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Comment by asdefghyk | Hacker News Reader

I read the linked page and googled here name. I found a very detailed and intesting page ( to me ) at

Commodore International Historical Society Link below )

Gail Wellington: far more than just a herder of CATS and ... https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f...

Looks to be an excellent page, excellent information about Commodore computer history too.

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>The CDTV was a brilliant product for its time.

It was a 1985 computer selling $300 retail in 1991 packaged with $300 retail CD-ROM. Commodore got the crazy idea to try and sell this "the whole is less than the sum of its parts" at $1000 because black case and remote control! Nobody got fooled. Zero effort went into trying to cost optimize it, or even make it a desirable product. It was as ridiculous as Philips mega flop CD-I shipping similarly bad internals at same price point.

I think there was at least one iteration of the CDTV with somewhat lower-cost internals though.

Never seen a CDTV-CR in real. I have an original with keyboard, mouse, diskdrive and remote. I did like the device. Somehow the CD playback sounded better than my Sony CD player, but very clunky with the caddy and somewhat unintuitive interface.

I think that was after Gail Wellington was fired, and didnt exit prototype stage.

Unfortunately I concur with this assessment. Commodore was too busy phoning it in towards the end and effectively wasting the talents of Gail, as well as others in engineering, like Dave Haynie.

Obviously they lost focus if they laid Gail off.

I feel like they just wanted to coast on the previous success, and not having to put more capital in to bring the platform back up to the lead.

Sad. I was an Amiga user from roughly 1989 through 1994. Commodore barely updated the Amiga platform for most of its life. The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.

One of my biggest regrets in my "journey" with computers is walking away from Commodore when Amiga was released. I felt it was superior to anything else I had seen, and I knew the Commodore 64 inside-out, but I just felt like PCs were for grown ups, and I needed to grow up. I needed to skate to where the puck was going, and that wasn't Commodore. I guess I was right, but I still regret it because all the dudes I knew that stuck with Commodore, with the new Amiga platform - well, they all seemed to be having more fun. I learned macros for Lotus 1-2-3, which was more practical (I made $$$ as a teenager teaching stiffs about macros), but my Amiga friends were making cool drum beats and sample-based music and remixes on their Amigas - totally impractical, but also fun as shit back then. So yeah, they were all having fun with their Amigas, while I became Alex P. Keaton.

I stayed with Commodore, but with my 128, since I couldn't afford an Amiga. I envied my PC friends their VGA graphics, but yeah, the Commodores were a lot of fun. And I learned to program on it, which none of my friends were doing with their PCs. Once they went to PC, it seemed like they just used them to run software, and weren't interested in tinkering.

For me anyways: Amiga was learn what a computer can do, PC was learn how a computer works. PC was also my path to linux and linux changed my circumstances in life drastically. I get what the comment above you is saying, but I don't think the Amiga was more fun at the end of the day, PC ended up being much more challenging as a power user (therefore fun).

I still miss features from AmigaOS, to the point I've started adding some to my software. E.g. I've added "assigns" to my shell (very superficial integration), and it's so nice to be able to just create an alias for any path.

It's hard to explain why it feels better, because you could "just" create a bunch of symlinks in one location, but being able to "cd projects:" instead of ~/Desktop/Projects just feels nicer. I've also added "implicit cd" when entering paths, so I can also do just "projects:" like on the Amiga.

What made the Amiga special wasn't just the hardware, but a whole host of small extra niceties like that.

Another favorite is datatypes: A uniform plugin-based API to open files of any type, ensuring Amiga software written decades ago can open modern image formats.

And another one I love was the ability to open a new console window as a file path, so you could redirect shell output to a new window just as if it was a file.

(it also took way too long before I remembered who Alex P. Keaton was...)

I also enjoyed these features! I used to have "downloads:" for all my BBS downloads, "docs:" for my papers, etc. The Amiga OS had some other interesting features, like the ability to attach comments to files as metadata ("filenote" command.)

I use a script to create a dotfile with comments about a file, and an ls wrapper that outputs the comments if present for that reason as well.

My setup is very slowly converging on getting back some of the things I enjoyed about AmigaOS... The challenge of course is that simulating it without rewriting every piece of software and/or replacing the kernel will always be a leaky abstraction, but I can at least do it for the basic desktop and terminal experience...

> The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.

And AGA was a mixed bag. The extra bitplanes were really welcome, but not having chunky (1 byte per pixel) mode when all the 3d coming out really required it, and having to do an expensive operation to go from chunky to planar, did really hurt efficiency.

It was a great addition that extended the existing idea of bitplanes, which was a really good one in lots of ways though.

The problem with AGA is it arrived when 386 clones with SVGA were becoming incredibly affordable. If it had arrived in early 1990 instead of late 1992, the Amiga might've had more of a chance.

Basically, Commodore should've skipped ECS entirely. ECS was essentially useless to most consumers.

Actually, Commodore should have kept their chips up-to-date with process improvements. That means releasing a new chipset with four times the performance every three or four years. So the AGA should have arrived in 1988, and the blitter should have been four times faster as original, not just twice as fast.

The Amiga 2000 should have been delayed until 1998 to include the new AGA. Keeping the cheaper Amiga 500 on the OCS would have been fine.

I do like your alternate reality better than mine!

I disagree that it needed a chunky pixel mode most of all. What you're asking for is a machine that can draw a scene byte by byte with the CPU, then just display that. But if your hypothetical Amiga is doing most of its graphical manipulation with the CPU, then it has failed as a platform. The main idea of the Amiga is to handle media data using specialized chips that are much faster than the CPU for certain tasks.

What an upgraded Amiga really needed was two things. The first is a fast blitter that could also horizontally stretch or shrink a bitmap by some fractional amount. The second was some sort of “flipper” device (or new blitter feature) that could reflect a bitmap across a diagonal line (or rotate by 90 degrees).

Here's how you'd use these for a third-person shooter. Store the wall bitmaps flipped along the diagonal; each line of those bitmaps correspond to a vertical slice of the wall. For each vertical line in the scene, find the correct wall tile and row, and blit that line of pixels into a scratch space, squishing it and shifting it by the correct amount. Then use the flipper to copy that to the screen.

Yeah, as you mentioned before, the chipset just didn't keep up. I had an A3000 for a while (68030 25mhz) You could do faster blits with the CPU. I remember running a utility called "cpublit" that accelerated window scrolling. It was noticeably faster. This was 1991 or so. ECS was long in the tooth.

But still, 3 years later, the Playstation did the same thing and it was a fantastic success.

CDTV was simply a bit early (hence the price) and a bit confused about what it wanted to be. It cost like a development machine but it was a fundamentally end-user one; it provided continuity for Amiga developers but only a hard reset for Amiga users. It also debuted in harsh economic times.

Commodore wanted $1000 for a 1985 computer combined with single speed CDROM barely able to play 160×100@12Hz CDXL video and called it multimedia! It cost less to just buy external SCSI CDROM and SCSI controller + A500.

Playstation was a $350/$299 toy with a computing power delivering 3D experience only available in top end Arcades a year prior (Namco System 22). 60fps 3D gaming plus 320x240@30Hz ~MJPEG video playback. You couldnt buy anything with similar 3d power for a couple of years, closest would be $3000 top of the line 1997 PC (P200, dx5/glide).

Can't help being a little nitpicky, but the CDTV was an A500, not A1000. So it was 1987 tech inside a stereo box + CD player, not 1985.

But at the end of the day it really didn't matter. I remember seeing a CDTV at a store and it wasn't even in the computer section. It was in the stereo department sitting in the middle of the sales floor in just a stack of boxes. You had to know what it was all about when you saw it. The sales guys didn't know what to do with it, sadly.

>A500, not A1000

Not a single technical improvement, hardly any non cost reduction difference between them. Would be like arguing breadbin vs C64c are different computers so cant call C64c 1982 tech.

The A500 came with a Kickstart ROM. The A1K required a floppy disk. The 500 could also use a 1MB Agnus chip and one could easily update trapdoor RAM. It wasn't light-years advanced over the A1K but it was a good step in the right direction and vastly more affordable. Hence why it was the best-selling Amiga and the A1K "did OK" but didn't set any sales records. "Not a single technical improvement" is ridiculous.

Yes, the A500's main "innovation" was cost reduction.

Well they released the CD32 within a year or two of the PS1 launching. It was a patent lawsuit that took them down but an AGA 68020 console with a library of A500 ports was never going to make it either.

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