XOR patent ended CD32, and Commodore-Amiga
xcssa.org
xcssa.org
It's such a shame. Commodore made great computers.
The Amiga had sort of an identity problem. It was born a videogame console and NTSC timing was pervasive throughout the system and that made the design more complex as the machines evolved. They should have gotten rid of that as soon as they launched their second-generation machines.
1) Management "bet the farm" on CD32.
2) XOR patent infringement claims killed CD32.
3) The failure of the CD32 product was the last nail in the coffin.
Tragic. I loved my Amiga 500 dearly. It makes one wonder what might have happened if Commodore could have held on for a few more years and (perhaps under new management) ridden the wave of internet-driven hardware sales to new heights.
Or this oddity, the A2024 with a 10hz-15hz refresh rate: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=863
Worked a treat!
That's not really the case. It was designed with computer graphics in mind - far more akin to a workstation than a game system. It was always intended as a full fledged computer as indicated by a multi-tasking operating system and peripherals such as the sidecar for the A1000 and the bridgeboard for the A2000. Standard serial and Centronics ports are further evidence of Commodore's intent.
Using standard video timing and providing stereo sound created significant benefits for audio visual applications - and in true Commodore tradition - the video system allowed the Amiga's to be used with a television as the monitor and reduced thereby reduced the cost of a basic system.
Got a citation for that? I didn't think so.
I disagree with their description of the 1981 Diehr opinion as saying "the only new feature of this invention was the timing process controlled by the computer". The dissent said this, not the majority. The dissent was based on the facts of the case, not law. Diehr was not a departure from earlier precedent.
EDIT: Not only did the Court majority not say what bitlaw says in the Diehr opnion, they contradict it: "According to the respondents, the continuous measuring of the temperature inside the mold cavity, the feeding of this information to a digital computer which constantly recalculates the cure time, and the signaling by the computer to open the press, are all new in the art."
http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/bilski-and-software-pa...
From what's actually written in the Supreme Court opinions I've read, every software patent I've seen discussed on HN should be invalid. Benson and Flook were super clear. Diehr was long and hard to read, but when you boil it down, it didn't change anything; it merely clarified that software as part of an invention doesn't automatically make the whole invention nonstatutory. I haven't read Bilski, but it sounds like SCOTUS punted on clarifying things because they think it should be Congress's job.
Until Congress steps up and clarifies, I think the previous Supreme Court decisions should be law. But they aren't. I find that extremely annoying.
What personally killed the Amiga for me, was the graphics power. The Amiga 3000 "enhanced chipset", best graphic mode was 320x200 with 64 colors (extra half brigth). Meanwhile, PC VGA displays 800x600 and 1024x768 256 colors were starting to become popular on the PC side. The Amiga was clearly behind.
The Amiga was also capable of 640x400, but only with 16 colors. And the "HAM" mode, 4096 simultaneos colors on low res 320x200, suffered from "color fringing" and was mostly unusable.
What would have made me happy back then, was a 736 x 482 overscan mode with 4096 real simultaneous colors.
I wish I could restore all the game demos that I made back then with Amos Basic. lots of simple games, a basic doom clone, musical apps, etc. I would love to give a look at that code again.
I worked, at that time, for the largest Amiga dealer in the US, and we built a couple hundred multimedia display kiosks using CD32s and Paravision SX-1s. We had no trouble getting them (well, other then the usual Commodore supply issues of the time).
Oh, wow, found an old email about this:
http://www.howtomakeanimations.info/cd32sx1mm300-problems
freaky.
I have never been quite as excited over a machine as when I got my Amiga 500. I had owned a Commodore Plus/4 and a 128 since middle school and high school, and bought the 500 to start college. It was quite an amazing little machine for it's day.
Then again, I haven't ever been 17 again either, so that might explain it.
We would distribute burned CDs containing graphic, sound, and video/animation assets to the customers. This was '94, and if I remember correctly blank cds were something like $8-10 each (and the burner must have been close to $1000), and the burning process was so fragile that I'd burn discs at night just to try to prevent any possible issues due to vibration, or power fluctuations, or whatever other gremlins caused burn failures. I think we still had only like an 75%-ish success rate.
Fun time, though.
To be fair, the article does say:
>> But I didn't know this factoid.
If you Google define:factoid, you'll see the definitions are like "something resembling a fact; unverified (often invented) information that is given credibility because it appeared in print".
Looking at the suffix "-oid", it makes sense that the definition is akin to "similar to a fact."
However, I don't think that's what the author intended. "Factoid" has come to mean, "a little fact", it seems.
Definitely. "Factlet" or "Factette" would probably be more accurate, and more pleasing to say, but we can't have everything.
At the end of the day, had the Amiga been a viable business, $10M in patent fines would not have killed them off.
Planar.
Bitplaned graphics was definitely an impediment to efficient rasterization. But when you look at what demo sceners have done with 3D on the Amiga, it's hard to argue that was its main downfall.
What killed the Amiga was stagnation in both technology and marketing. It also never had much of a foothold as a non-gaming machine in the home.
The IBM-compatible PC was the focus of innovation from many different companies. It wasn't a one-vendor platform like the Amiga. That is the ultimate cause of its demise. If the fate of the PC had stayed tied to IBM, it would have suffered the same end. Apple had a similar problem with the Macintosh in the 1990s and it almost killed them. If Apple's stewardship ever wavers, that is sure to happen again. It will take a lot more before it can become an immortal (undead?) platform like the PC.
Thanks.
As a hardware platform, it was more closely tied to the individual chips but that was rapidly fading, with OS abstraction APIs for sound and graphics coming in around then.
As a software platform, while it lacked MMU-dependent features, in other ways it had major benefits. Small, fast, pretty tidy, modular, customisable. Quite frankly I'd still like something to replace the Amiga's Datatypes concept, 20 years later.
A sad loss to computing. To this day I'm baffled how Commodore managed to lose the not-PC slot to Apple in spite of having cheaper harder with more features and a vastly more capable operating system. I've said before here; if Commodore had done their job properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?
The ST line was truer to the Commodore of the VIC and 64 era in that it was simple (much simpler than the Amiga), powerful (somewhat less than the Amiga) and inexpensive.
At that time, nobody was predicting the collapse of the PC market around the IBM PCs (which were much more expensive than the home computers of the mid-to-late 80's and much clunkier).
Apple managed to make the leap to OS X, as Microsoft managed to move to the NT base before it. I don't see how Commodore was going to do it without being something fundamentally different. Their machines were nice but it seems to me they were always building machines for today, never thinking much about tomorrow. But tomorrow comes... it always does.
I'm posting this because I'm curious about reactions; if this is flamingly wrong I'd love to hear. I don't have direct experience, except with the Commodore 64, which looking back was already experiencing the "make a computer for today" problem in many ways.
You yourself bring up the Mac's leap to OS X. On a technical level that wasn't so much a transition as a hard reboot, only made possible by some truly heroic programming of compatibility systems software. OS X got off to a bumpy start but not enough to kill it. The Mac since went from PowerPC to x86 by another feat of compatibility wizardry in the form of Rosetta. But what would have been easier than looking at the state of the Macintosh in the late 90s and pronouncing it a dead-end, a lost cause?
Commodore's problem was first and foremost cultural. I've always found myself in the unusual position of loving the C64 and the Amiga but hating Commodore.
The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1984. Had VideoScape 3D in 1987.
It's hard to say that they were building computers for today, when they're machines were doing things the mainstream OSes (Mac and Windows) wouldn't do for a decade.
It would be like introducing the iPhone in 2000. And then doing nothing for 10 years.
I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so far ahead of the field when released. And yet virtually all of it squandered.
Maybe the PDP-1? Or the Tera MTA? Or the Transputer? Or the CDC 6600? Or VisiCalc? Or the 6502? Or Intel's first X25-M SSD? Or Gmail?
Preemptive multitasking by itself isn't very interesting. It's useful if you're running a real-time control task (in which case, on MS-DOS, you would hook an interrupt, and fuck the lack of OS) or if you have memory protection, which the Amiga didn't. That's why the mainstream OSes didn't have it for another decade: because it didn't matter. (And concurrency control is much simpler without it.)
The Amiga had lots of other awesome stuff in the late 1980s, stuff that (as others pointed out) still isn't mainstream. But preemptive multitasking without an MMU is mostly a waste of time.
The other issue was the operating system, which is really three pieces---Exec, DOS and Intuition. Exec is the kernel, written in 68000 assembly and appears as just another shared library to the system (neat design really). It's small (I was able to recreate over half of it in C in just a few hours) and would have been able to keep up as is until multiprocessor cores became popular, which would have required a somewhat major change (critical sections were handled by literally disabling task switching). It also has no notion of users (being a single user machine).
DOS, the file system. This itself was a port of a portion of Tripos (written in BCPL) which only took two weeks to do (or four; it was a really short period of time). It's a bit quirky (due to it being written in BCPL) but it worked and given the nature of device drivers in the Amiga (a combination of shared library and a potential thread) it could easily support other file systems rather transparently. This is probably the least problematic aspect of the operating system to update for modern machines.
And finally Intuition, the GUI. This was written in C, and unfortunately, was rather closely tied to the underlying hardware. Not only could you specify a new screen (different screen resolution and color depth) but access to the blitters (which were also used by the floppy disk drivers to decode the bit stream I kid you not) and even the raw video co-processor (a three-instruction CPU that could be used to reset the video registers at an almost arbitrary portion of the video scanning beam). Some of the upper layers of Intuition were fairly video independent but not enough of it to survive a major redesign of the video subsystem.
You're pretty much right in that it was a "nice computer" (I found it really fun to program) but it didn't evolve all that much while on the market. Exec would need some work to work on today's multicore hardware and Intuition would have to be reworked from the ground up.
The amiga was a technology marvel when it came out - it could do background 14-bit stereo sample playing in 1985 (PC got there around '92), and true useful multitasking with 128K (PC got there around '94, but not with so little memory).
Graphics wise, it was on par with the arcade machines of the era - the PC got there in '93 or so.
Technically, it was superior. And then the business part was miserably run, and the tech side stagnated (that is, was also miserably run).
Considering the the cost of the 80287 math coprocessors required by the modeler (ACAD) and the costs of VGA adapters in 1987, the cost of doing 3D graphics on a PC was substantially more than the Amiga.
The Amiga was great for 3D production graphics. Software such as Lightwave and Imagine 3D punched way above its weight (and cost) for a while.
The Amiga was effectively dead before 3D games became notable.