Talk:History of the Amiga

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Amiga, a collaborative effort to improve the depth of quality and coverage of the Amiga computing platform and related topics in Wikpedia. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

[edit] A more positive spin?

I just read over what I have self written and find that it comes of as a bit negative - IOW tends to focus on the negative side of the Amiga's history. This was not intentional but the Amiga's / Commodore's negative happenings are just better documented. Can someone dig out some positive Amiga news (say 'record profits from Amiga sales', Commodore outsold XYZ this x-mas - I believe AmigaCD outsold PC-CD at some point?, perhaps add a paragraph about NewTeck? ...) and mangle them into the article.--Anss123 11:07, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Hehe, "mangle". There is no "c" in NewTek if anyone is rushing to search for it. I dare say there's a lot we could add to this article to balance it out, I'm scatalogically messing with most of the Amiga articles as I can. There's a lot of info out there these days, seems every man and his amiga has set up a "History of the Amiga" page. --Monotonehell 22:09, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Amiga & Apple

These statments can add value to the article, but I think they need to be fleshed out a little:

Steve Jobs was shown the original prototype for the first Amiga and said there was "too much hardware". He was working on Macintosh at the time."

So does the Amiga have too much hardware? Or is SJ out on the left feild?

Jean-Louis Gassee, formerly of Apple Computer, was quoted as saying: "When the Amiga came out, everyone (at Apple) was scared as hell." (Amazing Computing, November 1996)

Why were they scared as hell? What about the amiga scared them?

--Anss123 19:37, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

These were cut from the main Amiga article's Trivia section and plonked here. So they may be a little terse. I didn't write them originally so I can't help other than speculate. --Monotonehell 11:04, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Well it was a particularly advanced piece of kit that did a lot of stuff that not many home computers could do. Leiam149 16:48, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
That is not quite the answer I was looking for. How was it advanced? What could it do that others could not? Think about it, and put a paragraph about it into the article. :D --Anss123 19:54, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
"too much hardware" is a cost/scale thing. hardware is more expensive to make than software so if you want to keep costs down it makes sense to do everything possible in software (which was one of the design principles of the early mac - use cheap general purpose hardware, no elaborate graphics subsystems. don't worry if it's slow, the technology will catch up). as a high end game machine (initially), the amiga HAD to have fast graphics and in 1984 the only way to do that was having dedicated hardware. you can see that once there were alot of pcs in the home by the late 80s pc graphiccs hardware caught up and passed amiga within a few years. commodore wasn't selling enough amigas to fund the continued development of the hardware. in retrospect, commodore should have repackaged the amiga as a EISA or VESA local bus card for pcs, they might still be around today. —Preceding unsigned comment added by A plague of rainbows (talk • contribs) 14:47, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A300/A600

That summary (deleted for lack of reference) is basically correct (if rather over-simplified), but I know that from personal knowledge (since I was there), so I don't think that will count as a reference. — jesup 01:06, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

The A600 article had a relevant reference: [1]
aren't the Amiga 600 and the Amiga 300 the very same thing?
They're not the same thing. (snip) When Sydnes took over, that very design was changed.
This Snydes character should have a paragraph in the text (what did he change, why did he take over), do you know anything about him?--Anss123 08:14, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Bill Sydnes was in charge of the "Peanut" (PCjr) design for IBM at Boca Raton. He was later brought in to Commodore by a previous VP of Engineering as his right-hand-man, and later took over Engineering. He lived in Colorado and commuted every week from there (4 days a week he was in PA). — jesup 03:11, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Somehow I'm not surprised that the father of the PCjr is responsible for the A600. Silly anecdote time: Did you know that the guy who pushed Lucas Arts to publish Mac ports of their SCUMM games, cut his teeth getting PC games running on the jr? If not for the crumminess of the jr, LA wouldn't have offered him a job, and thus no Mac ports. Heh.--Anss123 11:06, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
All other PCs will tremble at the power of Amiga!!!... no wait... sorry I thought it was the early 90s again for a moment... :) I've often seen conflicting info about the above, but synthesis of all I've read online suggests that from a technical point of view the A300 was either HIGHLY modified to become the A600 or completely redesigned. From a marketing point of view the very basic computer user A300 was retargeted at more advanced post A500 users. But then squeezed out when the gap between there and the A1200 proved to be very slim. Usually marketing directs development, but often development cuts corners to satisfy marketing pressures. Amiga History CO UK, Boingball DE and so on; but the problem is none of these sources are anywhere near authoritative. Does anyone have access to any of the published Commodore histories? --Monotonehell 11:39, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
The problem with history is that everyone has their own take on it. Fortunately the A300 issue is so minor it's probably better left to the A600 article. It would be better if we devote some space to the A4000/1200 instead. I was planning to write a about them, but the 93-94 era is a bit messy history wise. When it comes to discussing what impact the A1200/4000/CD32 combo had on the marked some say "too little to late," others say "just enough, but XXX ruined it all." Hu hum.
If anyone has that "the downfall of Commodore" book (Forgot the exact title), it probably gives a good bit of insight into that era.--Anss123 13:17, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Neither the A1200 nor the A4000 were all that impressive by the time they reached market. The AGA chipset might have been great for Amigans compared to the ECS chipset available so far, but compared to the PC Amiga had lost considerable ground. The CD32, now, that was a different matter - it had real potential, if you think about when the 32bit CD-based consoles really peaked. However, all sources I have read so far on the subject agree that, from the very beginning, Commodore was unable to meet demand on the CD32 - because they were already on a steep downward spiral financially. DevSolar 12:16, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Right. The C= business model didn't need PSX level sales to see good profit, so the CD32 could have been a decent enough success had C= managed to chug out more of them.
As for AGA, the real problem was the chip-mem bottleneck on the low cost model/CD32. Thanks to C= cheapness the better A500 games looked better than many early A1200 games, and that didn’t exactly spur upgrades. But with proper backing the 1992 AGA chipset was decent enough for the time, only around 1995 did it start falling behind for gaming purposes.
--Anss123 13:33, 21 September 2007 (UTC)