heart, because if you did the
key combination. After the engineer had made some more changes
and now said Amiga born a champion. But This turned
out to be a smoke screen because if you held
down another set of keys, the message we made the
(24:16):
Amiga would pop up. And then if you were to
keep holding those keys down and then have someone insert
a floppy disk into the disk drive, a second half
of that message would pop up. The they left it
up part would flash on screen for one six of
a second. Now, it sounds like such a thing would
not be discoverable, like this was just there for the engineer.
(24:39):
No one else would ever know about it. It would
just be this sort of insubordinate behavior that ultimately wouldn't matter.
But in fact, someone in Europe found the code embedded
in the read only memory of the chips. They could
see that it existed there, and managers her worked at
Commodore UK issued a recall on all the existing machines
and demanded that the affected ROM chips would have to
(25:02):
be replaced with new ones that did not contain that message,
which set Amiga back three months and sales in Europe.
And just so you know, traditionally in Europe Amiga did
much better business than did in the United States, so
this was a big deal, and so Commodore wanted to
bring these jokesters, maybe a little closer to home where
they could be a bit more carefully observed. I have
(25:25):
no idea what sort of dressing down that engineer might
have received as a result of this prank gone awry,
but I imagine it must not have been a very
good day for that person when all of this shook out.
I've got more to say about Amiga, but first let's
take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Commodore CEO
(25:52):
Radigan wasn't just cutting jobs and moving people around. He
wanted to make the Amiga platform a success. He didn't
want to get rid of it. He thought a good
strategy would be to create two lines of Amiga computers.
One would be dedicated toward a lower price point. It
would be a lower power machine to be kind of
the budget version of the Amiga. The other would be
(26:16):
a powerful computer aimed more at professionals, high end users,
people who wanted to have a lot of power in
the graphics and audio side of computation. And so he
thought we should make two brands of Amiga. That would
mean making one machine that was similar in spirit to
the old Commodore sixty four, something that would be accessible
(26:39):
and could get people excited about Amiga's approach, and the
other would be a more powerful and more expandable computer
than the Amigo one thousand was. So the one thousand
would be kind of the middle of the road, and
these two would take more of an extreme path off
of that middle. Ratigan's methods, while harsh with all the layoffs,
(26:59):
worked from a in a standpoint. In the last quarter
of NIX, Commodore posted a twenty two million dollar profit.
In the previous year it had suffered two d thirty
seven million dollars in losses, so this was a good move,
but he was also setting people against each other. Ratigan
had wanted that lower powered, lower priced Amiga super Fast.
(27:20):
This would become the Amiga five hundred, and he had
to figure out who was going to actually develop this.
Now you had all of Amiga under the umbrella of Commodore,
so you still had some engineers and developers and programmers
who had been part of Amiga, the ones who hadn't
been laid off and the ones who had chosen to
move across the country. But on the other side you
(27:42):
had engineers who had been at Commodore for a while.
And Radigan decided that the Commodore engineers would be the
team to work on the Amiga five hundred. He felt
that they would have the motivation to do it quickly.
They had a challenge ahead of them. They were being
told this other team developed this architecture. I need you
guys to make a less powerful version of this as
(28:04):
quickly as possible. So they had something to prove, and
so they had to work super hard to get the
computer on the market earlier than if the original Amiga
team were to work on it. The thought being that
the original Amiga team would probably do a better job,
but they would take a lot longer to do it.
Jeff Porter became the director of New Product Development. He
(28:25):
had previously led the effort to design and build that
LCD portable Commodore computer and I talked about earlier, the
one that Marshall Smith had canceled. After the Tandy CEO
was so helpful. George Robbins and Bob Welland, who had
been working on a Commodore workstation that ran on Unix
before that project had been canceled by Radigan, would become
the lead engineers for the Amiga five hundred. George Robbins
(28:48):
decided to increase the amount of RAM on the Amiga
chip called Agnes, up to one megabyte. The goal was
to give the chip enough memory to support higher graphic resolution,
and his decision kind of ruffled feathers with the original
Amiga team who had designed this chip, but that reaction
ended up being a motivator for the Amiga five hundred
(29:09):
team at Commodore, not something that detracted from it. The
new chip was called fat AGNES, and it worked. It
boosted the Amiga's abilities to display graphics without breaking backwards
compatibility because it still was using the same architecture as
the previous chip, but it did slow things down a
little bit in the process. The machine itself ran a
little more slowly. However, the improvement in graphical output helped
(29:31):
balance that out. George Robbins also took a look at
the motherboard that the Amiga team had designed to try
and figure out ways that they could simplify things to
reduce the cost of fabrication and get that Amiga five
hundred down to the level that Ratigan wanted. One of
the things he cut was the original Amiga's ability to
connect directly to a television set. Robbins would replace that
(29:53):
capability on the motherboard. By including an adapter that could
do the same thing but would not be incorporate did
directly into the actual motherboard. That simplified the fabrication process
for the motherboard itself. He also took the power supply
out of the computer and he made it an external component.
He designed the Amiga five hundred to integrate the keyboard
(30:14):
directly with the computer case, so as part of the
computer case as a whole, and the computer case included
an expansion slot that would let users plug in devices
without having to open up the computer case. Each move
helped bring the Amiga's price down a little bit. Meanwhile,
Radigan had decided that the high end machine which would
become the Amiga two thousand, would not go to the
(30:36):
original Amiga team either. They're just weren't enough engineers left
to carry the projects, so he initially assigned the development
of the Amiga two thousand to a team of engineers
at Commodore's German subsidiary. That team took the Amiga one
thousand design and then they essentially added more stuff to it.
(30:58):
They added in an interface for expansion cards. They changed
the case to a more standard PC case, but then
Ratigan sees this design and he says, that's not really
what I wanted. It's not it's not powerful enough. It's
not a step far enough from the Amiga one thousand.
He felt the team had failed to deliver upon the
goal of building out a truly powerful computer for the
high end market, so he turned to Commodore designer David Haney,
(31:22):
and Haney looked at the designs of the original Amiga
chip set and motherboard design, and he began creating new hardware.
One thing he built was a chip called Buster and
Busters purpose was to handle the operations of the expansion bus.
And again, a bus is a component that facilitates communication
(31:44):
between different computer devices or even different elements within a
computer itself. Busters design worked on an architecture that was
called Zoro and uh It would allow for almost a
plug and play a coroach with expansion devices, which was
uncommon in that era. The Amiga two thousands sported five
(32:06):
expansion slots using this Zoro bus design that Haney had built.
It also had four IBM pc I s A slots.
I s A, by the way, stands for Industry Standard architecture.
That was a term IBM used for its sixteen bit
internal bus. For computers that were built on the eight
two eight six CPU architecture and beyond two three sixty
(32:28):
six those this gave the Amiga two thousand incredible expansion
abilities when paired with the right devices. Haney also put
the processor on a separate board from the motherboard. So
why would you do that? Why would you put the
CPU on a separate board. Well, the idea was that
that would allow you to swap out the CPU more easily,
so you could conceivably upgrade the same machine over time,
(32:51):
as long as the CPU was compatible with the rest
of the architecture of the computer. Haney also incorporated a
generator locking mechanism the Amiga that's also known as gen lock.
The gen lock would allow a user to output computer
images to display on top of a video feed without
affecting the image stability, so you could overlay computer graphics
(33:13):
on top of a video feed. This is the source
of stuff you see in broadcast systems all the time
where you might see a graphic appear on top of,
say a live news report, that's due to stuff like this,
like a gen lock. This feature would make the Amiga
two thousand the go to computer for video production and
broadcast once a very important product would debut. More on
(33:36):
that in a bit. For a case, Hainey was able
to pull a design from the canceled Commodore nine hundred.
That was that Unix workstation that got canceled. I had
mentioned that a little bit earlier when Radigan was canceling
all those projects. That was one of them. The Amiga
two thousand was certainly more powerful than the Amiga one thousand,
(33:56):
but some people like J Miner, felt that the computer
did not go far enough. It wasn't really transformative enough.
Minor believed that the technological advancements that were in the
industry had outpaced the two thousand, and that Commodore had
made a mistake by not going far enough with the design.
Like the Amigo one thousand, the five hundred and two
(34:19):
thousand both experienced delays in development. It takes a while
to build out a new computer design, even if you're
starting from an already established foundation like the Amigo one thousand.
The team's building the five hundred and two thousand were
not the same people who had designed the one thousand
to start with, so it took some time just to
get up to speed before serious design work could begin.
(34:41):
Investor Irving Gould and the Board of Directors wanted to
see new computers hitting the market right away, replacing the
Amigo one thousand, which was doing modest sales. And remember
the Amigo one thousand debut at the end of nineteen.
They wanted the new five hundred and two thousand models
to debut in nineteen eighty six, but it was taking
a while to get them ready to go, longer than
(35:04):
Gould would like. He was notoriously impatient. Irvin Gould pushed
the board to hire a management consulting firm to evaluate Commodore. Essentially,
from the way I've read it, it sounds like he
was looking for a reason to be able to fire Ratigan. Well,
there was a man who was part of this consulting
(35:24):
firm who came in named Mehdi Ali, who was then
a special advisor, and he prepared the report, and one
of the suggestions that Meddi Ali made in this report
was that the board should fire Ratigan as CEO right away.
Radigan knew what was up, He could see what was happening,
so he went to work the next day anyway, he
(35:46):
was then met by security and lawyers and was escorted
off the premises, but reportedly no one could actually tell
him why he was no longer employed. He had made
some really tough decisions as CEO. A lot of them
were not terribly popular because they involved tons of layoffs
some of really good people, and they some of those
(36:07):
decisions might have been harmful in the long run, but
he had returned Commodore to profitability. He had pushed for
the next generation of computers in the Amiga line, and
now he was history almost You see, there was the
matter of that five year contract he had signed. So
Ratigan sues Commodore for breach of contract, claiming nine million
(36:32):
dollars of unpaid wages. Commodore counter sued Ratigan for twenty
four million dollars. This case would go on stretching all
the way to which fittingly would have been the end
of that five year contract. The courts ultimately found in
favor of Ratigan, and they dismissed the countersuit against him.
(36:55):
In Ratigan's place, Gould would serve as the chief executive
for the time being. As for Amiga and two thousand
would both launch just a short while after Ratigan had
been let go. And I've got a lot more to
say about how those computers turned out, but we're going
to cover that in our next episode where we learn
about the ultimate fate of Amiga. If you guys have
(37:18):
any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's
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(37:39):
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(37:59):
stuffs that carm
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
over at How Stuff Works and a lot of all
things tech. And we are continuing our discussion about Amiga.
(00:24):
We have this episode and one more to go, because
that story is crazy complicated, not from a technology standpoint
so much as from a business standpoint, because Amiga was
so involved in the political maneuverings of other companies like
Atari and Commodore. But in the last episode, I left
off with the debut of the Amiga one thousand, the
(00:48):
initial original Amiga computer. Commodore, the electronics and computer company,
had purchased Amiga in four and had saved it from
being gutted by Atari and hold out all the stops
to show off this new computer in a lavish presentation
at the Lincoln Center in New York City. And I
talked all about that in the last episode, and the
computer was heading towards store shelves eventually, And because it's
(01:13):
going to come back in this episode a lot, here's
a quick reminder. Jack Tramiel was the founder of Commodore,
but he was forced to resign by the board of
directors UH, led by investor Irving Gould, after Tramuel had
led Commodore to push Texas Instruments out of the computer
business using drastic competition and price cutting. But Tramuel then
(01:37):
went on to go to Warner Communications, which owned Atari,
and in the wake of the video game crash in Nree,
that company seemed to be worth very little. So Tramuel
bought the video game console and computer divisions of Attari
from Warner Communications for no down payment, and he was
the one who would really go after Amiga, using a
(02:00):
five thousand dollar loan to Amiga, and if Amiga was
not able to pay that loan back, Atari was going
to get control of Amiga's chip set design. But then
Commodore got into the picture and ended up buying Amiga
for twenty four million dollars. And all of that is
important to remember when we talk about the things that
(02:20):
happened in the next couple of years. So while the
folks at Amiga continued to work to get their Amiga
one thousand ready to ship, they had shown it off
at a big press event, but it still wasn't ready
to buy in stores. Commodore was going through a bit
of a cash crisis. The Commodore sixty four was the
best selling computer of all time, but one of the
(02:43):
reasons it sold so well was that Tramuel had been
so aggressive pricing the Commodore sixty four at a low
fee in order to fight off Texas instruments that the
computers really popular, but the profit margin was pretty low,
so they weren't making a lot of money per sale.
Commodore had launched several eight bit computers to follow up
(03:04):
on the Commodore sixty four. Commodore sixty four was also
an eight bit computer. These computers were technically competing against
the Commodore sixty four, which was a bit strange, and
some of them were a little interesting. There was the
Commodore s X sixty four. That one was a semi
portable PC. I called semi portable because it weighed more
(03:25):
than twenty pounds and you had to plug it into
a an a c uh wall outlet. There there was
no onboard battery that would let you work with it
without it being plugged in. It was interesting but didn't
sell very well. Commodore would discontinue it in nineteen eighties six,
but they also launched the Commodore Plus Slash four four.
(03:48):
This was built on an earlier computer architecture called the
Commodore sixteen. Commodore sixteen was a holy incompatible architecture with
the Commodore sixty four. You could not run software written
for the Commodore sixty four on the Commodore sixteen. The
same was true for the Commodore Plus Slash four You
could not run Commodore sixty four software on it. And
(04:09):
so there really was no place in the market for
this odd computer, and so it didn't sell well either.
The question came up, why would I buy this other
eight bit based computer if it's not compatible with this
really popular one, And no one really had the answer
to that. And then there was the Commodore one. This
was still an eight bit computer, and you might wonder,
(04:31):
why are you we calling them eight bit computers if
you have Commodore sixty four a Commodore. Well, that actually
referred to the amount of RAM or read access memory
in the machine, not not the the processor, but the
actual amount of memory. So the Commodore had a D
twenty eight kilobytes of memory. It actually had two processors,
(04:52):
one of those was meant to handle processes or applications
that were associated with Commodore sixty four, and the other
was meant to handle Commodore one eight software, so we
could work on both. Unlike many of Commodore's other computers,
this one was actually backwards compatible. It sold modestly well.
But the one came out just at the end of
(05:14):
the eight bit computer era, so it was kind of
a and also ran because there were more advanced computers
coming out immediately following that. So Commodore was a company
that was not making much from its products. In five
and it purchased Amiga for twenty four million dollars, but
(05:36):
Amiga did not yet have a computer available on the market.
There You couldn't buy an Amiga yet, not until late night.
And meanwhile, Jack Tramuel was suing the heck out of
Commodore for forcing amount of the company. All of that
meant Commodore wasn't able to dedicate the resources that the
Amiga team needed to get the Amiga one thousand out earlier.
(05:59):
They were able to develop it, but they weren't able
to produce it as fast as they wanted to. Amigo
was finally ready to take orders for the Amigo one
thousand in August nineteen five, but Commodore was strapped and
couldn't actually move into high capacity production yet, so in
October they had only managed to produce fifty of the
(06:22):
Amigo one thousand computers. Five zero, just that many. That's it. Now.
None of those were actually in customer hands. They were
all internal computers. They were either being used to develop
software or they were used to give demonstrations to potential
customers and to make matters worse over at Atari, Jack
Tremuel had been busy in nineteen eighty five. He had
(06:43):
pushed his engineers and programmers, a lot of whom had
left Commodore to follow Tramuel after he had been ousted
from the company, even pushing them really hard to rush
a new computer system to market and get ahead of
the Amigo one thousand. Jack trying Meal was always one
of those people who took these things very personally, and
(07:05):
so he thought, well, if you're gonna force me out
of my company, I'm going to come back and launch
a computer that's going to completely take the wind out
of your sales. So in the spring of nineteen five,
months before the Amiga would come to market. Atari introduced
the Atari ST computer and the ST stood for sixteen
(07:25):
thirty two. That meant it was a PC with a
CPU that had sixteen and thirty two bit components or
or busses, that's the facilitators for a communication between different
components within a computer. This would be the Motorola sixty
eight thousand CPU. That's the same chip that served as
the CPU for the Amiga one thousand. And the Atar
(07:47):
E ST also had a graphical user interface or g
u I or gooey. It also had a mouse, and
it had a color monitor option, although the base model
was monochromatic and it was relatively inexpensive, so it is
a true shot across the bow of Commodore. Now. Atari
had a head start, but Commodore got more units moving
(08:09):
and by November it was actually finally possible for your
average customer to go and buy an Amigo one thousand
at a computer store. But that late entry was still
a disadvantage. It was not able to take the full
advantage of the holiday shopping season because it came out
so late. And also Commodore made another very odd decision,
(08:30):
and I honestly don't know what the logic was behind it.
They decided to only sell the Amigo one thousand in
computer stores. And the reason why I say that's weird
is because back in the eighties you could find computers
in lots of different places, including big department stores, and
Commodore had previously used big department stores to sell their computers.
(08:55):
The department store Sears had even offered to carry the
Amigo one thousand in its store, and Commodore declined the offer.
So if you went into a Sears and you went
to their computer section, you could find the Attar e
st but not an Amigo one thousand. And Commodore also
did not do a really good job on the marketing
front for this computer either. For one thing, the ads
(09:17):
they debuted all seemed to be a pale imitation of
other ads that were on the market. Specifically, there was
one that was obviously a copy of Apple's famous Night
four ad. And just in case you don't know what
I'm referring to, I'll give a quick rundown. But if
you've never seen this ad, you need to go to
YouTube search Apple commercial. It'll pop right up. It is
(09:41):
one of the most famous commercials ever made in Apple
released a commercial. It was directed by Ridley freaking Scott,
the film director directed this commercial, and it showed a
bunch of people walking down a hallway that had monitors
all over it and their lit in these very kind
(10:01):
of bluish lights. So it's got this very drab gray scene.
Everyone's kind of dressed in uh and very uh dull
clothing and they're all kind of staring lifelessly ahead of themselves.
And then they file into what is essentially like an
amphitheater and they sit down there looking at an enormous
screen with a huge face on it, and it's essentially
(10:24):
a character who's like big Brother in George or And
that is inter cut with shots of a woman who's
wearing like a white tank top and red shorts and
she's running down the hallway and she's carrying an enormous hammer.
She eventually runs into the room with the giant screen
on it and hurls the hammer at the screen and
(10:44):
that shatters the screen. It shocks the lulled people who
had been watching it. And the message was that Apple
was going to break the model of the dull lockdown
in utilitarian PC that had been introduced by IBM. So
IBM was the big brother. Apple was the woman throwing
a hammer through the screen. It made a big impact,
and that was in early so late, we're talking nearly
(11:07):
two years later. Commodore releases an ad during the Christmas
season and it shows a group of emotionless, drone like
people shuffling slowly up some stairs. At the end of
the stairs was a pedestal upon which sat the Amiga
one thousand, and the monitor is just got this blinding
white light coming out of it. So this was clearly
an imitation of the earlier Apple commercial, but not nearly
(11:30):
as impactful. And because it's an imitation, you don't you
don't admire it the way you would with the Apple commercial.
You'd say, oh, they're just copying what's already been done.
They had another commercial that showed an older man walking
through an mc escher light collection of weird staircases. You
get a real Labyrinth vibe from it, although to be fair,
Labyrinth would come out after this ad did. He eventually
(11:51):
gets to a similar pedestal as a computer on it,
also emanating a blinding white light they lost at the screen,
and he smiles, and then the screen cuts to black,
and you then see an illuminated fetus fill the screen. Yep,
little baby fills the screen glowing. It's weird, and it's
obviously an homage to Stanley Kubrick's film two thousand one.
(12:13):
I do not think it made many people want to
buy a computer. I did see one ad from that
era that made me chuckle. There was a man walking
his dog in a suburban neighborhood and inside one of
the houses is a boy who's working on his computer,
and he's created a replica of his own house on
his Amiga one thousand and then he clicks his mouse
and he makes the the image of his house rise
(12:36):
up off the bottom of the the image he's working on.
So he's lifting his house up, and meanwhile his actual
house starts to lift up out into the sky. And
none of that really got me chuckling. But what did
get a reaction out of me as the music that
was playing in the background of the commercial, because I
recognized it and I realized eventually that it was from
(12:57):
the movie score to the film The Goonies, and then
I went and listened to the Goony soundtrack. The ads
were not doing Amiga any favors. By the end of
n Commodore had sold fewer than fifty thousand Amiga one
thousand computers. Now here's hoping this ad break is more effective.
We're going to take our quick break to thank our sponsor.
(13:24):
In addition to the sales and marketing woes, the initial
batch of Amiga one thousand computers had some stability issues.
You might remember from an earlier episode that I talked
about how they had programmed the system crash error to
read Guru Meditation error. It was sort of a tongue
in cheek message. Unfortunately, this particular error was popping up
(13:46):
with frequency, and Amigo one thousand was quickly associated with
not just being unreliable, but this whole Guru Meditation error message.
And the team was able to patch the problem and
address it in future shipments, but the reputation of the
computer was already damaged. People associated the Amiga one thousand
(14:07):
with being unreliable. One product that worked in Amiga's favor
came from Electronic Arts. It was actually some software, so
Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, was impressed by
the Amiga. He had received an Amiga as sort of
a developer kit and was working within playing with it
to figure out what he might be able to make
with it. Over an electronic arts he led his team
(14:29):
to rewrite a program called Prism for the IBM PC
that in turn was already an evolution of an earlier
piece of software called Doodle for the Xerox computer. And
this new product for the Amiga was called Deluxe Paint.
EA produced what was then a truly incredible image of
King Tutin commons golden death mask, and chances are if
(14:53):
you've ever looked at art from earlier computer eras, you've
seen this picture. It was icon It would become a
very important piece of art that Amiga would use in
a lot of its advertising moving forward, and it was
a go to for Amiga for marketing. And Amiga was
in desperate need of good software, because without good software,
(15:15):
your computer doesn't really do any good. You have to
have people develop stuff for it. Developers were less keen
to create software for the Atar e ST largely due
to Jack Tramuel's reputation for being difficult to work with.
So there were developers who were shy about working for
Atar E s T because they didn't want to have
(15:35):
to deal with Tramuel. And there were people who are
getting more and more excited about Amiga. So while the
Autar E S T was priced lower than the Amiga,
it had more trouble getting good software investor. Irving Gould again,
he was the guy who led the effort to force
Jack Tramuel out of Commodore had put a man named
Marshall F. Smith in charge of the company of Commodore.
(16:00):
Smith had previously worked in the steel industry, which, as
you might imagine, is not very much like the computer industry.
In the computer industry, tech changes very quickly and the
business has to adapt to that. Steel does not tend
to change very quickly, and Smith just didn't seem to
quite have the mindset to head up a computer company.
(16:22):
He also made some decisions that some critics would point
out later as being very questionable. So, for example, back
in early at C E S, he got into a
conversation with somebody else, and that someone convinced him that
Commodore's line of portable computers with l C D screens,
which they were showing off at C E S was
(16:42):
going to be terribly unprofitable. They were just going to
end up languishing in the market, and the company was
going to lose money as a result for really backing
a portable computer with an l c D screen, and
Smith took at the heart and he canceled the line
of computers. So while they showed one off like a
prototype over at c E S, it would never become
(17:03):
an actual Commodore product. Here's where people got really upset.
The person who told him that it wasn't going to
be profitable was the CEO of Tandy Tandy Slash radio shack.
That was the company that was making its own line
of pordable computers. So essentially Tandy was able to talk
(17:23):
a competitor out of launching a product that would have
gone toe to toe with their own products, and a
lot of people said that Smith let a competitor sabotage
his own business. Marshall Smith began to cut costs at
the end of nineteen eight five because Commodore was not
going to be profitable unless they were able to trim
(17:44):
a whole lot of the expenses. That included cutting payroll
by forty five per cent. Commodore had suffered losses in
all but the final quarter of five and night at
the last quarter it posted a one million dollar profit.
That was not enough to set off the losses from
the rest of the year, and it had a lot
of debt to pay off as well. So over the
(18:05):
course of the fiscal year of nineteen eighty five, Commodore
lost two hundred thirty seven million dollars. Clearly that was
going to affect Amiga as well as a division of
the company, and commodore struggles in spilled over into nine six.
The company made the decision to skip both c e
(18:26):
S shows that year. Remember the Consumer Electronics Show, which
these days has one show a year. It's in January.
It's in Las Vegas in the United States. There are
some international shows too, but that's the one big one
in the US. Back in these days, it had two shows,
one in the winter one this summer. Well, Commodore skipped
(18:47):
both of them and also skipped Comdex, which was a
huge computer trade show at that time, and it had
always maintained a very large presence during these shows, so
it's absence was notable On the executive side. Over in
the corporate section of Commodore, Chief operating Officer Thomas Radigan
was preparing to move into the role of CEO with
(19:09):
Marshall Smith stepping down. This had been the plan all along.
This was not a sudden decision. It was a long
term strategy, and so rat Agan had been groomed to
become the CEO of Commodore, and he was given a
five year contract that would expire in nineteen and he
assumed the role of Commodore CEO in March nine, and
(19:31):
it was down to him to turn Commodore into a
truly profitable company, which was going to require some really
tough decisions. Rat Agan had previously served as the CEO
of Pepsi co International, which was a pretty interesting move
because Apple had previously hired away Pepsi CEO John Scully
in nineteen eight three, So now you had two former
(19:53):
leaders of Pepsi leading personal computer companies that were in
competition with each other. Ratigan would lead three rounds of layoffs,
and the first round targeted people who were described as layabouts.
So I'm guessing these were folks who are either were
not particularly productive at their jobs or they held jobs
that did not seem to contribute to the bottom line
(20:15):
of Commodore in any real way. So that was the
easiest cut to make and probably was the one that
was making the most sense. From a business standpoint, The
second round of layoffs involved cutting the people who were
working on what were now irrelevant or underperforming projects, so
rad again would discontinue things like the pet or PET
(20:37):
computer line, which had been introduced way back in ninety seven.
He also discontinued the VIC twenty, which came out in
the Commodore sixty four was still selling, so he kept
that going. The Plus Slash four and the Commodore sixteen
models also were cut, and a few other projects that
were for systems that had not yet debuted but were
(20:59):
in development. Those were eventually acted as well, and a
lot of those people, most of them were let go.
The third round of layoffs was the hardest to make
because they're still needed to be cuts in order to
get Commodore back to profitability, but now they were cutting
into people who were contributing directly to Commodore's business. So
(21:20):
a lot of people referred to this as cutting into
the bone because it was It was beyond the the
the folks that you could more easily say goodbye to
because they were not contributing to Commodore's business. So here
was where pro programmers and engineers found themselves out of
a job both at Commodore headquarters in Pennsylvania in Westchester
(21:42):
and the folks over in Las Gatos in California. The
Amiga folks, they all of them, saw cutbacks, but another
big change was coming, and that was that the Amiga
team was told that their operations were going to move
across country and that the team was going to join
the Amadore headquarters in Pennsylvania. People working for Amiga had
(22:04):
to make a decision. They could continue to work for
the company, but that would mean they'd have to move
across country or they were going to have to quit.
J Minor, the guy who had led the design for
the Amiga chip set, the co founder of Amiga, the
one guy who had been a consistent presence at the
company from its start, decided he was done. He resigned
(22:27):
from Commodore as a full time employee. He would continue
to act as a consultant for the company for several
more years, and ultimately J. Minor passed away in due
to kidney failure. One other reason Commodore wanted the Amiga
folks to move closer to their headquarters had to do
(22:47):
with an embarrassing prank that went a little too far,
So the Amiga had a graphical desktop environment that was
called Workbench, and there was a software developer who was
working on an upgrade to work Bench. The you know,
a later version like one point two, and as far
as I can tell, this person's identity has never been revealed.
(23:10):
But this software developer hid a message in the code.
And the only way you would unlock the messages if
you pressed a certain key combination simultaneously. And it wasn't
a common one, so it would require you to know
about it or to have heard about it in order
to do it. And if you did do it, a
message popped up on screen. That message read, and I'm
(23:32):
going to paraphrase a little bit we made the Amiga.
They left it up. The message did not obvious skate
the curse word. They they actually said it in the message.
The head of software over at Amiga was perhaps amused,
but told this developer that the this easter egg was
(23:54):
going to have to go. It could not stay in
the software. And at first it seemed like this engineer
had taken that to heart, because if you did the
key combination. After the engineer had made some more changes
and now said Amiga born a champion. But This turned
out to be a smoke screen because if you held
down another set of keys, the message we made the
(24:16):
Amiga would pop up. And then if you were to
keep holding those keys down and then have someone insert
a floppy disk into the disk drive, a second half
of that message would pop up. The they left it
up part would flash on screen for one six of
a second. Now, it sounds like such a thing would
not be discoverable, like this was just there for the engineer.
(24:39):
No one else would ever know about it. It would
just be this sort of insubordinate behavior that ultimately wouldn't matter.
But in fact, someone in Europe found the code embedded
in the read only memory of the chips. They could
see that it existed there, and managers her worked at
Commodore UK issued a recall on all the existing machines
and demanded that the affected ROM chips would have to
(25:02):
be replaced with new ones that did not contain that message,
which set Amiga back three months and sales in Europe.
And just so you know, traditionally in Europe Amiga did
much better business than did in the United States, so
this was a big deal, and so Commodore wanted to
bring these jokesters, maybe a little closer to home where
they could be a bit more carefully observed. I have
(25:25):
no idea what sort of dressing down that engineer might
have received as a result of this prank gone awry,
but I imagine it must not have been a very
good day for that person when all of this shook out.
I've got more to say about Amiga, but first let's
take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Commodore CEO
(25:52):
Radigan wasn't just cutting jobs and moving people around. He
wanted to make the Amiga platform a success. He didn't
want to get rid of it. He thought a good
strategy would be to create two lines of Amiga computers.
One would be dedicated toward a lower price point. It
would be a lower power machine to be kind of
the budget version of the Amiga. The other would be
(26:16):
a powerful computer aimed more at professionals, high end users,
people who wanted to have a lot of power in
the graphics and audio side of computation. And so he
thought we should make two brands of Amiga. That would
mean making one machine that was similar in spirit to
the old Commodore sixty four, something that would be accessible
(26:39):
and could get people excited about Amiga's approach, and the
other would be a more powerful and more expandable computer
than the Amigo one thousand was. So the one thousand
would be kind of the middle of the road, and
these two would take more of an extreme path off
of that middle. Ratigan's methods, while harsh with all the layoffs,
(26:59):
worked from a in a standpoint. In the last quarter
of NIX, Commodore posted a twenty two million dollar profit.
In the previous year it had suffered two d thirty
seven million dollars in losses, so this was a good move,
but he was also setting people against each other. Ratigan
had wanted that lower powered, lower priced Amiga super Fast.
(27:20):
This would become the Amiga five hundred, and he had
to figure out who was going to actually develop this.
Now you had all of Amiga under the umbrella of Commodore,
so you still had some engineers and developers and programmers
who had been part of Amiga, the ones who hadn't
been laid off and the ones who had chosen to
move across the country. But on the other side you
(27:42):
had engineers who had been at Commodore for a while.
And Radigan decided that the Commodore engineers would be the
team to work on the Amiga five hundred. He felt
that they would have the motivation to do it quickly.
They had a challenge ahead of them. They were being
told this other team developed this architecture. I need you
guys to make a less powerful version of this as
(28:04):
quickly as possible. So they had something to prove, and
so they had to work super hard to get the
computer on the market earlier than if the original Amiga
team were to work on it. The thought being that
the original Amiga team would probably do a better job,
but they would take a lot longer to do it.
Jeff Porter became the director of New Product Development. He
(28:25):
had previously led the effort to design and build that
LCD portable Commodore computer and I talked about earlier, the
one that Marshall Smith had canceled. After the Tandy CEO
was so helpful. George Robbins and Bob Welland, who had
been working on a Commodore workstation that ran on Unix
before that project had been canceled by Radigan, would become
the lead engineers for the Amiga five hundred. George Robbins
(28:48):
decided to increase the amount of RAM on the Amiga
chip called Agnes, up to one megabyte. The goal was
to give the chip enough memory to support higher graphic resolution,
and his decision kind of ruffled feathers with the original
Amiga team who had designed this chip, but that reaction
ended up being a motivator for the Amiga five hundred
(29:09):
team at Commodore, not something that detracted from it. The
new chip was called fat AGNES, and it worked. It
boosted the Amiga's abilities to display graphics without breaking backwards
compatibility because it still was using the same architecture as
the previous chip, but it did slow things down a
little bit in the process. The machine itself ran a
little more slowly. However, the improvement in graphical output helped
(29:31):
balance that out. George Robbins also took a look at
the motherboard that the Amiga team had designed to try
and figure out ways that they could simplify things to
reduce the cost of fabrication and get that Amiga five
hundred down to the level that Ratigan wanted. One of
the things he cut was the original Amiga's ability to
connect directly to a television set. Robbins would replace that
(29:53):
capability on the motherboard. By including an adapter that could
do the same thing but would not be incorporate did
directly into the actual motherboard. That simplified the fabrication process
for the motherboard itself. He also took the power supply
out of the computer and he made it an external component.
He designed the Amiga five hundred to integrate the keyboard
(30:14):
directly with the computer case, so as part of the
computer case as a whole, and the computer case included
an expansion slot that would let users plug in devices
without having to open up the computer case. Each move
helped bring the Amiga's price down a little bit. Meanwhile,
Radigan had decided that the high end machine which would
become the Amiga two thousand, would not go to the
(30:36):
original Amiga team either. They're just weren't enough engineers left
to carry the projects, so he initially assigned the development
of the Amiga two thousand to a team of engineers
at Commodore's German subsidiary. That team took the Amiga one
thousand design and then they essentially added more stuff to it.
(30:58):
They added in an interface for expansion cards. They changed
the case to a more standard PC case, but then
Ratigan sees this design and he says, that's not really
what I wanted. It's not it's not powerful enough. It's
not a step far enough from the Amiga one thousand.
He felt the team had failed to deliver upon the
goal of building out a truly powerful computer for the
high end market, so he turned to Commodore designer David Haney,
(31:22):
and Haney looked at the designs of the original Amiga
chip set and motherboard design, and he began creating new hardware.
One thing he built was a chip called Buster and
Busters purpose was to handle the operations of the expansion bus.
And again, a bus is a component that facilitates communication
(31:44):
between different computer devices or even different elements within a
computer itself. Busters design worked on an architecture that was
called Zoro and uh It would allow for almost a
plug and play a coroach with expansion devices, which was
uncommon in that era. The Amiga two thousands sported five
(32:06):
expansion slots using this Zoro bus design that Haney had built.
It also had four IBM pc I s A slots.
I s A, by the way, stands for Industry Standard architecture.
That was a term IBM used for its sixteen bit
internal bus. For computers that were built on the eight
two eight six CPU architecture and beyond two three sixty
(32:28):
six those this gave the Amiga two thousand incredible expansion
abilities when paired with the right devices. Haney also put
the processor on a separate board from the motherboard. So
why would you do that? Why would you put the
CPU on a separate board. Well, the idea was that
that would allow you to swap out the CPU more easily,
so you could conceivably upgrade the same machine over time,
(32:51):
as long as the CPU was compatible with the rest
of the architecture of the computer. Haney also incorporated a
generator locking mechanism the Amiga that's also known as gen lock.
The gen lock would allow a user to output computer
images to display on top of a video feed without
affecting the image stability, so you could overlay computer graphics
(33:13):
on top of a video feed. This is the source
of stuff you see in broadcast systems all the time
where you might see a graphic appear on top of,
say a live news report, that's due to stuff like this,
like a gen lock. This feature would make the Amiga
two thousand the go to computer for video production and
broadcast once a very important product would debut. More on
(33:36):
that in a bit. For a case, Hainey was able
to pull a design from the canceled Commodore nine hundred.
That was that Unix workstation that got canceled. I had
mentioned that a little bit earlier when Radigan was canceling
all those projects. That was one of them. The Amiga
two thousand was certainly more powerful than the Amiga one thousand,
(33:56):
but some people like J Miner, felt that the computer
did not go far enough. It wasn't really transformative enough.
Minor believed that the technological advancements that were in the
industry had outpaced the two thousand, and that Commodore had
made a mistake by not going far enough with the design.
Like the Amigo one thousand, the five hundred and two
(34:19):
thousand both experienced delays in development. It takes a while
to build out a new computer design, even if you're
starting from an already established foundation like the Amigo one thousand.
The team's building the five hundred and two thousand were
not the same people who had designed the one thousand
to start with, so it took some time just to
get up to speed before serious design work could begin.
(34:41):
Investor Irving Gould and the Board of Directors wanted to
see new computers hitting the market right away, replacing the
Amigo one thousand, which was doing modest sales. And remember
the Amigo one thousand debut at the end of nineteen.
They wanted the new five hundred and two thousand models
to debut in nineteen eighty six, but it was taking
a while to get them ready to go, longer than
(35:04):
Gould would like. He was notoriously impatient. Irvin Gould pushed
the board to hire a management consulting firm to evaluate Commodore. Essentially,
from the way I've read it, it sounds like he
was looking for a reason to be able to fire Ratigan. Well,
there was a man who was part of this consulting
(35:24):
firm who came in named Mehdi Ali, who was then
a special advisor, and he prepared the report, and one
of the suggestions that Meddi Ali made in this report
was that the board should fire Ratigan as CEO right away.
Radigan knew what was up, He could see what was happening,
so he went to work the next day anyway, he
(35:46):
was then met by security and lawyers and was escorted
off the premises, but reportedly no one could actually tell
him why he was no longer employed. He had made
some really tough decisions as CEO. A lot of them
were not terribly popular because they involved tons of layoffs
some of really good people, and they some of those
(36:07):
decisions might have been harmful in the long run, but
he had returned Commodore to profitability. He had pushed for
the next generation of computers in the Amiga line, and
now he was history almost You see, there was the
matter of that five year contract he had signed. So
Ratigan sues Commodore for breach of contract, claiming nine million
(36:32):
dollars of unpaid wages. Commodore counter sued Ratigan for twenty
four million dollars. This case would go on stretching all
the way to which fittingly would have been the end
of that five year contract. The courts ultimately found in
favor of Ratigan, and they dismissed the countersuit against him.
(36:55):
In Ratigan's place, Gould would serve as the chief executive
for the time being. As for Amiga and two thousand
would both launch just a short while after Ratigan had
been let go. And I've got a lot more to
say about how those computers turned out, but we're going
to cover that in our next episode where we learn
about the ultimate fate of Amiga. If you guys have
(37:18):
any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's
a technology, a company, a person in tech, anything like that,
send me an email. The address you should use is
tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
can always drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter.
To handle with both of those is text stuff HSW.
Make sure you go on over to t public dot
(37:39):
com slash tech stuff to check out all of our merchandise.
We got some cool stuff in there, and don't forget
we have an Instagram account. You should be following it
and I'll tell to you again really soon for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how
(37:59):
stuffs that carm
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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