Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did [video]
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I feel like there was a roughly three year period where Amiga really was better than all the competition. AmigaOS was really impressive, the hardware was cheaper and more capable than Apples, and categorically better than whatever Microsoft was doing. It feels like the management at Commodore didn't really realize the head start that they had; it appears that instead of continuing to grow the OS, they just were happy enough enough keep things business-as-usual and eventually Apple and Microsoft caught up.
That all makes enough sense, but I feel like there exists an alternate universe where Commodore was competently managed, and in 2024 we are all running Commodore machines instead of Apple.
I remember how primitive the PC looked compared to the Amiga. It was not until Windows 95 that I felt that the PC had caught up with Amiga. It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home. Having 3 viable platforms would have "forced" software developers to think cross platform, like they often do today.
The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.
I also am still much more bought into the power of marketing and generally focusing on getting things into student's hands as the power move that Microsoft pulled off. Probably helped a ton by a lot of failed vendors along the way. It isn't that DOS and Windows were pure successes. Rather, they managed to outsource a ton of their failures onto other companies.
I broadly agree with everything you said though.
UNIX did, I ran it on a 386-25 from 1987.
That's a huge part of Microsoft's success. They looked the other way regarding "piracy" to gain market share. At least in my country nobody paid for Windows at home. If students and home users had been forced to pay, the adoption of new Windows versions would fall drastically.
The entire chipset state could have been bankswitched in a multi-tasking fashion and each process could have gotten its own "virtual Amiga" to play in. So much can be done when you have full vertical integration, but Commodore never leaned into it.
Every perceived weakness of the Amiga is from the perspective of the design of the winning system, i.e. generic modular PC design where the hardware and the OS are at best uneasy friends.
The filfre.net series of articles on the history of Commodore and Amiga is truly great work, and should give you a much clearer picture than pretty much anything else.
I have a Quadra 700 (same era as the Amiga 3000, which I also have) that can run circles around the 3000 with far less power or needed upgrades. For example by adding a decent video card the Q700 can output to dual monitors, each running their own resolutions and color depths - while multi-tasking. I can install triple-A CD-based software titles (like Photoshop or Illustrator or Pagemaker or MS Word) and on and on. The tools on Amiga pale in comparison even while the hardware was cool. In the 80s the Amiga was magical. By 1992 the way it seemingly just stood still was tragic.
As previously stated, high-quality print had become a "killer app" and Amiga simply didn't get the same support. And a lot of this had to do with their native video modes.
I can throw video cards and processor cards at the Amiga and make it a much more technically impressive machine. But if I want to run A+ professional software on it I basically need to run a Mac emulator.
As the video points out, the gaming market by '92 was moving on in the US. For 2D the SNES and Genesis took over. For 3D the PC arms race had begun, and there was no looking back.
The a2024 monitor did not require any changes to the Amiga that drove it, except that software needed to be aware that it existed which naturally almost none did.
It basically just used the bitplane model as a tiling frame buffer and rather than displaying four or five bits of color depth, dropped the color depth by half and interpreted different colors as shades of gray using some monitor translation profile type of thing.
Again software would have to know how to play ball with this to work, but the effect was that you got a rock solid 60 hertz screen that displayed, initially, 8 or 16 shade greyscale at 1024 x 800 resolution.
There was a limitation in that the individual quadrants of the screen could only be redrawn at 10 or 15hz even though the scan rate of the tube was non-interlaced 60hz. Subjectively, having seen this thing in person I didn't get the sense that it made much noticeable difference for the kinds of applications that would use it, which would be principally dtp or coding. The computed vector refresh rate of the entire display field was in general nowhere near quick enough for the raster quadrant paging to be noticeable, except in vertical scrolling.
Sadly this was obviously was a desperate if rather clever hack solution to the eye-strain drawbacks of the Amigas interlaced display at high resolutions, so no software support however appeared that would have driven further work in this direction. However had that happen, and the technique applied to this monitor was updated to match the capabilities of the AGA chipset, the resolution would have been potentially as high as 2360 by 1024 at 75hz, (edit: should be 60hz. 75hz possible "only" at 1600x1200) which comfortably exceeds HD (though only in greyscale) but for 1992 would have been safely well out in front of almost anything else at any price range, let alone a few thousand dollars.
Given the awkward aspect ratio, a more sensible use of that resolution would have been splitting it vertically into a dual monitor setup, although one would need two identical monitors to make that work. and the Amiga's version of multiple virtual desktops, pull-down screens, would have been impossible to make work effectively, and one wd have to do multitasking entirely on the workbench display in full-screen application windows like the Mac.
But at least it would have been preemptive multitasking, which clearly was entirely worth all of the extra associated hazards of multitasking without an mmu-aware kernel. /s
[0] https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863
By the early '90s, new DOS PCs had VGA and Sound Blaster cards as standard equipment, and were usually also including Windows 3.x. That put the typical PC clone on par with Amiga for most home/office use cases, especially including gaming.
> It would probably be hard to compete with the PC in the office, but I feel it could have competed with Apple to provide an affordable alternative for the home.
Apple didn't have much of a foothold in the home at this point -- their bread-and-butter market was schools, and they were just beginning to get a foothold in the design and DTP market -- and Apple itself was in deep trouble for similar reasons to Commodore.
The fact that IBM PCs and compatibles had become the de facto standard for business computing is one of the exact reasons why Apple, Atari, and Commodore started losing market share in the early '90s.
If you could buy a single machine that's good for both business and gaming --- one that runs Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Wolfenstein 3D, and King's Quest V -- perfectly, why would you pay even more for a proprietary platform that only excelled at one set of use cases at the expense of the other?
This was the era of convergence between home and office computing, and the fact that IBM-compatibles dominated the office market, the capabilities of PCs had reached near-parity with the Amiga, and the PC was an open architecture with a large ecosystem of OEMs all competing with each other and driving prices down, spelled doom for any non-x86 computing platform by the mid-'90s.
By the mid 90s Microsoft were persuading a lot of people WinNT would displace Apple in publishing, but that never quite worked out how they intended either. (This is one of the reasons Xara was developed on the PC and not the Mac, which with hindsight was a big mistake).
Once the Quadra’s came out it was all over.
The only pro non Apple DTP people I encountered in that era were Germans with DA's products on Ataris (famously kicked off by an ill considered bet with a Mac owner), and various more workstation or custom hardware type things such as using the Quantel Paintbox for print work, and the odd unix people doing more tech publishing work.
The other thing was Apple became so sticky in part because so many people leveraged Quark Xtensions to a possibly misguided degree, and these proved very non portable. Whole catalogues and directories were being laid out that way.
But, yeah, for those couple of years the combination of the Mac II, Laserwriter II, and Ready Set Go / Pagemaker / Quark was king. The Amiga never really had a chance to gain a foothold.
The root of Commodore' demise goes back to the 1960's when Jack Tramiel let Irving Gould invest to keep Commodore from going bankrupt after Jack made some bad business deals. Without that mistake, Irving Gould wouldn't have caused Jack to leave by preventing Jack's sons from entering management, and wouldn't have pushed out Rattigan or cut R&D which prevented the Amiga chipset from keeping ahead of the industry.
But then they only made the smallest incremental improvements to the hardware until they launched the AGA chipset with the A1200 and A4000 which was too little too late. Had the amiga improved at the same rate as consoles or dos PC's they might have had a chance.
The OS (mostly workbench) also did not see any big improvements over its lifetime.
The 1st gen products (500/1000) never caught on in the world's largest market. They were always struggling.
The ASIC-based architecture did not help
Have an ARM in an ST running a pre emptive multitasking OS in 1990 . . . now that would have been an interesting machine.
As a collector, I vastly prefer the ST lineup over the Amiga for this reason. The hardware was more "bog standard" and easier to understand than the custom chipset on the Amiga, even if the Amiga seemed cooler on paper back in the day.
They never believed in themselves.
The IBM PC was launched in 1981 with 4.77MHz and 7 years later you could buy 40MHz PCs with wider buses.
Anyway, in the early 90s my father wisely chose PC over Amiga to replace our aging ZX Spectrum. The reason - PC was open and easier to upgrade. Maybe that's what actually killed Amiga and Atari ST.
Commodore didn't give the hardware development team the resources and go-aheads that they needed in order to keep the Amiga competitive, mainly as a gaming machine and incidentally as an extremely popular demo platform. And it wouldn't have had to be "insane" upgrades to at least buy Commodore more time in the race to figure out the platform's future shape:
* A few more (and ideally also a bit wider) sprites.
* 8 channels of sound, with actual panning. The low sample rates were "OKish".
* Chunky mode, or at least hardware chunky-to-planar like the CD32 has.
* Bumping e.g. the 14 MHz EC020 in the A1200 to the 25 or 33 MHz variant.
* More chipmem and an equal amount of real on-board fastmem.
56kHz (ECS) != low.
Other than this, most was taken care of in the chipsets that management cancelled, such as Ranger (it was even finished!), or AA/AAA.
Fair. PS3M is how I used it.
>and you forfeit so many CPU cycles per raster line.
Only if you use more than 2 colors and have no fast ram at all.
They spent a ton of R&D getting ahead on things that would be commoditized in a few years. Later, their sound card had to be better than the best of a half-dozen PC variants, and so did the video card, CPU, monitor, keyboard, disk drive, etc, etc.
Sure, they could have bought commodity versions of some of those (and probably did), but then they’d have to be the best at choosing commodity components, and there were 100’s of strong competitors doing just that for PCs.
Now that moore’s law is slowing down, and everything has long-moved into system on chips, vertical integration seems to make sense again (look at Apple).
Android was trying to create an ecosystem of interchangeable hardware vendors (like Microsoft did with DOS, and, later, Windows), but it basically failed because driver compatibility is so poor in that space, and key components, like cell modems are locked behind anticompetitive OEM licensing agreements.
Android succeeded at other things, but it’s definitely not the case that you can assemble components into something with better specs than a flagship android for half the price, even if you had access to a pick + place / IC soldering machine. It was/is that way for desktop PCs.
What they really didn't understand is that software sells hardware: The OS was so far ahead, but in terms of basic productivity software? Even the Mac was ahead.
And [IMO] markets can maintain a leader and one strong competitor. But just one. So it became PC/Mac throughout the 90's on the desktop.
The only reasons Commodore was successful is that their hardware engineering was great and their products were inexpensive. Apple had weak hardware and high prices, Atari had great hardware and high prices.
Jack Tramiel never used a computer until he was given an iPad. He never understood computers. He would have been just as successful selling bicycles.
When it was released in 1985, the Amiga was at least 5 years ahead of its time when it came to the graphics and sound technology. I don't care about angering Apple bots, but the capabilities of the Mac paled in comparison.
The mismanagement at Commodore that led to the fall of the company is well documented.
For me personally, as a tech professional, the lesson of the episode is clear: superior technology alone is not a guarantee of business success.
The technology companies are high performing in both technology and business. The most clear example of what I mean is NVIDIA that was launched when Commodore was still alive.
I was devastated at the time, but they were 100% correct in hindsight.
It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.
That said, I was a kid, so I don't really remember the numbers well.
We were definitely not rich.
I believe the out of the store price was something like $2,300. With a model below that available for under $2,000, I think with less ram or only one floppy or something. But anyway this was for a fairly atypical take on the PC and a regular white box of the same era could have been had for perhaps half of that with the same or better specs.
In 1988, I had saved up for an Amiga, but my father offered to match what I had saved for a hard drive if I bought a PC instead.
The PC was 15x as expensive as the C128 and still wasn’t any good for gaming. While C128 had the entire C64 games library available!
It also had the CP/M software library and could run productivity software in 80 columns. Yes CP/M software wasn’t as good as DOS software, yes your spreadsheets didn’t calculate as quickly, but for a couple of years the C128 was the best option, until the Amiga came along.
The Amiga was certainly the best option in 1988. Arguably it was the best until about 1995.
BASIC was actually slower on the original PC than on the 6502 and the Z80.
My first was a 386/20, which had a problem and Circuit City's guarantee saw us trade it out for a "better" computer for free... That turned out to be a 386/16. I didn't know enough about them at the time to spot the problem.
It wasn't long before I had a 486, though, so the problem wasn't long-lived. I've never forgiven them for the deception, but they went out of business, so I guess I won? (I see they're back now somehow. Wow, what a joke.)
Things definitely changed with 386s and Windows.
I remember how excited I was on my Atari 8-bit awaiting the production of Amiga Lorraine. By the time it came out I think I was less excited, and happy enough with my monochrome Atari ST. The Amiga would certainly have been more fun, but I was glad to have a machine that could run a (Megamax) C compiler. It helped that I got some beta software and dev docs through a connection. The Lorraine was supposed to have it all, graphics+sound+MIDI but the last part went to the ST instead.
It sure was weird when Commodore and Atari made PC-compatibles--the end of an era. In the late 80s I'd already moved past the Atari, Amiga, and even DOS/Windows, being all excited running all versions of OS/2 (until that failed too), but hey we got OS/2 3.0 (aka NT).
One day I'll rip and upload a video I made in the late 80s of when I was typing up a chemistry lab report. My Amiga was producing so many guru meditation errors I had my VCR record my typing (in real-time) so I had proof that I did the report. I handed in a draft of the report and a VHS tape.
Before 1.2, AmigaOS was very unstable.
The biggest problem was that Amiga did not have an MMU until very late, and the OS has been designed for unprotected shared memory space. It was crashy, with fragmenting leaky memory, and it could not support fork(). Later AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS struggled to add full process isolation.
In retrospect, Microsoft has been prescient in adding virtual memory to 9x, and incredibly successful in switching to the NT kernel. AmigaOS would have needed the same to survive, instead of just sitting on their multitasking-a-decade-before-Windows laurels.
Did you mean protected memory? Didn't OS/2 have both earlier?
It's astonishing to think that the Amiga hardware was done in 1984 and the A1000 came out in 1985 - the same year the NES released in the US! It took Nintendo until 1991 to come up with something roughly comparable power-wise.
From what I understand in the US the Amiga slowly petered out without never truly taking off. In Europe the A1000 never was a thing, but we had four years of the press talking about this mythical monster of a machine and its custom chipset. Then in 1989/90 all of a sudden everyone bought A500s to play Kick Off and Speedball II. That 89/92 period was glorious.
At least in southern Europe Wolfenstein wasn't regarded as a killer app at all, it barely made an impact. Doom and Wing Commander most definitely were, though.
The Amiga was less popular in the US and used more for graphics, sound and video for TV and movies on the 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000, and with the Video Toaster, but you wouldn't see one as often when you visited people at home.
I would agree with the other poster that, as far as being a living product, the Amiga was already dead, but as a usable platform, there was still a very helpful, very large community.
I regret it because passing from GEM to DOS really felt a step backward
If the IBM PC had custom chips, it would not have been easy, or even possible, to clone and would have remained an IBM-only product. If that had been the case, I suspect CP/M and GEM would have won out and Microsoft would be much smaller and still producing language compilers today. The only question is, which version of CP/M would have won out? I think Motorola's 68K series would have won over Intel's x86 series.
That said, would the Pentium have happened without the PC industry - everything up to the 486 would likely have continued to develop as it did, even without the PC as they were strong embedded chips too.
If you cared about games, the system you bought would be completely different than if you cared about business.
In the 8-bit era, if you wanted business you got a CP/M system with 80x24 text. If you wanted games, you got an Atari 800 or Commodore 64 with colors, hardware scrolling and sprites.
In the 16-bit era, there was the IBM PC for business, the Mac for people who wanted ease of use, the Amiga for games, 4096 color graphics and stereo sound, and the Atari ST (512 colors, mono sound) if you couldn't afford an Amiga. That said, they could all do games but obviously some were better than others, and they could all do business, but the perception was that game systems weren't good at business so business apps weren't made available.
In my family I get the impression we chose our home computers based on merit/value. That meant starting with the commodore 128 in the mid 80s and led to my brother buying an Amiga 1000 [with his hard earned teenage burger king min wage $] in 1987.
In the 90s the advent of Windows 3.1 running on cheap PC clones left Commodore in the dust. The value for the money shifted to PC, even if it was inferior at first.
It was really sad that Amiga did not continue to innovate - the hardware was astonishing which can be seen by looking at the demo scene output and games front he time relative to what was possible on other platforms.
How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
Another aspect is Doom as an engine had longer legs. It got an official sequel not a year after its release as well as official "clones" in the form of Hexen. Hexen's own box advertised its relationship with Doom.
There were multiple types of RAM, and not like the PC's conventional/extended/enhanced or whatever there were multiple PHYSICAL types of RAM and upgrading one over the other might make it so upgrade cards don't work, or are slower, or have incompatibility issues.
When I upgraded the video card in my A2000 to a picasso-something I had to have three different drivers and switch between them because AmigaOS didn't have the concept of "a driver" like Mac and PC. One operating mode for old amiga programs hard-coded to OCS, one mode for compatibility with later amiga standards, and one mode for card-specific high-res/high-color modes for pro apps.
How can you tell which mode you have to use? Just do things until it crashes and then guess that the video mode was the culprit and switch modes until one works, of course!
I installed too much of one kind of ram so the address space of the ram expansion board overran into the space for other zorro-ii slots which switched my graphics card into a slower mode unless I disabled some ram. Was this documented, either by the board manufacturer or Commodore? No. Did I find out on a random BBS while complaining about how my fancy new graphics card was so slow? Yes.
The 68000 in my A2000 was slow the day it was introduced so a couple of months later I forked out for an accelerator card and because everything was so tightly integrated with the original CPU and the amiga solution to everything seemed to be "just hang it off the CPU bus and hard code it to the timing of the original CPU" things would be blazing fast until they hit some kind of rarely-used Paula/Denise/Agnus function that HAD to occur at 7 MHz and crashed at which time I had to turn the A2000 off, flip a toggle switch I drilled into the back of the case, reboot and re-do what I was doing at the original speed.
But yeah, the last time I turned on my A2000, which I still have, (except to play Lemmings or pull some files off its hard drive) was around the time that Wolfenstein 3D came out.
edit: also, until its dying day Commodore refused to even acknowledge that computer networking existed. It was easier to share files and resources between an Apple II and a PC over a network than it was to share files and resources between two Amigas.
The different types of RAM were part of the reason the Amiga was so powerful and was a feature, not a flaw. The fast RAM was only used by the CPU so it could run faster without the custom chips slowing the CPU. Because the CPU mostly used the fast RAM, the custom chips weren't slowed down by the CPU. This effectively made the data bus nearly twice as fast.
By the time custom graphic cards were coming for the Amiga, people were just trying to keep up with the IBM PC. Those video cards weren't designed to match the architecture of the system. That's not the Amiga's fault, but a fault of those aftermarket video cards. That is also why you had problems with RAM overlapping. I never used those cards and had no problems.
If you bought an IBM PC at 4.77 MHz and put a 286 accelerator in it, it would be hobbled too. If you wanted more speed, you should have gotten the Amiga 3000 in 1990 with a fully 32-bit 68030 @ 25 MHz with 32-bit RAM, like I did, and I never had to deal with crashes and it was faster than your accelerator.
I don't know how you can say Commodore refused to acknowledge that computer networking existed when they had released the A2065 Ethernet card for the A2000. Few people had LANs at home back then so it was mostly used in businesses.
It sounds to me like you made a number of bad purchase decisions and ended up with a mess of your own making. Sure there were good quality accelerators and video cards but apparently you didn't buy those ones or didn't want to wait for the Amiga 3000.
The Amiga, and none of the other 16-bit systems had an assembler built in either. They had interpreted BASICs just like the 8-bit systems, except on disk instead of in ROM.
a:\DEBUG < FOO.ASM
-a
(press enter until you reach the end of your source code at whatever address)
(enter a blank opcode to mark end of assembly range)
-g =100
voila, your (naturally, bug-free, right?) code assembles and runs.
It's living about as close to the land as you can get when it comes to an assembler, but it did the job.
from ms-dos 2.0 onwards debug was apparently re-entrant and could read its own binary from disk, "un"assemble it, assemble it again, and run another instance of itself from inside itself. When I first discovered this at 12 or so It felt I stumbled across a tiny doorway to some alternate dimension.