It was the best of times, it was the worst of times :-)
I really really liked the Amiga (and was a fairly regular contributor to the comp.sys.amiga newsgroup), I also interviewed for a job at Commodore HQ in Frankfurt (the actual headquarters of the tax shelter known as Commodore :-)). And one of the things that became painfully obvious was the Commodore was not set up to make Amiga successful, they didn't have the correct organizational structure nor the core corporate values that would make them successful.
At the time I was working at Sun, had joined as a reasonably early engineer, and watched how Sun had grown from a scrappy "start up with great pretensions" to something DEC and IBM started actually losing market share too. I saw the market for Amiga as coming up as a low priced workstation, not the bargain basement home PC. But it could be both, and for a while that path was making progress with the A500 and the A2000.
It was hard to do though, the workstation market really needed a "high resolution" flicker free display, the home market needed to look good on TVs. The architecture didn't have the display bifurcation line that was built into the PC or other workstations.
With out executive air cover to make the investments they needed to make in engineering, Commodore reverted to its roots of making things as cheaply as possible to add margin that way. "High end" systems that would have small markets were shelved, and even the commercial systems they were selling into the video post production market were starting to get a reputation for being cheaply made.
It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the future slip away.
> It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the future slip away.
I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss. Among retrocomputing enthusiasts, Amiga users are an extra odd bunch -- often making and selling commercial shrink wrapped software for years.
While it's not entirely unusual for people to put effort into a special game or whatnot for their favorite retrocomputer, and charge people for a special nostalgia filled limited run, Amiga users seem strangely tied to trying to make creating Amiga stuff a viable commercial venture [1][2][3] it's as quaint as it is bizarre these days.
The Amiga broke my heart. In some sense I will never get over it. At ages 12 to 18 I was a programmer on the Amiga, a music composer, digital image artist, I scoured BBS's, and so much more. I got together with groups of other people (from all over, and of all ages) doing the same things.
When it could no longer be denied that Commodore and the Amiga were dead, cold and buried, and it seemed the only alternative was a clunky, artless PC, I got so down on the whole thing that I left the field of computers entirely. I even went to university in a completely unrelated field.
I finally broke after many years, went back and got a computer science degree and has now been a programmer and systems architect for many years. But I have never forgotten my first love.
I feel the exact same way (and even did the same things on the Amiga), except the breakage is taking place as I write this. For the last 30 years I lived on borrowed time provided by Sun and SGI.
You wouldn't say that about an aftermarket for, say, vintage car parts, would you?
To be specific, if you buy yourself an original VW bus, you won't be on your own when you try to service it.
Amiga just might be the VW bus of retro computers (probably Commodore deserves this title better, but the analogy works the same way). It'll be alive for as long as the feelings associated with it are understood.
I think what really sticks out to me, more than other retrocomputer scenes, is that not only is software that should have long been turned over for free or gone open source being sold, but the business model for the software is all very 1990s. "Buy here, $199.99 and download" seems anachronistic to where most other scenes have gotten to.
I mean, these companies must move what, tens of licenses per year? I would bet that many of them would do better just to give the software away for free (as in beer) and put a patreon link on the home page.
I honestly really admire the Amiga scene's incredible tenacity, but can't also help but find it just a hair amusing.
Less like a VW bus, and more like a 1920's Lincoln (the 1980's is relatively ancient when it comes to personal computing), and not only do you have the community of vintage enthusiasts to help you restore it and get it in running condition, there's some company selling aftermarket entertainment systems, and they offer kits for the modern Accord and Camry, as well as 1920 Lincolns...
Here, though, I'd say it was not exactly a niche product: Fuji Instax has been on an upwards curve the whole time Polaroid was messing around with its product line.
Fuji Instax is still pretty niche and survived largely because of Fujifilm's extremely diverse portfolio. Polaroid didn't so much "mess around with its product line" as "go bankrupt twice in a decade". The revival of Polaroid instant film was difficult, painful and wouldn't have happened at all if it weren't for the fanatical devotion of a number of key players outside of Polaroid Corporation.
Polaroid arguably discontinued their instant film business because they bet on Zink[1]
Zink is a Polaroid technology that powers many instant cameras. I own a Polaroid-branded one (Polaroid SNAP), and it's awesome: it never ceases to amaze people. And when I tell them that yes, they can keep it, and it's also a sticker, their eyes light up!
I've made friends with this new digital iteration of the technology. But when the Impossible Project was started, that tech was still very far from being mature; and many people still prefer the look and feel of the instant film. They are different products.
Still, it wouldn't be fair to say that Polaroid didn't try to stay relevant in instant photography. Ultimately, Zink is a success - although it's a separate company now.
I can commiserate, I had the same feels of loss when Acorn closed down.
When I was a kid they held the same affection for me as some kind "nerd football" team that you'd support out of all reason. I used to think "if they'd have just done this then they would have won!". With hindsight, as an adult, that seems so sweetly, childishly naive; I was a funny kid. :D
It convinced me though that you shouldn't tie your dreams to someone else's commercial organisation unless you're a major shareholder.
The happy ending for me was that Gnu/Linux and Free software nicely filled the void in my heart. No one can take it from you and it's never "finished". Cheers Mr Stallman.
(That's so naive of me; I must be a funny adult too. :D )
"The happy ending for me was that Gnu/Linux and Free software nicely filled the void in my heart."
How ironic, considering that exact same thing is the bane of my existence: for someone like me who skipped the primitive, clunky, derided PC and jumped straight onto Suns and SGI's, Linux and GNU are a terrible, utterly depressing regression compared to HP-UX, Solaris and IRIX. I lost all will to work on computers because of GNU and Linux. It's that terrible when I compare it to AmigaOS, HP-UX, Solaris or IRIX.
Much has improved and illumos keeps getting better and faster: since 2005, no code which causes performance regressions was allowed into the Solaris codebase. Each speedup committed set the base higher. Nobody would be allowed to commit code which slowed the performance thereafter. Any case where GNU/Linux was faster was treated as priority 1 bug. Yes, a bug.
Implementing tools within other tools for convenience is stupid, as it kills modularity, which is the UNIX®️ philosophy: I don't need that kind of "convenience" since I know UNIX®️ and therefore which pipes to use to which commands to get the same effect. grep -r replaces find + xargs + grep and therefore goes against "do one thing and do it well" as well as against "design tools to interface with other tools". For example tar is a tape archiver, therefore it has no business implementing compression - that's what dedicated compressors like bzip2 or xz or 7z are for - they know best how to (de)compress and how to handle their own formats. Therefore, the GNU approach of convenience is stupid beyond retarded.
As a former Amiga owner, I don't think it is unique to Amiga but rather it was an end of an era and nothing burned as bright as the Amiga at the end of that era. I called it the tinkerer era where home computers where not just a box but rather something to be tinkered with.
Resources where limited and hacks where abundant to make them perform miracles (in their day). Tinkering gave way to homogenization and the whole landscape got sterile. I felt the same loss as I did with Amiga when Symbolics started to fade from the landscape, then there was DEC, SGI, Atari, etc. etc. The era almost took Apple and NeXT with them. Some burnt out longer than others but they all started to die then and there. It really was an epoch shift in computing and I think that is what we all truly miss. We pin it on our favorite tech of the time, but in the end, it was just a cooler time to be in computing.
> I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss.
Man you are so right. I reluctantly moved to the PC hoping till the very end that Commodore/Amiga would somehow survive the late 90s. That was a really bitter era when one had invested so much time and joy in the machine and its OS.
Well it has one advantage, it's a privacy focused computer disconnected from the wild internet and probably less likely to be back doored. I'd be happier using it a a crypto wallet or for personal finance spreadsheets than a modern PC.
To be fair to the Amiga enthusiasts, the Acorn / RISC OS group has a similar kind of -- well, I'll call it momentum.
Commercial software is still available (though not as much of it as was available in the past), and sometimes the prices are downright silly given the size of the market and the lack of maintenance on said software.
"I think that for many Amiga users, they've never gotten over their feelings of loss."
That is correct and my pain born of that loss has increased over the years. First Sun and then SGI provided some alleviation but when they both lost the pain came back in full force, since both ended up opening an old wound which had never fully healed.
It's not about the nostalgia. The nostalgia is present in lots of retrocomputing fandoms that aren't anywhere near as vulnerable to scams as the Amigans. RISC OS fans are nostalgic. NES fans are nostalgic. People insisting on re-building a Vax in their basement are nostalgic.
Nostalgia drives things like some guy puts together an order for Amiga logo keycaps, and sells them for barely more than cost price and maybe a couple of people feel the quality isn't as good as they expected. That's not a scam.
But the Amiga will also have a company that says it's going to sponsor a new sports arena for so much money it'll be named the Amiga arena - when there isn't any money. That's not an imaginary example by the way, it happened: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/amiga-fails-to-del...
Ten years ago one of the Amiga companies told potential customers it would ship them a new multi-core PowerPC Amiga, within the year, with a new OS version that supported using multiple cores. A huge breakthrough. It didn't ship that year, and when it did ship it came with a "preview" that lacked support for the multi-core processor, and you will not be surprised to learn that almost a decade later those customers are still waiting for their "final" version with working multi-core.
But in many ways being heavily down-voted shows exactly why this works. Amigans are sure that if they are insistent enough that it's not a scam then it won't be. They just need to have faith, click that downvote, tell people they're wrong, if I scream loud enough that I can fly surely gravity will just have to believe me...
I'm not so sure. Compare the enthusiasm of the Amiga community about new "Amiga" hardware compared to how well the new VCS has been received in the Atari community, for example.
Sun actually approached Commodore about using Amiga technology for 680x0 workstations, while they were focusing on SPARC, but Mehdi Ali told them to go away.
He also was nasty toward (IIRC) Epson during final negotiations for a large deal for the Japanese market. Later, the deal was revived and he insulted them a second time.
The Amiga Unix licensing failure was an impressively well aimed shot to the foot.
Medhi Ali was responsible for gutting Commodore engineering and replacing with mostly cheaper PC people. Which led to the cost-cutting A600 that actually turned out more expensive to produce than the 500 it was supposed to replace. Dave Haynie had a lot to say about that era, all of it free of compliments.
Ali and Gould were drawing more than the CEO of IBM in Commodore's declining years.
From what I garnered from a few documentaries here and there long ago, Mehdi Ali was responsible for driving other companies into the ground too, and escaping those ships richer than he was when he got on them.
How does this happen and why is it allowed to?
Are these kinds of CEOs the designated cleanup people who get sent in after a company has been decided to get killed off and they're the [insert butcher analogue for stripping the leftover parts of a corpse]?
> I was working at Sun, had joined as a reasonably early engineer, and watched how Sun had grown from a scrappy "start up with great pretensions" to something DEC and IBM started actually losing market share too.
If one wanted to read observations about specific things Sun did effectively in this process, from either an organizational, strategic, or execution perspective, where would one look?
Just from chats I've had with people who were there, they claim it was just being better engineers and having more focus, and less internal rot. IBM is full of people who are good at keeping a job at IBM, ditto any company that lasts long enough. If you take any organization, and it lasts long enough, eventually it will be full of people who's only skill is keeping a job at that organization.
Apple was yet another company that was almost destroyed by its management, post-Jobs. If it wasn't for Steve's return, we came scarily close to becoming a soul-sappingly gray, homogenous Microsoft/PC-only world. Thanks to the Mac's success we got iOS, then because of that, Android.
I wonder if there's any chance of a new major architecture becoming successful today.
The history of disruptive innovations shows that dominant new software platforms tend to emerge around new hardware form factors. So there's probably no room in the market for a new OS for smartphones or laptops. But once AR goggles or quantum computers or something become technically feasible then someone will create a new OS that disrupts the market for Windows / Unix / Android / iOS.
Probably not as long as those two have some of the most profitable companies in the world behind them. We might get one of them pushing an replacement (e.g. Fuchsia), but competing against either of them when they've got the resources at their disposal they do currently seems destined for failure.
At best, we might see an open source contender gain some traction, but there's not really the same lineage to draw on there either. Linux at least had a few decades of Unix software and UI (including text consoles) going for it. An open source competitor to iOS or Android will either be copying what they do, or making it up as it goes along, which is unlikely to yield major advantages they haven't already taken advantage of, IMO.
> but competing against either of them when they've got the resources at their disposal they do currently seems destined for failure.
The same was said for anyone versus IBM, then anyone versus Microsoft for almost 2 decades after that.
Each time a new challenge was able to enter and stay in the fray, it was by capitalizing on a paradigm shift; mainframes -> home computers -> smartphones..
I think the next frontier may be ubiquitous, always-on AR/VR. If a new company makes that happen before Apple or Google do, they might have a chance.
That's a good point about AR. Then again, Google and Apple have been pretty active in pursuing these areas, going as far as to now include dedicated hardware to help with much of the AI/ML stuff required to do that well, and they both have enough money to buy almost any company that comes out with a great showing in that area.
If we got some dark horse contender that wasn't taken as serious for long enough to let it gain an advantage and/or was established or large enough that there wouldn't be a lot of pressure to sell, maybe. Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft are the current contenders for that in my mind based on that criteria (with Microsoft actually aggressively pursuing it). Any other company that makes a good showing is likely going to be someone else's next meal.
In the era of the A3000 and A3000T, so 1990 or 91, there was an official Commodore port of Unix that had got really good reviews as one of the best, most stable small system SVR4 ports.
Sun approached Commodore offering money to license the A3000UX as a low end 680x0 Sun workstation. It could have done wonders for Amiga's serious market and visibility outside games.
Medhi Ali turned them down. Twice, if memory serves.
I really really liked the Amiga (and was a fairly regular contributor to the comp.sys.amiga newsgroup), I also interviewed for a job at Commodore HQ in Frankfurt (the actual headquarters of the tax shelter known as Commodore :-)). And one of the things that became painfully obvious was the Commodore was not set up to make Amiga successful, they didn't have the correct organizational structure nor the core corporate values that would make them successful.
At the time I was working at Sun, had joined as a reasonably early engineer, and watched how Sun had grown from a scrappy "start up with great pretensions" to something DEC and IBM started actually losing market share too. I saw the market for Amiga as coming up as a low priced workstation, not the bargain basement home PC. But it could be both, and for a while that path was making progress with the A500 and the A2000.
It was hard to do though, the workstation market really needed a "high resolution" flicker free display, the home market needed to look good on TVs. The architecture didn't have the display bifurcation line that was built into the PC or other workstations.
With out executive air cover to make the investments they needed to make in engineering, Commodore reverted to its roots of making things as cheaply as possible to add margin that way. "High end" systems that would have small markets were shelved, and even the commercial systems they were selling into the video post production market were starting to get a reputation for being cheaply made.
It took me a long time to get past my feelings of loss when we saw the future slip away.