Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan's Trickling. I'm an executive producer here
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works and love all things tech. And
Speaker 1: while my producer Tari chortals on the other side of
Speaker 1: the glass laughing at something, I can only guess as
Speaker 1: to the reasons why we're going to go back and
Speaker 1: pick up on our story about Amiga. Now. I left
Speaker 1: off in the last episode about talking about the simulated
Speaker 1: hardware of the Amiga chips set with the Motorola sixty
Speaker 1: eight thousand processor and the breadboard simulated chips. These enormous
Speaker 1: circuits that would represent the teeny tiny chips that would
Speaker 1: be on the motherboard in the future Amiga. But what
Speaker 1: about the operating system? You really need an operating system
Speaker 1: in order to do anything useful with a computer. Developers
Speaker 1: would need an application programming interface or a p I
Speaker 1: in order to build programs to run on this machine,
Speaker 1: and users would need some sort of method to navigate
Speaker 1: the computer system. So for Amiga, that task fell to
Speaker 1: the team that was led by a man named Bob Parizo,
Speaker 1: the chief of software engineering and Perizo had previously worked
Speaker 1: on mainframe computers with a company called Tandem, and Tandem
Speaker 1: made giant computer machines for the banking industry. That Prizo's
Speaker 1: background was in machines that could handle multitasking, and so
Speaker 1: he set out to create an operating system that would
Speaker 1: take advantage of the hardware that J Miners team was
Speaker 1: building over on the other side of Amiga, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to be able to run multiple applications simultaneously. This
Speaker 1: was in stark contrast with all the other home computers
Speaker 1: at the time. They were all designed so that they
Speaker 1: would run a single program at anyone given time, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: and that if you wanted to launch a second program,
Speaker 1: you first would have to shut down the program you
Speaker 1: were in, or at least have it go into kind
Speaker 1: of a sleep mode. But Pariza wanted a machine that
Speaker 1: could truly run multiple applications side by side, so he
Speaker 1: hired on several people to join his team, including Robert J.
Speaker 1: Mical Or r J, Carl Sassin, rath Dale Luck, and
Speaker 1: Dave Needle. All joined the Amiga team over the course
Speaker 1: of the next year or so. M r J had
Speaker 1: previously worked as a software engineer at Williams Electronics and
Speaker 1: worked on video games and Amiga. He would build out
Speaker 1: many of the system's basic routines for the OS that
Speaker 1: that made it all possible. He was also known for
Speaker 1: building a game for the Amiga that made use of
Speaker 1: the joyboard peripheral that I mentioned in the last episode.
Speaker 1: That was that balance board peripheral that acted kind of
Speaker 1: like a joystick. This game was called Zen Meditation, and
Speaker 1: the goal was to sit perfectly still the high stress
Speaker 1: environment of building a new computer system, and a lot
Speaker 1: of folks would kind of give this a world try
Speaker 1: and calm down. And when it came time to create
Speaker 1: an error message for the Amiga that would show in
Speaker 1: the event of a system crash, you know, you would
Speaker 1: get that message kind of like the blue screen of
Speaker 1: death known in the Windows Circles. Well, for the Amiga,
Speaker 1: it was cheekily decided that they would call it the
Speaker 1: Guru Meditation error, and that was kind of a nod
Speaker 1: to this game that r J had made. Carl Sassin
Speaker 1: Wrath had worked as a television cameraman when he was
Speaker 1: a teenager and then would go on to get a
Speaker 1: degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University
Speaker 1: of California at Davis and began working with Hewlett Packard
Speaker 1: as a programmer and system designer, including heading up a
Speaker 1: project team to develop a mouse driven graphical user interface
Speaker 1: or g u I, also known as a gooey. He
Speaker 1: became Amiga's manager of operating Systems. Dale Luck got a
Speaker 1: degree in computer science from Michigan Technological University and would
Speaker 1: join Amiga as the manager of graphics Software, and Dave
Speaker 1: Needle worked not just on software but also on chip design,
Speaker 1: and all four would go on to do big things
Speaker 1: outside of Amiga later on. Carl Sassin Wrath was already
Speaker 1: working on ideas for an operating system that could handle
Speaker 1: multitasking before he had ever met Prizo. That fell right
Speaker 1: in line with what Bob Aarrizo wanted to do with
Speaker 1: the Amiga system. So the challenge was figuring out how
Speaker 1: to do multitasking without overtaxing the CPU and chip set
Speaker 1: and memory capabilities of this machine. They had to build
Speaker 1: out a system that would make efficient use of the
Speaker 1: resources of the computer would have Assassin Wrath developed an
Speaker 1: approach that would later be called a microkernel. This is
Speaker 1: the collection of features that are needed at minimum to
Speaker 1: implement an operating system that includes stuff like in her
Speaker 1: process communications, low level address space management, thread management, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. The concept of the micro colonel actually
Speaker 1: pre dates Assassin Wrath's work, but his was a notable
Speaker 1: early example. In the home computer space. Herrizo and his
Speaker 1: team were determined to incorporate a graphical user interface with
Speaker 1: this operating system. This g u I or gooey, and
Speaker 1: this is how we access pretty much all consumer computer
Speaker 1: systems these days. Files are represented as icons. Clicking on
Speaker 1: an icon can execute a file. I know what I'm
Speaker 1: saying is all old news to you guys. This is
Speaker 1: the stuff you use every single day. But for the
Speaker 1: programmers out there, and also for old folks like myself,
Speaker 1: we remember the days of command lines. And in a
Speaker 1: command line computer system back in the day, the way
Speaker 1: you would run a program is you wouldn't type the
Speaker 1: word run, typically followed by the file name that you
Speaker 1: wanted to execute. You actually had to type all this
Speaker 1: stuff in. You had to navigate file trees and systems
Speaker 1: using typewritten commands, had to change drives this way, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't really complicated to get the basic commands down,
Speaker 1: but it acted as a barrier to entry. It was
Speaker 1: something that intimidated people because it was rarely intuitive. It
Speaker 1: wasn't necessarily hard once you learned the basics, but the
Speaker 1: basics themselves seems so foreign, so alien, that a lot
Speaker 1: of people felt that that meant computers were for quote
Speaker 1: unquote smart people or nerds or something. The g U
Speaker 1: Y made interacting with a computer much more easy, much
Speaker 1: more intuitive. I mean, we've seen this over and over
Speaker 1: again the Mac Os, Windows, all of these different graphic
Speaker 1: user interfaces that carry over today into things like smartphone interfaces.
Speaker 1: They show that they're much easier to understand than those
Speaker 1: command lines, and in nine three they were largely unheard
Speaker 1: of outside of specific spheres within the computing community. The
Speaker 1: model had actually been in development for years at other places,
Speaker 1: such as Xerox's Park facility, but it hadn't really made
Speaker 1: its way into consumer computers yet. Meanwhile, r J was
Speaker 1: getting to work building out the Application Programming Interface or
Speaker 1: a p I. J Minor once said that r J
Speaker 1: had done this by locking himself in his office for
Speaker 1: three straight weeks and emerged only once to get up
Speaker 1: some clarification from Sassain Wrath on something the a p
Speaker 1: I that he eventually built was given the name Intuition,
Speaker 1: and because it was the product of one person, it
Speaker 1: was fairly uniform and straightforward. A lot of other a
Speaker 1: p I s are the products of teams that are
Speaker 1: working sometimes at different times. Something work might get started
Speaker 1: by one team and then finished by another team, and
Speaker 1: so sometimes those sort of interfaces can be a little
Speaker 1: clunky to work with because different people with different perspectives
Speaker 1: were working on it. But Intuition was the product of
Speaker 1: one person at Amiga, So as long as you understood
Speaker 1: how r J thought, you could figure out how to
Speaker 1: build applications for the Amiga. So you had these two teams.
Speaker 1: You had the hardware team, you had the software team,
Speaker 1: and they were both working very hard to create what
Speaker 1: would become the first Amiga computer, and the company planned
Speaker 1: to demonstrate something at the Consumer Electronics Show or ce
Speaker 1: S in January nur in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now they
Speaker 1: knew they were not going to have the full prototype
Speaker 1: Amiga computer to show off something that would look like
Speaker 1: a production model, they would have to rely on the
Speaker 1: simulated chips they had built on bread boards. So these
Speaker 1: enormous bread boards that would represent tiny, tiny chips They
Speaker 1: knew the operating system was not going to be finished
Speaker 1: in time for this demonstration, but the team wanted to
Speaker 1: show off their work and the capabilities of their chips
Speaker 1: set design, and this would hopefully bring in more investors
Speaker 1: and pull in the money they would need to keep
Speaker 1: operations going and move towards a production model because their
Speaker 1: revenue generating process. You know, they had been making stuff
Speaker 1: for the video game industry, the home video game industry,
Speaker 1: but that industry had collapsed, so now they were desperately
Speaker 1: trying to get work done and get investment money into
Speaker 1: the company to keep it going until they had a
Speaker 1: consumer ready computer they could put on the market. Money
Speaker 1: was already tight. The team didn't have any idea of
Speaker 1: how they were going to ship their prototype to the
Speaker 1: trade show without endangering it. I mean, you had these
Speaker 1: enormous bread boards with thousands of wires connected to them,
Speaker 1: and disconnecting any of those wires would make the simulated
Speaker 1: chips not work properly. So r J and Dale took
Speaker 1: it upon themselves and they booked an extra airline seat
Speaker 1: in between them so that they could put the prototype
Speaker 1: in an airline seat and make sure that it was
Speaker 1: protected in addition, they completely covered this prototype in pillows. Now,
Speaker 1: to book a seat, they had to give a passenger name.
Speaker 1: This is again this is in the old days when
Speaker 1: it was pretty easy to go through an airport, but
Speaker 1: you still needed to have a name on a ticket
Speaker 1: if you wanted to book a seat. So the name
Speaker 1: they gave their passenger this prototype computer was Joe Pillow.
Speaker 1: The engineers, perhaps giddy from working so hard for so long,
Speaker 1: even drew a face on one of the pillows to
Speaker 1: give Joe Pillow a face, and apparently he wore a
Speaker 1: tie to Legend has it that Dale and r J
Speaker 1: even tried to go so far as to get an
Speaker 1: airline meal for Joe, but the flight attendants drew the
Speaker 1: line there and said no dice. At c E S,
Speaker 1: the Amiga team had a booth with a backstage area
Speaker 1: where they kept their prototype, and this would keep the
Speaker 1: computer away from prying eyes and allow the team to
Speaker 1: control who could actually see it. They would hold demonstrations
Speaker 1: in this backstage area. They would approve people, bring them
Speaker 1: back there, and then show off this prototype. It was
Speaker 1: still working from those simulated chips, and it was enormous.
Speaker 1: It was sitting on top of a table, and more
Speaker 1: than a few onlookers would actually snoop around to make
Speaker 1: sure that the bread boards were in fact acting as
Speaker 1: a chip set and that there wasn't some other computer
Speaker 1: system hiding out of view that was creating the effects
Speaker 1: that they were seeing. Uh, it was not running the
Speaker 1: Amiga operating system, because, as I said, the operating system
Speaker 1: was not finished at that point. So r J and
Speaker 1: Dale had built in some demo software that would run
Speaker 1: directly off the chip set to show off what the
Speaker 1: computer could do. One of the demos that they built
Speaker 1: was a large ball, and the ball had a checkered
Speaker 1: pattern on it, and the ball would bounce up and
Speaker 1: down on the bottom edge of the screen, and every
Speaker 1: time it would appear to hit that bottom edge, it
Speaker 1: would produce a booming noise and stereo. And it was
Speaker 1: a hasty demonstration, but that checkered ball would become an
Speaker 1: iconic symbol and would stand as the symbol for Amiga
Speaker 1: going forward. I've got a lot more to say about
Speaker 1: the birth of the Amiga, but first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsor. The demonstrations at that
Speaker 1: January c e S where success and the team got
Speaker 1: back to work. They had a new goal that they
Speaker 1: wanted to meet, because back in those early eighties there
Speaker 1: were actually two c e S shows every year. There
Speaker 1: was one that would take place in the winter and
Speaker 1: one that would play take place in the summer. The
Speaker 1: winter ones would take place in Las Vegas, and the
Speaker 1: summer ones tended to move around a little bit, but
Speaker 1: that second show would happen in June in Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 1: So the Amiga team had set a goal. They wanted
Speaker 1: to do more demonstrations of the Amiga, but this time
Speaker 1: they wanted to use prototype silicon chips, not the simulated
Speaker 1: chips on bread boards. They wanted to actually produce the
Speaker 1: silicon chips and create a motherboard where they could run
Speaker 1: demonstrations off that show that they had made some progress
Speaker 1: and that they would soon be able to move into
Speaker 1: fabrication and production stages, though at the time they would
Speaker 1: only really be able to do this for a prototype
Speaker 1: because again they were running short on funds at this point.
Speaker 1: The Chicago ce S show was another success from a
Speaker 1: technological standpoint, but Amiga was out of money. They were
Speaker 1: not going to be able to stay in operation without
Speaker 1: a significant investment, and the CEO of Amiga. Dave Morse,
Speaker 1: who had come from Tonka Toys to head up Amiga,
Speaker 1: sought out potential investors and partners, including at very established
Speaker 1: company's stuff like Sony and Hewitt, Packard and Phillips, as
Speaker 1: well as Apple, which was younger but had been doing
Speaker 1: quite well. But none of those seemed particularly interested in
Speaker 1: investing in Amiga. One company, however, did offer up a
Speaker 1: pretty cutthroat deal. It was a five hundred thousand dollar
Speaker 1: loan and the company was Atari, the same company that
Speaker 1: Amiga co founder j Minor had worked for in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and he had left Atari for another company
Speaker 1: before starting Amiga. Well, he left Atari because he had
Speaker 1: had disputes about bonuses and the direction of projects. Attari
Speaker 1: was the same company that had been rocked by the
Speaker 1: video game crash a year earlier. And here was Atari saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: we can loan you half a million dollars. But the
Speaker 1: deal was a really tough one. According to the agreement,
Speaker 1: Amiga would get that half million dollar loan, but it
Speaker 1: would have to repay Atari by the end of June,
Speaker 1: otherwise Atari would end up owning all of Amiga's technology.
Speaker 1: And this was a draconian deal, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: there weren't really any other options available, and Morse really
Speaker 1: had no other lifeline, so he signed this deal because
Speaker 1: it was either this or dissolve. Now it could have
Speaker 1: unfolded that Amiga was never able to pay back that
Speaker 1: loan and it would have become part of Atari, and
Speaker 1: maybe that would have saved Atari, though I doubt it.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, it's all a moot point because
Speaker 1: another company swooped in and kind of sort of rescued
Speaker 1: Amiga from being devoured by Atari, and that company was Commodore.
Speaker 1: I've done episodes about Commodore, but here's a quick overview
Speaker 1: of its history. Commodore had started off as a typewriter
Speaker 1: repair and assembly company back in nineteen fifty four. It
Speaker 1: was founded by a guy named i Deck Trammilski, who
Speaker 1: changed his name to Jack Tramiel. He immigrated to the
Speaker 1: United States after he had been rescued from a Nazi
Speaker 1: work camp during World War Two, and he founded the
Speaker 1: company Commodore in the nineteen fifty four. In nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: he secured money from an investor named Irving Gould, and
Speaker 1: Irving Gould will play another important part in our Amiga story.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, Commodore would diversify and start making calculators,
Speaker 1: largely relying upon chips from another company called Texas Instruments.
Speaker 1: But then Texas Instruments began building its own calculators and
Speaker 1: started competing with Commodore, and that taught Tramiel a lesson.
Speaker 1: He decided they didn't want to depend upon some other
Speaker 1: companies products, only to have that company enter into direct
Speaker 1: competition with him further down the line, and so Commodore
Speaker 1: decided to get into another business and they acquired another
Speaker 1: company called Most Technology. Most Technology was the company that
Speaker 1: made the Most six five O two chip, and that
Speaker 1: chip powered many early computer systems and video game consoles.
Speaker 1: Commodore had been one of the early players on the
Speaker 1: personal computer scene. They introduced the pet or PET in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, the VIC twenty in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen eighty two, Commodore introduced the best selling
Speaker 1: computer of all time, the Commodore sixty four. But then
Speaker 1: Commodore went into kind of a scorched earth policy against
Speaker 1: competitors like Texas Instruments and tried to drive them out
Speaker 1: of the industry and become the dominant player. To do that,
Speaker 1: one of the big tactics was cutting prices, and they
Speaker 1: cut prices on their their products to the point where
Speaker 1: the company was eating into its own reserves. And that's
Speaker 1: when Gould, the investor and Tremiel the founder budded heads.
Speaker 1: Gould wanted his investment protected, Tramuel wanted to be the
Speaker 1: dominant force in personal computing. In late nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: Gould would go to the board of directors and they
Speaker 1: decided to force Jack Tramiel to resign from the company
Speaker 1: he had founded. But while Tramuel wasn't in charge when
Speaker 1: Commodore would approach Amiga, he still plays an incredibly important
Speaker 1: part of this story. And this is really where things
Speaker 1: get Games of Throne ish arelthough with the players in fold,
Speaker 1: maybe I should call this video game of Thrones. So
Speaker 1: Jack Tramiel, he gets pushed out of his own company
Speaker 1: at the end of nineteen eighty three, and while the
Speaker 1: folks over at Amiga, we're still getting ready for their
Speaker 1: first prototype debut at C E S the following January.
Speaker 1: So at this point Amiga is an independent company and
Speaker 1: they're building up for C E S night four, Jack
Speaker 1: Tramiel gets kicked out of Commodore. He does not go
Speaker 1: into retirement. Instead, he saunters over to Warner Communications. Warner
Speaker 1: Communications was the parent company of Atari. Now, this was
Speaker 1: in the fallout of the video game crash of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, and at that point Warner Communications really was
Speaker 1: trying to find a way to dump the personal computer
Speaker 1: and video game console division of Attari. The only part
Speaker 1: of Atari the company still wanted to hold onto was
Speaker 1: Atari's arcade division because it was still making money. But
Speaker 1: in the wake of the video game crash, the console
Speaker 1: and personal computer arms of Attari felt like an anchor.
Speaker 1: So Jack Tramuel comes over to Warner Communications and says,
Speaker 1: I'll take that off your hands, and he's able to
Speaker 1: take over the company without even making a down payment.
Speaker 1: It was one of the biggest craziest deals in tech
Speaker 1: history where Jack Tramuel essentially took over control of Atari.
Speaker 1: So now Jack Tramuel's in charge of Atari. And you
Speaker 1: remember that five hundred thousand dollar loan deal I mentioned
Speaker 1: from Atari, the one that would force Amiga's technology to
Speaker 1: become Atari property if Amiga failed to pay back that
Speaker 1: loan by the end of June that was put together
Speaker 1: by Jack Tramiel, formerly of Commodore, and the company that
Speaker 1: would rescue Amiga was Commodore, so in a way, Amiga
Speaker 1: was put in the middle of a really ugly custody
Speaker 1: battle between an entrepreneur and his former company. Originally, Commodore
Speaker 1: was going to enter into a licensing agreement with Amiga
Speaker 1: to use the company's chip set in return for four
Speaker 1: million dollars, but ultimately Commodore executives decided that what made
Speaker 1: the most sense was to acquire Amiga outright, and so
Speaker 1: Commodore would acquire Amiga for the princely sum of twenty
Speaker 1: four million dollars, which obviously allowed Amiga to payback that
Speaker 1: five thousand dollar loan, and Amiga would become part of Commodore.
Speaker 1: Jack Tramiel must have been pretty steamed to have his
Speaker 1: former company come in and rescue Amiga, so under his leadership,
Speaker 1: Attari got to work designing a new personal computing system,
Speaker 1: one that would compete directly against Commodore's Amiga computer. The
Speaker 1: official name for this other computer, the Atari computer, was
Speaker 1: the Atari st that. Some people would jokingly refer to
Speaker 1: this as the jack Intosh because it seemed to eight
Speaker 1: Apple's Macintosh platform, and it was rushed into production by
Speaker 1: Jack Tramiel. Ultimately, this feud would be really harmful to
Speaker 1: both companies spoiler alert. They spent so much time facing
Speaker 1: off against each other that other companies like Apple, IBM
Speaker 1: and later Microsoft were able to get a firmer foothold
Speaker 1: in the personal computer marketplace. They fought a fierce battle
Speaker 1: against each other while a larger war was going on.
Speaker 1: But I am getting ahead of myself, so we'll rejoin
Speaker 1: that discussion later on. At first, Commodore was pretty darn
Speaker 1: awesome to the Amiga team. The group got the resources
Speaker 1: they needed to keep developing their first computer system, and
Speaker 1: while there was an initial fear that Commodore was going
Speaker 1: to require the Amiga group to pick up stakes in
Speaker 1: California and moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania, which is where Commodore
Speaker 1: headquarters were, those fears were initially quelled. The team did move,
Speaker 1: but they moved into larger offices about ten miles away
Speaker 1: from where they had been working, so it wasn't that
Speaker 1: big of a change, and it meant that they were
Speaker 1: no longer in a very cramped working space. Amiga was
Speaker 1: able to get more equipment and able to hire on
Speaker 1: more engineers to get back at it, and things were
Speaker 1: looking up. But nothing lasts forever. I'll tell you more
Speaker 1: when we get back after this quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. As the hardware had been taking shape, so
Speaker 1: was the operating system. The microkernel named Exact served as
Speaker 1: the core for this OS. The g u I or
Speaker 1: Graphical User Interface was coming together, but the OS would
Speaker 1: still need a way to handle the file system and
Speaker 1: some of the other tasks that neither EXACT nor the
Speaker 1: g u I would touch on. There are some things
Speaker 1: that the OS needed to do that neither of these
Speaker 1: components could do now. At first, the solution to this
Speaker 1: was going to be creating code called the Commodore Amiga
Speaker 1: Operating System or c a O S CHAOS. That might
Speaker 1: have been a little prophetic. Carl Sassin Wrath wrote up
Speaker 1: the design specifications for CHAOS. What CHAOS was supposed to
Speaker 1: be able to do. This would include some advanced operating
Speaker 1: system task management capabilities, like the ability to take the
Speaker 1: resources that were used by one application and then free
Speaker 1: those resources up if that application should crash. Since the
Speaker 1: Amiga was being built as a mole t tasking machine.
Speaker 1: That was a really important feature because without it, computer
Speaker 1: resources could get locked up in a crashed application while
Speaker 1: other applications are still working, and eventually that means you
Speaker 1: would run out of computer memory or processing power if
Speaker 1: you couldn't get to those, and you would have to
Speaker 1: do a hard reboot of your system in order to
Speaker 1: free them all up. Again. Design was falling behind, and
Speaker 1: so the team chose to outsource some elements of Chaos
Speaker 1: to third party developers. But despite pulling long hours and
Speaker 1: despite putting outsourced work in there, it became evident that
Speaker 1: there was no way the team was going to get
Speaker 1: everything done and be ready to launch the Amiga on time.
Speaker 1: And while Commodore was being really helpful, that was not
Speaker 1: going to fly. The Commodore did expect results. So in addition,
Speaker 1: the third party that was working on parts of Chaos,
Speaker 1: they found out that Amiga had been bought out by Commodore,
Speaker 1: and suddenly this third party was demanding a whole lot
Speaker 1: more money of that outsourced work, which is kind of
Speaker 1: like if you won the lottery and then all of
Speaker 1: your friends and family started hitting you up for cash
Speaker 1: because they know you've got deep pockets. That was what
Speaker 1: felt like was going on with this third party. Commodor
Speaker 1: tried to negotiate with them, but it all fell apart
Speaker 1: and it became pretty clear the Chaos just had fallen
Speaker 1: into some sort of orderless state of being, if only
Speaker 1: there were a word for that. Anyway, the team would
Speaker 1: pivot and seek out a new solution for their operating system,
Speaker 1: and they chose to use an existing operating system as
Speaker 1: their foundation. It was one that had been developed at
Speaker 1: the University of Cambridge for the PDP eleven computer system.
Speaker 1: It was called trip Os. It was developed by a
Speaker 1: guy named Dr Tim King, and he created a new
Speaker 1: company called MetaComCo specifically to work with Amiga. He took
Speaker 1: the code of trip Os and then began to adapt
Speaker 1: it so that would work on Amiga's chip sets and capabilities,
Speaker 1: and this new code was called Amiga Doss. Amiga Doss
Speaker 1: could do basic operating system functions, but it was not
Speaker 1: going to do everything that the design spec for Chaos
Speaker 1: had called for. It had no resource tracking, which meant
Speaker 1: that if an application crashed, the resources being used for
Speaker 1: that application when it was working might get locked up.
Speaker 1: So that was a bummer. One other battle that was
Speaker 1: taking place before the computer would launch would revolve around
Speaker 1: computer memory. J Minor had really wanted this Amiga computer
Speaker 1: to ship with five kilobytes of RAM because he knew
Speaker 1: that the operating system the graphical user interface would both
Speaker 1: require a decent amount of memory just to work on
Speaker 1: their own before you ever launched an application. But he
Speaker 1: wanted developers to be able to make good programs for
Speaker 1: this computer system. However, RAM was kind of expensive, and
Speaker 1: adding that much RAM would dry up the price of
Speaker 1: the system, and Commodore was worried that that would price
Speaker 1: the computer out of the market. Commodore wanted to ship
Speaker 1: the computer with two fifty six kilobytes of RAM. They
Speaker 1: fought over this. Eventually they made a compromise. J Minor
Speaker 1: essentially threatened to walk away from the company, and the
Speaker 1: compromise was that the computer would ship with two d
Speaker 1: fifty six kilobytes of RAM as a standard, but it
Speaker 1: would also feature an expansion slot or expansion cage as
Speaker 1: it was called, where it would be very easy to
Speaker 1: plug in additional RAM. Finally, the pieces were in place,
Speaker 1: The chip set and motherboard were finalized, the operating system
Speaker 1: was finished. The team then began to design the case.
Speaker 1: They even added their signatures to this design so that
Speaker 1: their signatures would all be on the inside of the
Speaker 1: Amiga computer case. This was something that a lot of
Speaker 1: early personal computer manufacturers did, where they had the designers
Speaker 1: signed their work, but it was all on the inside
Speaker 1: of the case, where you would not see it unless
Speaker 1: you opened up the computer. Every single team member at Amiga,
Speaker 1: including those who joined after Commodore had purchased were part
Speaker 1: of this. Plus j miners Dog, which was a cockapoo
Speaker 1: named Mitchie, had a signature in their pop print. Oh
Speaker 1: and one other valuable team member had a signature in
Speaker 1: this Joe Pillow. Joe Pillows signature is inside the original Amiga.
Speaker 1: Dave Morse, who was the CEO of Amiga he was
Speaker 1: now kind of the the head of Commodore Amiga, even
Speaker 1: had a little bit of input on this case designed.
Speaker 1: The Amiga computer, which was now called the Amiga one thousand,
Speaker 1: would have a raised section on the bottom of the
Speaker 1: machine that would allow the user to kind of slide
Speaker 1: the keyboard in, so it's kind of nestles underneath the
Speaker 1: computer case a little bit, and that way you could
Speaker 1: move the keyboard out of the way whenever you're not
Speaker 1: using the computer. And it was now time to unveil
Speaker 1: the Amigo one thousand to the world, and so Commodore
Speaker 1: decided to make it a big media event. The company
Speaker 1: rented out the Lincoln Center in New York City and
Speaker 1: every Commodore employee in attendance got to wear a tuxedo.
Speaker 1: They were given tuxedos by Commodore. They hired out a
Speaker 1: full orchestra to provide music before and during the event,
Speaker 1: and Bob Parizo was chosen to present on behalf of Amiga.
Speaker 1: He was joined on stage by a computer operator who
Speaker 1: was working on an Amigo one thousand. Cameras would show
Speaker 1: both Bob Barrizo up on stage as well as the
Speaker 1: screen of the Amigo one thousand, and that would be
Speaker 1: projected onto large screens behind the stage so that people
Speaker 1: in the audience could see what was happening in real time. Pariso,
Speaker 1: by the way, came out as an incredible presenter. The
Speaker 1: presentation is actually available on YouTube if you want to
Speaker 1: watch it. I did watch it. It's pretty entertaining. The
Speaker 1: computer capabilities are obviously primitive by today's standards, but you
Speaker 1: have to think back in terms of nine five. They
Speaker 1: were revolutionary back then. Parizzo and the operators showed how
Speaker 1: the Amiga could handle graphics including animation, how it could
Speaker 1: display more colors than other computers on the market, how
Speaker 1: the graphical user interface worked, how the computer could multitask,
Speaker 1: how you can use the same sets of data in
Speaker 1: a spreadsheet to generate multiple graphs and charts and different
Speaker 1: formats at the same time in different windows, how the
Speaker 1: sound system on the computer would work, and more. To
Speaker 1: make sure that the business crowd was appeased and would
Speaker 1: have something to talk about, he also showed off how
Speaker 1: the Amigo one thousand could run an IBM PC emulator.
Speaker 1: They used a program called Amiga Transformer, and the operator
Speaker 1: showed that using that program you could then put in
Speaker 1: a PC doss disk into the system, boot into PC doss,
Speaker 1: then you could load in any software meant for the
Speaker 1: IBM PC and run it. And they showed off Lotus one,
Speaker 1: two three, which was developed for the IBM PC, And
Speaker 1: the argument here was you can use this device to
Speaker 1: run all your IBM business stuff, but it also does
Speaker 1: all this incredible sound and and visual stuff that the
Speaker 1: IBM PC can't do. The presentation also involved an appearance
Speaker 1: by two celebrities. One was Deborah Harry, who was the
Speaker 1: lead singer of an awesome musical group called Blondie. My
Speaker 1: fellow children of the eighties know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: Blondie was a super cool music group. Go check them
Speaker 1: out if you haven't heard of him. And the other
Speaker 1: celebrity was the pop artist Andy Warhol, known for his
Speaker 1: counterculture take on iconography. Now. During this demonstration, a camera
Speaker 1: took a photo of Deborah Harry and a digitizer converted
Speaker 1: the photo into a monochromatic image on the Amiga screen,
Speaker 1: and Andy Warhol used tools in a program called pro
Speaker 1: Paint to add color. Pro Paint was in prototype form,
Speaker 1: so it's amazing, but the whole thing worked, and that
Speaker 1: was a big shock to the programmers who had been
Speaker 1: struggling with pro Paint because as it was frequently crashing
Speaker 1: in the weeks leading up to this demonstration, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure everyone backstage was hoping against hope that it would
Speaker 1: stay stable, and it did. The Amigo one thousand left
Speaker 1: a great impression. Lewis Wallace, who wrote about tech, said
Speaker 1: that it took the best qualities of the Macintosh. It
Speaker 1: took the processing power of an IBM computer, and it
Speaker 1: drastically cut the price tag, which seemed fairly accurate. A
Speaker 1: Macintosh would set you back about two thousand four dollars,
Speaker 1: and the Macintosh had one kilobytes of memory. The Amigo
Speaker 1: one thousand had two versions. It had a two hundred
Speaker 1: fifty six kilobyte version that was priced at one thousand,
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars, and even if you got the full
Speaker 1: five d twelve kilobyte version that was one thousand four dollars,
Speaker 1: that was still a grand cheaper than Apple's Macintosh and
Speaker 1: had way more memory and had way more capabilities. But
Speaker 1: while the reaction to the Amiga was positive, the computer
Speaker 1: wasn't yet available for purchase, and there were other things
Speaker 1: going on at Commodore that would complicate matters for both
Speaker 1: the parent company and for Amiga. But we're gonna save
Speaker 1: that for the next episode, and that next episode we'll
Speaker 1: talk about changes at Commodore that caused issues with Amiga.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about how Jack tramiel Over at Atari kept
Speaker 1: on the fight against Commodore and Amiga, and talk about
Speaker 1: some of the cool stuff that actually was developed with
Speaker 1: the Amiga systems and what happened. So join me for
Speaker 1: that so we can continue this story in the meantime.
Speaker 1: If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
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