AmigoOS vs Everything Else + Storage!

[Guden Oden]

It was incredibly daft not to put it in the A1200 (while putting it in CD32) since it would have helped the A1200 match PC features (if not performance).

Um, Akiko was mainly the CD controller chip and some other odds and ends afaik. There is no spot to solder it in on the A1200 PCB because the A1200 was never designed with that chip in mind. Another short-sighted Commodore decision probably.

Under the competent management of Irving Goa'uld and A ghoul Medhi, CBM went from a $1Bn/year company to nothing in like half a decade. Really quite a feat I must say. The two deserve to be shot like the crooks they are.

The MPEG module for the CD32 was really quite impressive btw, it featured a transparent overlay of data on top of the video image for example, looked really nice and professional.

 

[radar1200gs]

I could have sworn there was a place on the PCB for AKIKO. Might depend on PCB revisions, it's been a long time.

Anyway the point with AKIKO was that it would have given the A1200 a standardised way to interface with cd's plus chunky to planar as a bonus - not saying the chunky to planar performance would be anything to get excited about, just that it would be present.

While you could add 3rd party cd drives etc, the lack of an official drive and the perception of PC superiority (by being able to use a video mode the amiga couldn't for gaming) really hurt the A1200.

Someone made the point that the 68EC020 was too slow. I guess thats true if you didn't expand the fast memory, but adding fast memory doubled your performance and usually gave you a 68881/2 socket to boot.

The memory expander I used (don't know how common it was really, but it was very cheap and readily available) gave you an FPU socket, 8mb fast ram and a 28mhz 68EC020 cpu all on one board. While it didn't exactly fly compared to a 68030 or better it also didn't cost anywhere near as much either and performed very nicely for budget conscious users (most amiga owners).

Gould wasn;t just a crook, he was a stupid crook. For those who don't know, Irving Gould was a venture capitalist who gave Commodore the money to expand into computers in the first place and also provided most of the funds needed to purchase the Amiga. The biggest mistake he ever made was falling out with Jack Tramiel who pretty much made Commodore the force that it was single handedly. His departure for Atari (caused because Gould didn't want Tramiels' sons obtaining management positions in Commodore) was the beginning of a long end for commodore.

If Gould had kept competent managers in control of Commodore and spend more on R&D he would still be earning a very nice income from Commodore to this day. Instead, like a lot of venture capitalists he wanted control of the company and when he thought the end was near stripped the company of every dollar it had.

I'm not religious, but people like Irving Gould make me fervently hope there is a place called hell.

 

[Guden Oden]

Hm, I heard Gould was a Coke-boss... (As in that brown beverage, not the white powder, haha.)

Well, if he's a venture capitalist that might explain a thing or two, but he does seem like an idiot venture capitalists. The way these normally do business is they invest in a company and then let it return a profit.

Gould's management of CBM on the other hand virtually strangled R&D while he gave himself the fattest salary in the business (I heard he earned more than the CEO of IBM) plus unlimited company jet use.

Basically he simply seems to have treated CBM like a free meal ticket with no regard to the other stock owners. He was charged with fraud after the bankruptcy but never indicted as I remember. If it'd had happened today, post-Enron/Worldcom, things might have turned out differently.

 

[Nappe1]

I didn't read the whole discussion but about the OS'es...
In 1981 PC-DOS was released (same as MS-DOS 1.0) and Amiga wasn't even in the plans back then.

1981 CBM Inc (leaded by the marketing master mind Jack Tramiel back then.) had just launched VIC-20 and VIC-1540 Floppy Drive that used CBM-Dos 2.0 (version number?) and it was 100% comparable to PC-DOS 1.0 (afaik, original PC-DOS didn't supported even sub-directories and why should it? 320 KB floppies never got past the file entry limit. (512 entries.)

PC-DOS 2.0 (1983) the sub directory support as well as support for 10 MB Hard Drives. at the same time, Tramiel launched C64 and 1541 Floppy Drive that had only slight modifications for older brother. Still, C64 had so HUGE influence that it made Microsoft notice that they were losing home / small computer market totally And so MSX (MicroSoft eXtensions) consortium was founded. in this case, MS was the ppl defining software side of computer and several manufacturers licensed the technology and used it. Still MSX didn't make very well outside the japan, where the major makers were coming.

In 1984 Jack Tramiel was basically smoked out from his own company and after that CBM Inc never got strong enough CEO, to steer the company in the success they had with VIC-20 and C64. Jack Tramiel got himself in the ATARI and after CeBit 1984 where small Amiga Inc has showed a running prototype of upcoming system, he smelled the money. By making huge public money offer buying the whole Amiga Inc, He also woke up The Commodore. Started terrifying offer competition which eventually ended to Commodore winning with price that has been later said to be more than 6 times of reasonable price of Amiga Inc. Still Tramiel has losed the battle, but he still had advantage, because their own ST-series were more further than Amiga's design. As a marketing guy, actually bought quite lot more living time to dying company with quick launch of ST series before Commodore got Amigas up and running. when Amiga 500 and Atari ST were competing of the 1st place, the competition was really hard and eventually killed the ATARI off. Still, the end of Commodore looked like glorious, but fact is that they sold most of the time Amiga series with very thin profits and weak CEOs in the lead didn't make things any easier. Most likely, Commodore hardly got any use of buying Amiga Inc, because price wars cutted the profits so weak. In the April 1994, CBM Inc was declared to bankcrupt in the Bahamas. though Amiga rights were sold, still this basically ment end for Amigas as well.

While all that happened, also lot happened at PC side too. almost at the same time with AmigaOS and WorkBench releases, Microsoft and IBM showed OS/2 operating system, that had all what AMiga had plus much more. Before OS/2 MS/PC-DOS 3.0 and MS/PC-DOS 4.0 were released and hardware had gone forward from 8086 to 80286. difference between Commodore path and IBM path is that PCs were all backwards compatible, CBMs weren't. also, PC side was pretty much steady, while ATARI and Amiga were having real cut throat competition and you could have picked wrong system.




and then about the Doom... Fact is that there's no way make it run with basic Amiga 500 with playable frame rates. when doom was released in 1994, majority of Amiga systems were 500 / 600 machines and only minority had 1200 with AGA chipset. Basically, there just wasn't market for it anymore. IF JC would have ported Doom to Amiga, it would more like speed up the death instead of slowing it down.

Bluebyte's The Settlers was the last real big hit for Amiga that made PC-players really jeallous, just because there wasn't PC-port. But when the PC-port at last 9 months later came out, tables turned. with _old_ 386 and 4MB memory, The Serf City (as it was called in PC) run a lot more faster than hard coded Amiga port on A500 with 512KB memory expansion. that was a last straw for many amiga users strugling about updating their A500 to faster Amiga or perhaps jumping to PC-world. (all this from my nordic point of view.)


There's so many IFs. what would happend, IF Tramiel would have won the offer competition and Amiga has become a ATARI? and what would happened if Commodore wouldn't smoked Tramiel out and their CBM 9000 with MC68000 and System V based OS would have taken the market? it was obiously originally targetted against IBM and Microsoft...

but oh well, past is a past... In any case, there's whole bunch of mighty machines in the history and they all have affected on the way or other to development of the industry. Enjoy them whenever you have the possibility.







wheeh... there's for start...

 

[radar1200gs]

I have to point out that The Settlers on Amiga IMO has had the last laugh over Serf City even if you have to play it on an emulator (WinUAE) simply because you can properly save your games - something you can't do under Windows with Serf City.

That game is probably one of my all time favorites and best of the entire series too. Settlers 2 was okay, could not stand 3 & 4, they have nothing to do with the original IMO.

My perfect settlers games would be settlers 2 enhancements put into the settlers 1 engine. Perhaps replace the 2d rendering with 3d (not the artistic style though).

 

[Nappe1]

I have to point out that The Settlers on Amiga IMO has had the last laugh over Serf City even if you have to play it on an emulator (WinUAE) simply because you can properly save your games - something you can't do under Windows with Serf City.

umh... it's a dos game. every real retro player has a Pentium decade computer with working Win98 Dos mode for games like Serf City.

There's just so many games that don't work right in windows that I build a computer for retro games. Also, same computer runs pretty well windows games that do not like XP. (Driver comes to my mind...)

besides, I don't use emulators anymore, or at least it's the last option. I have real C64 ready for use and few friends of mine whole collection of different Amigas. (nothing beats the real thing.)

That game is probably one of my all time favorites and best of the entire series too. Settlers 2 was okay, could not stand 3 & 4, they have nothing to do with the original IMO.

My perfect settlers games would be settlers 2 enhancements put into the settlers 1 engine. Perhaps replace the 2d rendering with 3d (not the artistic style though).

- first one is a legend. it was a first of it's kind. there's no way comparing to any existing games back then.
- second one made it even better. easier road building, more nations and how well the nations were balanced against each other.
- 3rd one took giant leap, but divided the ppl. some ppl hated that you had to build houses for the workers. for me it was more like challenge. I like it too. (still playing all three first ones.) The major thing that made 3rd one a really good, was the network support. Of course it had some troubles too like in random maps the map usually gave too big advantage to some nations and AI was/is stupid as hell. Still, there's no other game that would be more fun than Settlers 3 on big well balanced map, match type 3 vs 3 vs 3 vs 3.
- 4th one I somehow skipped. I never found the thing from it that keeps me still playing 3 first ones.
- 5th incarnation does look very promising with only one nation and good old medieval themeing. (plus Bluebyte has been working on with modifying Renderware engine for it and 3D fits very well based on first screenshots, so your dream is kind of coming true www.siedler.de (english pages aren't open yet.))

 

[T2k]

Amigados happened 1984, not that long after MS-DOS (and together with workbench gave us a taste of windows 95 over a decade before it happened PC side).

AmigaDOS itself was based on a british OS mainframe/minicomputer OS(can't remember the name) that made Unix look silly.

I've got today's laugh... radar, you always can make me laugh...

 

[archie4oz]

Still, C64 had so HUGE influence that it made Microsoft notice that they were losing home / small computer market totally And so MSX (MicroSoft eXtensions) consortium was founded. in this case, MS was the ppl defining software side of computer and several manufacturers licensed the technology and used it. Still MSX didn't make very well outside the japan, where the major makers were coming.

Actually the MSX/MSX2/MSX2+/TurboR platform initiative was started by ASCII, not Microsoft... And it did do fairly well in east Asia in general, South America, and the Soviet Union (even getting lots of use on Mir), however Japan was the most significant market In fact after the MSX2 was introduced Microsoft pulled out and ASCII was the sole supporter. Also MSX doesn't actually stand for anything... I should point out that the MSX community is still pretty active and ASCII still publishes MSX rags and sells PCs with their own MSX emulators...

All in all they were pretty dandy little machines, although to be honest, I had several and loved them, but I still would've rather had one of the Sharp X1/X68k machines (I had a friend that had one.. *drool*)...

 

[Quitch]

If you search around you'll find how articles dedicated to how, back then, Unix was the enemy and people were cheering on Windows. There were good reasons to, and let's recall that Unix then is somewhat different from Unix now..

Really? I've been using it since, err, around 1985 or 86. Still seems much the same to me.
I don't recall anyone cheering on Windows.

Probably because you were a Unix user. I was also around then, and for most people Unix was a mysterious force they could never understand, a throw back to old technology and interfaces designed to keep things as hard to understand as possible.

Unless you were a geek of the age, Unix was a horrible thing, and Windows was a wonderful thing because it made computers easy to use... or easier than Unix did. Over the years, Windows does more and more for you and the user needs do less and less. It's the very reason that Windows is the favoured OS, it did what the users wanted it to do first, then worried about what the geeks wanted second.

Now, I'm a geek, but I can see why Windows achieved what it did.

Maybe I was a bit off with my "Unix is different." It's more the Unix community. It's far more accessible now than it ever was, though the net itself plays a big part in this.

 

[Gubbi]

The innovation in the Amiga OS were that it was one of the first micro kernel operating systems. Only the EXEC library (the kernel) had to run. dos.library and all the others could in pricinple be replaced.

The biggest downfall was the lack of memory protection. The lack of memory protection and the reduced context that implies did mean that it had stellar IPC performance. BeOS is in many ways an evolved Amiga OS.

Cheers
Gubbi