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Does anyone know what agency was responsible for the awful advertising? I've always heaped the blame for the demise of the Amiga squarely on the shoulders of the C= management, but it's about time the ad agency took some flak too.

It sure as heck wasn't Chiat-Day (I think that's the correct spelling for the ones Apple used)!

As much as I'd love to heap tons of scorn on them, no ad agency (well, most) creates and releases any campaign without the approval of the client ... I suspect that the abysmal advertising for the Amiga was a direct reflection on the lack of imagination and belief (and understanding) that the Commodore management had at the time.

What a complete shame that such an amazing machine was stifled by such a dimwitted and incompetent board.

I still have my trusty A2000, complete with Quantum 250M (whoo-hoo!) HD and additional RAM That, coupled with a really cool game-programming language, AMOS, brought me countless hours of programming nirvana ...

*sigh*

I owned an Amiga 500, upgraded the memory, (IIRC 1.5MB in total), I was tempted to get an Amiga 1200 instead of a PC, but I eventually caved in like most people and purchased one

Maybe I am the nut but I never caved in to the DOS/Windows PC. After Commodore/Atari I went to the Mac. I was so intrigued by its GUI and we had an SE at school. And in my opinion, Windows was just GEOS/Finder/Workbench done poorly. I perceived it as a cheap ripoff of other systems. Funny, I feel that way today about current versions of Windows. It's a good feeling not getting caught up in that mess because I know guys who got caught up in it early on and became dependent on certain Windows apps, but not they despise Windows yet feel stuck because of those apps.

I probably would have gone Mac as well but back then Mac's were hugely expensive. IIRC the NZ -> US exchange rate was in the toilet, NZ was just recovering after a recession, there was not much money floating around back at that time.

Even as early as 1998, the cost of even a low end Mac was incredibly expensive. The all in one powermac was priced at 4 grand for the low end model. This was back when the minimum wage was $7.50, so for many, computers were unaffordable, and a Mac was more so - most of the recent computers purchased in New Zealand has only really occurred in the last 7 years with the improvement in the economy - off the back of strong commodity prices.

They should also get off my lawn - and stop tracking mud across my nice, clean floor!

I used to work in computer retail during the time that Amiga started losing big to PC in the home computing market. I remember games like wolfenstein, wing commander, ultima underworld really started to draw gamers away with 256 color vga graphics. although Commodore countered with the A1200, and even with the blitter and the improvements in memory bandwidth in the AGA chipset, the Amiga's use of slow bitplanes made it incapable of competing against the fast VGA 256 color planar mode where one byte represented one pixel on the screen and thus was perfect for Doom-style games which relied on fast pixel scaling.

gamers were also already drawn to consoles such as the Snes and Megadrive, which despite having much slower cpu's could still deliver superior graphics due to better video hardware.

and this is my major gripe with Commodore, in my opinion they lingered too long on their rapidly outdated hardware, and then delivered far too little when they finally upgraded.

I figured "hHistory" was an Amiga inside joke and I was left out, having never used one...

The saddest part is that these schmucks are probably still around, lifting big salaries while being completly incompetent and not contributing anything.

Edited 2007-12-11 03:22

Sounds like NFL coaches.

*cough* Cheney *cough*...

Got the vinyls of changing minds and ina-gadda-da-vida at home as well as a longplayer on CD. The cover of changing minds is full of A500 promotion. 16 Bit is the same who later became quiet famous as Snap! and introduced with "The power" one of the new sounds of the nineties and went #1 in the UK and #2 in the US. But the power was not original but stolen by Snap!, anyway it's a great tune (have it at home as well).

Got the vinyls of changing minds and ina-gadda-da-vida at home as well as a longplayer on CD. The cover of changing minds is full of A500 promotion. 16 Bit is the same who later became quiet famous as Snap! and introduced with "The power" one of the new sounds of the nineties and went #1 in the UK and #2 in the US. But the power was not original but stolen by Snap!, anyway it's a great tune (have it at home as well).

Hey, I love that song and didn't know that an Amiga was somehow involved in its creation. Thanks for that!

It is funny to recall how much Amigas were used in the mainstream multimedia production back then. Some people say that earlier versions of Lightwave were used on Amigas to produce the special effects the original Galactica TV series. PCs were so primitive in comparison back then that it is not even funny...

A friend of mine used to run a small computer shop when he lived on the US during the early nineties and he did make quite a living basically selling Amigas with the Video Toaster(?) and Lightwave bundles. Then the CG market went to the huge Unix workstations sold by SGI and the Amigas were dropped to the sidelines. It is sad to see all this legacy fading into obscurity now... :/

celebrate mediocrity. failure is the best revenge. that is nothing new.

AmigaOS 4 is nothing at the moment. How many people have used (and therefore, tested) it, what, like three men and a cow? It's most likely riddled with bugs - not something you want in an OS without any decent memory protection.

AOS4 is a relic of the past. It is interesting, but it doesn't stand even the slightest of chances against Windows, Mac, or Linux out in the real world. A geek's toy, at best.

>An innovative thinker with lots of cash could buy-out and unify all assets related to the Amiga, have the OS converted to work with Intel/AMD chips and hire a kick-ass marketing/ad agency.

And wind up dead when "oh dear, I'm sorry sir, that northbridge you needed is discontinued. Oh, and you can't get the documentation on a replacement for another 8 weeks. Well, I'm sorry sir, Microsoft and Apple have non-competitive agreements with us preventing documentation from being released to other vendors, I'm sure you fully understand..." You go AMD or Intel you're just as dead as BeOS.

Control your hardware, or die off. I say go with one of the licenseable CPU designs, like ARM, MIPS or my recommendation, SPARC. Then you control your own fate.

A platform is more than the OS or the CPU, and just because something is commodity does not mean it is the wisest choice. Speaking from experience, if you wish to persue such a dream, you'd best do it from the strongest position possible, and that means controlling each and every component you use, from the CPU to the plugs that connect the USB ports. Why else do you think Commodore could so agressively price it's Commodore 64 compared to the Commodore 128? Commodore made virtually every component in the 64, it did not in the 128, resulting in lower margins on the higher priced unit.

Various Open Source operating systems have proven this not to be true. It isn't in the best interests of any hardware vendor to artificially restrict access to documentation. In fact, for a closed source OS with a small amount of cash to spend on signing NDA's, it would be significantly easier to gain access to hardware documentation than for an Open Source OS. Your biggest problem would be hiring enough warm bodies to write the drivers, not getting the documentation.

Various Open Source operating systems have proven this not to be true. It isn't in the best interests of any hardware vendor to artificially restrict access to documentation. In fact, for a closed source OS with a small amount of cash to spend on signing NDA's, it would be significantly easier to gain access to hardware documentation than for an Open Source OS. Your biggest problem would be hiring enough warm bodies to write the drivers, not getting the documentation.
Oh really? How is ATI 3D on Haiku, OpenBSD or AROS lately for ya?

Hardware vendors make a ton of cash through exclusive deals. Certain vendors, OS, system, whatever, get docs before others, and the haves are the ones that shell out the pile o cash for it. Everyone else is always playing catch-up, and catch-up. So Linux can run my Radeon 9200 fully supported? It can't run many games on my X1050 due to driver issues, and the lag time on that is so far now that by the time they're sorted out, it will be 6 generations behind.

Er, all three of those are Open Source, and ATI recently released specs for their hardware. Support for ATI 3D will be great, provided they can find enough warm bodies to write or port the drivers.

Compare this with the (closed) MacOS X, which has good support for 3D hardware from ATI and Intel, and had it long before ATI opened their specs.

If you have innovative ideas and lots of cash, why tie yourself to an old model? At this point, it'd be better to be a spiritual ancestor, than to just make an updated clone of an old machine.

Get a team of people who are equally innovative, talented, and organized (not just your programmers, mind). Once you have your intelligent people, ask them what they'd want in a computer, and see how much of it is feasable with the constraints you have to work in; that's how the Amiga got off the ground.

Myself, I probably wouldn't try to resurrect the Amiga -- however, I might purchase the Commodore name to work under, especially if I wanted to convey the image of a user-friendly, fun machine with a customizable base. The going price right now appears to be a touch over $5 million, about 1/5th what it last sold for; bargain basement, as corporate names go.

>Myself, I probably wouldn't try to resurrect the Amiga -- however, I might purchase the Commodore name to work under, especially if I wanted to convey the image of a user-friendly, fun machine with a customizable base. The going price right now appears to be a touch over $5 million, about 1/5th what it last sold for; bargain basement, as corporate names go.

Hey, sounds good.

and pst, have I got something to show you....

Hehehe. The name Commodore mostly tastes like failure to me...

>>I think there is a REAL OPPORTUNITY right now for a platform that is not Mac, Windows or Linux but one that incorporates the best of all of them and is presented as a real alternative.<<

Uh? In the PC/server world, the number of successful OS has decreased steadily, what's make you think that a 'real alternative' would gain steam?

>>An innovative thinker with lots of cash could buy-out and unify all assets related to the Amiga, have the OS converted to work with Intel/AMD chips and hire a kick-ass marketing/ad agency.<<

A *humongous* amount of cash you mean, because to attract users you'd need first to have applications and I doubt very much that the existing AmigaOS applications would please existing users..

A BeOS "revival" (very, very unlikely) would at least give you some applications which are not 'stale' by todays standard, but not a lot though: the formats used (PNG, websites, H264, ODF/OOXML..) evolve quickly so applications 'rust' quite quickly too..