Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickling. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in Love all Things Tech. As I
Speaker 1: watched my producer lip sync my intro with me, I
Speaker 1: guess that's a comment about how predictable I've become. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. We're talking about Amiga. We're wrapping up the
Speaker 1: discussion on Amiga. We're going to be cramming a whole
Speaker 1: lot of history in this episode, because we focused a
Speaker 1: lot on the politics that surrounded the launch of the
Speaker 1: Amiga one thousand and then the Amiga five hundred and
Speaker 1: two thousand. By the time the Amiga five hundred in
Speaker 1: two thousand had debuted in seven, the story of Amiga
Speaker 1: had changed considerably. The original people who had led the
Speaker 1: design of that first computer, that Amigo one thousand, we're
Speaker 1: pretty much out of the picture. There still a few
Speaker 1: Amiga engineers and developers who were around and we're working
Speaker 1: at Commodore, but they had been more or less incorporated
Speaker 1: into Commodore's larger structure. The Amiga five hundred debuted at
Speaker 1: a pretty attractive price, It was sold for the princely
Speaker 1: sum of six hundred dollars. If we use an inflation
Speaker 1: calculator to figure out how much that would be in
Speaker 1: today's money, that would be close to about one thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred seventy bucks. The Attari st had debuted at
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars more, but it also came with a monitor,
Speaker 1: and that was for the monochromatic version. If you wanted
Speaker 1: the color monitor version, it was three hundred dollars more
Speaker 1: than the Amiga five hundred. But again, if you bought
Speaker 1: an Amiga five hundred, you had also get a monitor,
Speaker 1: so you could also use a television if you really
Speaker 1: wanted to. Unlike the Amiga one thousand, which Commodore had
Speaker 1: only sold in computer stores, the Amiga five hundred actually
Speaker 1: found its way onto retail shelves like in sears. The
Speaker 1: lower cost and the superior performance in graphics and audio,
Speaker 1: and the wider availability made it a popular gaming platform,
Speaker 1: particularly over in Europe. It did okay in the United States,
Speaker 1: it always did better in Europe than did in the US.
Speaker 1: Developers like Bill Williams would create games that could leverage
Speaker 1: the specialized chip set in the Amiga five hundred to
Speaker 1: accomplish stuff that left the Macintosh and the IBM compatible
Speaker 1: machines of that era in the dust. It was around
Speaker 1: this time that I first got a chance to play
Speaker 1: stuff on an Amiga. I was immediately floored with how
Speaker 1: advanced gaming was on those machines compared to the Apple
Speaker 1: two that I had at home, or even the IBM
Speaker 1: two eighty six that my father was using to write books,
Speaker 1: and whenever he wasn't writing, I was playing games on it.
Speaker 1: It was like nine day when you compared the Amiga
Speaker 1: to other computers. At that time, I could not understand
Speaker 1: why the Amiga was not the dominant computer in the
Speaker 1: consumer market. But to be fair, I was also twelve
Speaker 1: years old, so my capacity for understanding the complexities of
Speaker 1: corporate maneuvers was even less developed than it is now,
Speaker 1: and that's saying something, but I was incredibly impressed. Some games,
Speaker 1: like Williams's title mind Walker, would allow the user to
Speaker 1: run other applications in the background, so you could actually
Speaker 1: take advantage of the Amiga's multitasking capabilities. But soon among
Speaker 1: game developers it became common practice to create software that
Speaker 1: would tap directly into Amiga's hardware. Bypassing the operating system
Speaker 1: and locking the computer into a single task just playing
Speaker 1: a really awesome game. It was a justifiable trade off,
Speaker 1: and I'm pretty sure most gamers didn't really care. Other
Speaker 1: games like Defender of the Crown showcase the Amiga's ability
Speaker 1: to present high resolution, colorful images. Defender of the Crown
Speaker 1: was a strategy game in which you would lead armies
Speaker 1: in a contest for the Crown of England. That game
Speaker 1: launched as an Amiga exclusive, but later ports of the
Speaker 1: game made their way onto lots of other platforms, including
Speaker 1: the IBM PC and even the Nintendo Entertainment System. There
Speaker 1: were lots of other games coming out for the Amiga
Speaker 1: five hundred. The computer system gave developers the chance to
Speaker 1: make really creative choices without being restrained by the hardware
Speaker 1: limitations that were everywhere else. So you had games like
Speaker 1: Shadow of the Beast, which included the ability to incorporate
Speaker 1: up to twelve layers of parallax scrolling, and you might
Speaker 1: wonder what the heck does that mean. Well, parallax scrolling
Speaker 1: is when you can create different speeds of scrolling for
Speaker 1: different layers of an image on a screen. Gives you
Speaker 1: the overall impression of movement. So a lot of side
Speaker 1: scrolling games would use this to create a more compelling experience.
Speaker 1: It's kind of an old trick. You have stuff that's
Speaker 1: in the foreground so close to the viewer moving at
Speaker 1: a faster speed than stuff that's in the background, and
Speaker 1: it gives you the sense that the stuff that's in
Speaker 1: the background actually is further away. That's why moving past
Speaker 1: it takes longer. And uh the uh. The Shadow of
Speaker 1: the Beast could actually have up to twelve layers of this.
Speaker 1: That's pretty much unheard of during that time. The popular
Speaker 1: game series Limmings also debuted on Amiga gosh. I love
Speaker 1: that game. This was one of the games that my
Speaker 1: friend had. Limings. That game, in case you're not familiar,
Speaker 1: was one where you have a group of critters Limmings,
Speaker 1: little green haired creatures that it was your job to
Speaker 1: move them from one part of a level to the
Speaker 1: exit of that level, and you did this by giving
Speaker 1: different limings various jobs, like they might have to dig
Speaker 1: through earth to get to the end part, or they
Speaker 1: might have to parachute to get down to another level
Speaker 1: and build a platform back up so that the other
Speaker 1: Limings can get down and if you lost too many
Speaker 1: lemmings because they were very fragile, then you would fail
Speaker 1: the level. And I just I can still remember the
Speaker 1: sound they would make when you would tell them to
Speaker 1: self destruct. They do a little no and then pop
Speaker 1: out of existence with confetti. But while games were starting
Speaker 1: to take off of the Amiga fire, the system did
Speaker 1: not become a mega hit in the US. A different
Speaker 1: product would really show off how powerful the Amiga platform was,
Speaker 1: and it would ultimately become a combination of an expansion
Speaker 1: card and some software, and it was called the Video Toaster.
Speaker 1: And this was for the Amiga two thousand and here's
Speaker 1: where the story of Amiga's past really would come into play.
Speaker 1: The original intent for the Amiga, back when it was
Speaker 1: first in the design phase, before any hardware had been built,
Speaker 1: was that it was going to primarily be a video
Speaker 1: game system, and as part of that, from the beginning,
Speaker 1: it was made to be compatible with television frequencies, meaning
Speaker 1: you could hook it directly up to a TV. Other
Speaker 1: computers were reliant on computer monitors, and you had sinking
Speaker 1: issues if you wanted to send a signal out from
Speaker 1: a computer to a television. Often the frequencies didn't match up.
Speaker 1: The gen lock in the Amiga two thousand would let
Speaker 1: a user overlay graphics on top of a video signal
Speaker 1: in either in TSC or PAL formats. A guy named
Speaker 1: Tim Jensen, was an electrical mechanical engineer, would take advantage
Speaker 1: of this capability. He had already created a program called
Speaker 1: digit View that would allow him to take a snapshot
Speaker 1: of a video so he could run a video on
Speaker 1: his Amiga. Use this program and capture a single frame
Speaker 1: and save that to an Amiga floppy disk. He saved
Speaker 1: some images to a disk which also happened to have
Speaker 1: his contact information stored on that disc, and he shared
Speaker 1: it with a guy named Jeff Bruett who worked for Commodore.
Speaker 1: Soon his work was being spread around, and because his
Speaker 1: information was still on that disc, he started getting contacted
Speaker 1: by people who wanted to explore the possibilities of using
Speaker 1: the Amiga to work with video in a more robust way.
Speaker 1: Jennison founded a company called new Tech. His programs did
Speaker 1: Your You and digit Paint We're both big hits. And
Speaker 1: then a guy named Paul Montgomery, who really wanted to
Speaker 1: develop a tool that would allow for video manipulation and
Speaker 1: editing joined New Tech, and he came up to Jennison
Speaker 1: and he said, what if we made a program that
Speaker 1: would let you do stuff like squish a video image
Speaker 1: or even flip it. So now you're looking at the
Speaker 1: mirror image of that video. What would it take to
Speaker 1: do that? And Jennison's initial response was, you take a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars. I mean, you're talking about the capabilities
Speaker 1: that a video editing studio running hardware that's dollars easy,
Speaker 1: plus software that's way more expensive than that. It's just
Speaker 1: it's it's financially impossible. But Jennison became obsessed with this idea, like,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe I could figure out a way to do
Speaker 1: this using an Amiga. You know, do the same thing
Speaker 1: that these specific purpose workstation do, but I can do
Speaker 1: it with a general purpose computer like the Amiga. So
Speaker 1: he started thinking about this and Montgomery, Jennison, and a
Speaker 1: guy named Brad Carvey, who trivia here is the brother
Speaker 1: of comedian Dana Carvey got together and started working out
Speaker 1: what it would take to allow an Amiga to manipulate
Speaker 1: video this way. They created a hardware design that would
Speaker 1: interface through an expansion slot on the Amiga, and they
Speaker 1: created some software to give them some early primitive capabilities.
Speaker 1: They built out a prototype of this concept and in
Speaker 1: November they showed off their idea at the Comdex computer
Speaker 1: trade show. The demonstration was a huge hit, and the
Speaker 1: team continued to work on their idea with the goal
Speaker 1: of creating an expansion card and software kit that would
Speaker 1: be able to handle all the tasks that you would
Speaker 1: find in a network video editing bay. And it would
Speaker 1: take three years total and three fifty thousand lines of code,
Speaker 1: much of which was written in the assembly language of
Speaker 1: the Motorola sixty eight thousand chip empowered the Amiga. When
Speaker 1: the product finally came out, it cost just under two thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred dollars. But if you bought Video Toaster, you
Speaker 1: would get an expansion card, you would get a collection
Speaker 1: of eight floppy disks holding a set of programs, and
Speaker 1: you would suddenly have the power to do video editing
Speaker 1: like a full system. Um. But here's the things that
Speaker 1: even if you bought a brand new Amiga two thousand
Speaker 1: and a copy of Video Toaster, that would set you
Speaker 1: back less than five thousand dollars. That was a fraction
Speaker 1: of what it would cost if you wanted a professional system,
Speaker 1: and yet you would have all the capabilities of a
Speaker 1: professional system. This turned the Amiga two thousand into the
Speaker 1: go to computer system if you were working in video.
Speaker 1: These days, the Mac platform is frequently favored by people
Speaker 1: who edit video or audio, including people here at how
Speaker 1: stuff Works. The Mac isn't quite as dominant in that
Speaker 1: position as it used to be, thanks to some advances
Speaker 1: in PC software suits over the last several years, not
Speaker 1: to mention some decisions that Apple has made with some
Speaker 1: of its editing software that has let's say, cheese off
Speaker 1: some long time editors. But you know, for the longest time,
Speaker 1: you'd say the Mac was the dominant video and audio
Speaker 1: editing platform. Well, in the nineties it was the Amiga
Speaker 1: two thousand. I've got more to say, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The Amiga
Speaker 1: and Video Toaster had an immediate effect on the appearance
Speaker 1: of video because producers now had access to video effects
Speaker 1: that would have previously cost them tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars to use, which led to a saturation of certain
Speaker 1: video effects. You started to see them everywhere, to the
Speaker 1: point where they became cliched and a joke. So today,
Speaker 1: if you were to see a star wipe in a video,
Speaker 1: you would probably hear a lot of people chuckling, especially
Speaker 1: anyone who had worked in video editing. That is a
Speaker 1: very dated kind of look. It's cheesy, but that's largely
Speaker 1: because that effect got so much use in the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties because the Amiga and video Toaster made it so accessible. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: back in the executive offices over at Commodore, chief executive
Speaker 1: Irving Gould would hire Max Toy to become the president
Speaker 1: and chief operating officer of the company in the fall
Speaker 1: of nine. Toy would say that no contract would be
Speaker 1: necessary to guarantee his loyalty. That was obviously a dig
Speaker 1: at at Ratigan, the former CEO of Commodore, who had
Speaker 1: been fired by Irving Gould earlier that year, and he
Speaker 1: said that the day he would require a contract would
Speaker 1: be the last day he would ever work at Commodore.
Speaker 1: And I guess that day must have happened two years later,
Speaker 1: because that's when he got fired. He got the boot,
Speaker 1: and Commodore then hired a guy named Harold Copperman from IBM,
Speaker 1: and also he had worked at Apple and now he
Speaker 1: was there to lead the United States division of Commodore.
Speaker 1: So why was Max Toy dismissed? Well, for one thing,
Speaker 1: Irving Gould was still extremely impatient, and he still wanted
Speaker 1: results super fast some people would say unreasonably fast. And
Speaker 1: for another, Toy was apparently on the losing side of
Speaker 1: an internal disagreement within Commodore, one that would actually revolve
Speaker 1: around the Amiga. So the disagreement kind of split the
Speaker 1: company into two big camps. In one camp where the
Speaker 1: engineers and developers who wanted to continue to develop the
Speaker 1: Amiga platform, they saw a potential in building out a
Speaker 1: powerful machine that could outpace all competitors in the consumer market,
Speaker 1: specifically when it came to graphics and audio. That camp
Speaker 1: felt the reason that Commodore continued to struggle as a
Speaker 1: company was not due to the quality of its products
Speaker 1: so much, but more in how those products were being
Speaker 1: marketed and sold. They were sure that the Amiga approach
Speaker 1: would win out if it was just given the proper
Speaker 1: chance and promotion. The other camp in which Toy was
Speaker 1: entrenched was that Commodore should just abandon the Amiga platform
Speaker 1: and instead concentrate on producing IBM compatible machines. This was
Speaker 1: the era of the IBM clone. IBM had used off
Speaker 1: the shelf components to build its personal computers, so that
Speaker 1: meant that you could buy those same off the shelf
Speaker 1: components and build your same machines, very similar to diabem.
Speaker 1: More importantly, IBM had failed to secure an exclusive license
Speaker 1: from Microsoft for MS DOSS, so you could then license
Speaker 1: ms DOS from Microsoft yourself and sell your own cheaper
Speaker 1: version of IBM computers to customers. This would technically have
Speaker 1: been easier for Commodore to do than to create new
Speaker 1: architecture based off the Amiga architecture, but critics of that
Speaker 1: plan said, yeah, it's easier, but the profit margins are
Speaker 1: also much lower. Commodore would have to pit its IBM
Speaker 1: clones against all the other IBM clones that were flooding
Speaker 1: the market, and ultimately this side lost, and so did
Speaker 1: Max Toy. Harold Copperman would come on board. Copperman's appointment
Speaker 1: was met with some trepidation from outside the company. I
Speaker 1: read an article that was very skeptical about the whole
Speaker 1: situation because at this point the company had a reputation
Speaker 1: now for having a revolving door. When it came to
Speaker 1: chief executives because you had Jack Tramiel and Thomas Rattigan,
Speaker 1: you had Max Toy and now Harold Copperman, all filling
Speaker 1: that role since nineteen four and now it's nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Nine had seemed to start off well for Amiga. Commodore
Speaker 1: had announced in January nine nine that one million Amiga
Speaker 1: computers had been sold up to that point. Also, one
Speaker 1: other executive took a position at the top of Commodore
Speaker 1: in early nineteen eighty nine. That would be Medi Ali.
Speaker 1: That was the man who had come on board of
Speaker 1: with Commodore as a consultant. He had been an advisor
Speaker 1: to Irving Gould, and he was the one who told
Speaker 1: Gould to fire former CEO Ratigan just a few years earlier. Well,
Speaker 1: now Ali was able to convince Gould to hire Ali
Speaker 1: on as the President of Commodore International, which was largely
Speaker 1: a vacant position for most of Commodore's existence, but now
Speaker 1: made a Ali would inhabit it. Copperman would be president
Speaker 1: and CEO of Commodore's US operations. In November nine, Commodore
Speaker 1: announced the Amiga twenty five hundred. This was essentially an
Speaker 1: Amiga two thousand with a new pair of coprocessors, so
Speaker 1: just a modest improvement over the Amiga two thousand. In
Speaker 1: n Commodore would offer Amiga one thousand owners a thousand
Speaker 1: dollar trade and deal if they would upgrade to an
Speaker 1: Amiga two thousand machine. This is also when the video
Speaker 1: toaster products became official and you can actually go out
Speaker 1: and buy it. The company would then announce the Amiga
Speaker 1: three thousand. This was a slightly bigger upgrade than the
Speaker 1: still a modest one, had a new CPU and also
Speaker 1: had a new chip set, and a brand new Amiga
Speaker 1: three thousand with a monitor would set you back four
Speaker 1: thousand one dollars. Truly a princely sum. Commodore would hold
Speaker 1: a swanky presentation to show off the three thousand. Kind
Speaker 1: of reminds me of the initial Amiga launch that came
Speaker 1: out back in Copperman gave the presentation that night, and
Speaker 1: the focus was on multimedia applications, something the Amiga was
Speaker 1: particularly well suited for. There were more changes in executive leadership.
Speaker 1: Copperman resigned, perhaps he was blamed for the moderate performance
Speaker 1: of the Amiga three thous and never really took off
Speaker 1: in sales and it turned out that only the hardcore
Speaker 1: Amiga fans were buying those computers. Other people were happy
Speaker 1: to stick with the Amiga five or the Amiga two thousand.
Speaker 1: James Dion would be named General Manager of US Sales
Speaker 1: slash Head of the United States part of Commodore. At
Speaker 1: this point, it gets real tricky to talk about titles
Speaker 1: because they seem to be somewhat nebulous at the executive
Speaker 1: level at Commodore. There were also some pretty dark jokes
Speaker 1: going around at Commodore at this point because they had
Speaker 1: seen so many leaders go in and out of that position.
Speaker 1: So the joke was, if you were named the head
Speaker 1: of Commodore US, you would move into your executive office
Speaker 1: and on your desk there will be three envelopes that
Speaker 1: say open in case of financial emergency, and they'd be
Speaker 1: labeled one, two, and three. So the first time you
Speaker 1: hit a rough patch, you open envelope number one, and
Speaker 1: inside there's a message that says, blame your predecessor, so
Speaker 1: you would lay all the aim of all the problems
Speaker 1: on the guy who was in that position before you.
Speaker 1: The second time you encounter a rough financial patch, you
Speaker 1: open up envelope two, and that one says, blame your
Speaker 1: vice presidents. So then you go blaming all the people
Speaker 1: who work underneath you. The third time you hit a
Speaker 1: financial rough patch, you open envelope three and a message
Speaker 1: inside says, prepare three envelopes. It seemed like working for
Speaker 1: Gould was tough, and it probably didn't help that Irving
Speaker 1: Gould was frequently changing his base of operations. He was
Speaker 1: moving around a lot, and I saw at least one
Speaker 1: guy say that he suspected the reason Irving Gould would
Speaker 1: pick up stakes and move to a different place and
Speaker 1: then force shareholder meetings to take place wherever he happened
Speaker 1: to be at the time was so that he could
Speaker 1: take advantage of the most favorable tax policies at any
Speaker 1: given time, so essentially sheltering himself from having to pay
Speaker 1: too much tax. That was the allegation. I have no
Speaker 1: idea if it's true, but he certainly did pop around
Speaker 1: a lot. Coming or introduced three new computers in the
Speaker 1: Amiga line. You had the Amiga six hundred, which was
Speaker 1: a low cost machine that had a base price of
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars and actually had fewer features than the
Speaker 1: Amiga five hundred, so very confusing. Higher number, fewer features,
Speaker 1: and the initial cost at that point, the Amiga five
Speaker 1: hundred was actually cheaper than the Amigas six hundred. When
Speaker 1: the six hundred launched, because the five d been out
Speaker 1: for a couple of years, not many people wanted to
Speaker 1: get an Amiga six hundred. There was very little reason too,
Speaker 1: why would you want a computer that was less powerful
Speaker 1: than an older machine that was actually less expensive. At
Speaker 1: that point, the company started producing more Amiga six hundreds.
Speaker 1: Then it was producing Amiga five hundreds. Technically both were
Speaker 1: still in production, but they began to scale back on
Speaker 1: the five hundreds. That actually led to losses because again
Speaker 1: people didn't want the six hundreds. Later, the Amiga four
Speaker 1: thousand would debut. It had a more powerful processor and
Speaker 1: it had a boosted chip set. The chips had names
Speaker 1: like super Gary, Super Ramsey, and super Amber, and there
Speaker 1: was also Alice Lisa at Good Old Paula. And at
Speaker 1: the end of nineteen nine two the Amiga twelve hundred
Speaker 1: came out. The twelve hundred would be a pretty successful machine,
Speaker 1: but the company was making more Amiga six hundreds than
Speaker 1: five hundreds or twelve hundreds, so the computers that people
Speaker 1: wanted were being made in fewer quantities than the computers
Speaker 1: nobody wanted. By nine two, Amiga sales were on the rise,
Speaker 1: with a seventeen percent over figures, and it looked like
Speaker 1: it could be a turning point for a Commodore, And
Speaker 1: I guess it kind of was, except it wasn't a
Speaker 1: good turning point. In James Dion would resign as the
Speaker 1: head of US operations, so once again that place was vacant.
Speaker 1: So now we have Tramuel Ratigan, Toy Copperman, and Dion
Speaker 1: as the various heads of Commodore in the United States,
Speaker 1: since medi Ali and Irving Gould were still at the
Speaker 1: tippy top. Gould was still the dire act. Medi Ali
Speaker 1: was still the head of Commodore International. During all of this,
Speaker 1: the engineers and developers who were down at the base level,
Speaker 1: we're still doing their best to make the Amiga platform
Speaker 1: as good as they could possibly make it with the
Speaker 1: resources that they had available to them, but those resources
Speaker 1: were getting cut back year over year. It was getting
Speaker 1: increasingly difficult to do. Commodore also had a reputation for
Speaker 1: not treating their engineers and programmers very well. They were
Speaker 1: underpaid compared to others in their industry, although just to
Speaker 1: be totally fair, most of their competing companies were based
Speaker 1: in California, and that's a more expensive place to live
Speaker 1: than Pennsylvania, so some of that was cost of living,
Speaker 1: but they were still underpaid compared to their peers. In ninete,
Speaker 1: Commodore would post a loss of three hundred sixties six
Speaker 1: million dollars. Sales dropped by twenty percent. In nineteen, after
Speaker 1: the first quarter of the fiscal year, Commodore posted another loss.
Speaker 1: This time it was eight point two million, which was
Speaker 1: technically an improvement from the previous year, but still a loss.
Speaker 1: And then Commodore sent out a warning message to investors
Speaker 1: saying that the company might have to prepare for bankruptcy proceedings,
Speaker 1: and the stock price took a nose dive. It all
Speaker 1: came to a head on April nine. That's when Commodore
Speaker 1: International Limited stated it would begin liquidating all assets and
Speaker 1: would file for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, including Amiga, was at
Speaker 1: the beginning of the end, but not quite the end.
Speaker 1: Amiga would limp on sword of I'll explain more in
Speaker 1: just a second, but first let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Now, these episodes are supposed to
Speaker 1: be about Amiga, not Commodore. But to understand why Amiga
Speaker 1: never managed to establish itself as a viable alternative to
Speaker 1: the Macintosh or the IBM PC clone here in the
Speaker 1: United States requires a lot of talk about Commodore because
Speaker 1: the problems were largely based in corporate politics. Again, not
Speaker 1: the technology of the Amiga, which was pretty darn cool,
Speaker 1: but because of managers and executives and the shuffling that
Speaker 1: was going on constantly at Commodore. Irving Gould, the investor
Speaker 1: who had been pulling the strings at Commodore ever since
Speaker 1: he convinced the board to kick founder Jack Tramial to
Speaker 1: the curb, is often blamed for Commodore's ultimate failure. Now,
Speaker 1: he didn't take a hands on approach to managing the
Speaker 1: day to day operations of the company. He had no
Speaker 1: interest in doing that. But at the same time, he
Speaker 1: wanted dramatic and rapid returns on his investment, and when
Speaker 1: he didn't see results that were fast enough for him,
Speaker 1: he would come in and change leadership. Those leaders would
Speaker 1: often make changes themselves sometimes that helps establish their new
Speaker 1: role at a company. You probably have experienced something like
Speaker 1: this at the point, you might have gotten a new
Speaker 1: boss sometime or seen a new boss come in and
Speaker 1: make seemingly unnecessary changes to a away a company or
Speaker 1: a division does things. Sometimes that's to make a mark
Speaker 1: on a business, to say, well, this way I can
Speaker 1: set myself apart from my predecessor. Often it means disrupting things,
Speaker 1: sometimes just so that you can establish yourself, and meanwhile
Speaker 1: the company starts to fall behind. Well, that happened a
Speaker 1: lot at Commodore because Gould kept replacing the head of
Speaker 1: US operations, and he would get impatient when he wasn't
Speaker 1: seeing good results, and he would do it all over again,
Speaker 1: and that would just keep things going in a state
Speaker 1: of chaos over at the corporate level. In addition, Commodore
Speaker 1: owed debts to many companies, and several of those companies
Speaker 1: happened to be owned by Irving Gould himself. So back
Speaker 1: when Jack Tramiel was still with Commodore, the founder of Commodore,
Speaker 1: when he was the head, he argued that Commodore should
Speaker 1: issue more shares of stock. At one point, what he
Speaker 1: wanted to do was issue shares of stock to raise
Speaker 1: more money to pay off some of Commodore's debts. So
Speaker 1: essentially he was saying, let's increase the percentage of ownership
Speaker 1: out there on the market. Irvin Gould said, no, that's dumb.
Speaker 1: But he was doing that for two very selfish reasons.
Speaker 1: One was, Irvin Gould was a majority shareholder in Commodore.
Speaker 1: So if you put more stocks out there on the market,
Speaker 1: offering up more ownership of Commodore, that means that Gould's
Speaker 1: percentage would get smaller because now there's more of the
Speaker 1: ownership out there on the market, and unless Gould was
Speaker 1: to buy up those shares, it would mean he would
Speaker 1: have less leverage over the company. Secondly, he didn't want
Speaker 1: those debts paid off because it gave him leverage over
Speaker 1: the company, so he would shoot down this idea of
Speaker 1: issuing more shares of stock. Then you had Medi Ali,
Speaker 1: the consultant who was picked by Gould to serve as
Speaker 1: the head of Commodore International. He also played a really
Speaker 1: large role in Commodore's failure. According to many people who
Speaker 1: worked for Commodore, one of Ali's big moves as leader
Speaker 1: was to increase his own salary and that of Irving
Speaker 1: Gould's as well. The two wouldn't make an awful lot
Speaker 1: of money. They were making more money than pretty much
Speaker 1: every other CEO in the computer industry, so that money
Speaker 1: had to come from somewhere. One source was Commodore's research
Speaker 1: and development departments. Ali would gut the funding for that
Speaker 1: over the years, cutting back research and development year over year,
Speaker 1: but he also torpedoed what could have been a lucrative
Speaker 1: licensing deal. There was a point where Sun Microsystems wanted
Speaker 1: to license a Mega technology and use them in their workstations,
Speaker 1: but Ali said, oh, sure, we'll let you do that,
Speaker 1: but he set an unrealistic fee, a ridiculously high licensing fee,
Speaker 1: and Sun microsystem said, pound sand, We're going to go
Speaker 1: somewhere else, and they left. When the company would actually
Speaker 1: fall apart, there was a new chip set that was
Speaker 1: actually in development at that time. It was called the
Speaker 1: Advanced Amiga Architecture or Triple a A. It was the
Speaker 1: most dramatic overhaul of the original Amiga chip set to date.
Speaker 1: The previous chips that had been tweaked in the past
Speaker 1: had all been what they called enhanced versions of the
Speaker 1: earlier architecture that J. Minor and his team had developed
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties. But while this project was in development.
Speaker 1: Medi Ali kept cutting the department's funding, so by the
Speaker 1: time Commodore was declaring bankruptcy, there was only one engineer
Speaker 1: left working on that project. And as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: having a project to redesign the architecture of chips fall
Speaker 1: on one person shoulders means that it's never gonna get done.
Speaker 1: There's just only so much work one person can do. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: PC graphics were starting to catch up to Amiga's position.
Speaker 1: The v g A graphics standard allowed PC manufacturers to
Speaker 1: incorporate hardware that was capable of running fast action games
Speaker 1: at a pretty low resolution three by two pixels with
Speaker 1: two fifty six colors. And I know that sounds like
Speaker 1: nothing compared to today's graphics, and it really isn't anything
Speaker 1: compared to today's graphics, but back then it was a
Speaker 1: big deal. Just trust me on this. Now. Amiga, however,
Speaker 1: could display up to four thousand, ninety six colors if
Speaker 1: it was running in HAM mode, but that mode could
Speaker 1: not respond rapidly to changes, so while it could show
Speaker 1: more colors than PCs, it couldn't do it in these
Speaker 1: applications like a fast action game. It was fine for
Speaker 1: slower moving games, but the fast action. The computer just
Speaker 1: couldn't keep up with it, so you wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to play a game like Doom with four thousand, ninety
Speaker 1: six colors on an Amiga. You would have to have
Speaker 1: something to make the Amiga run faster, so it could
Speaker 1: not do the same thing that the IBM PC could
Speaker 1: do um without running at a severe disadvantage where it's
Speaker 1: displaying like thirty two colors on the screen st of
Speaker 1: two fifty six. So it was just starting to fall behind,
Speaker 1: and Commodore wasn't giving the assets to developers to counteract that.
Speaker 1: When Commodore was going out of business, there were still
Speaker 1: engineers hoping to create the next generation of Amiga computers.
Speaker 1: There was the Ombre project that was meant to incorporate
Speaker 1: a three D graphics accelerator card with a powerful processor
Speaker 1: to make the Amiga top in the realm again when
Speaker 1: it came to graphics, but the project lacked the funding
Speaker 1: it needed to make any progress and ultimately fell apart.
Speaker 1: Following bankruptcy was a long process to figure out how
Speaker 1: to auction off Commodore's us as sets. This was more
Speaker 1: complicated than most companies, largely because commodore structure was particularly tricky.
Speaker 1: I've seen some people suggest that this was by design
Speaker 1: so that it would provide Irving Gould the equivalent of
Speaker 1: a tax shelter. I do not know if that's the truth.
Speaker 1: What I know is that it took a long time
Speaker 1: to sort everything out so that the auction could actually happen.
Speaker 1: Things were different in Europe. By the way. Commodore UK
Speaker 1: had managed to stay profitable while the U S branch
Speaker 1: was flailing around, So Commodore UK was still fine, and
Speaker 1: so if you lived in the UK you could still
Speaker 1: go out and buy Amiga computers from Commodore while the
Speaker 1: US side was fading away. The head of UK operations
Speaker 1: was a guy named David Pleasants, and he had a
Speaker 1: grand plan. He wanted to purchase the assets of all
Speaker 1: of Commodore at auction, including Amiga. So he went to
Speaker 1: some investors and raised some money, and he reached out
Speaker 1: to a company in China called new Star Electronics, and
Speaker 1: his goal was to continue Commodore operations, not just own
Speaker 1: the assets, but keep building Commodore machines and even develop
Speaker 1: new computer systems based on that architecture, so the Amiga
Speaker 1: could potentially have a future. There were a few other
Speaker 1: contenders that also we're vying to purchase Commodore's assets. One
Speaker 1: was Dell Computer, but its bid actually was too late
Speaker 1: for consideration. Another was a company called s Com, which
Speaker 1: made PCs in Europe. As COM's bid was lower than
Speaker 1: the one that pleasants As Group had made, But then
Speaker 1: just a couple of days before the auction was to
Speaker 1: actually take place, the Chinese company New Star would back
Speaker 1: out of the deal, and Pleasants was forced to cancel
Speaker 1: his bid, and so s Com would end up getting
Speaker 1: possession of Commodore brand and all of its assets in
Speaker 1: the US. As COM's leader, this guy named Manfred Schmidt,
Speaker 1: who had split Commodore's assets and create two companies. One
Speaker 1: of those two companies was Amiga Technologies. He put a
Speaker 1: guy named Petro Ti Schinko, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing
Speaker 1: that name. It has got way too many letters in
Speaker 1: it for a ignorant Americans such as myself to say properly,
Speaker 1: so I'm just gonna call him Petro. The Amiga would
Speaker 1: continue on in Europe for a little while longer, but
Speaker 1: there were no manufacturing facilities left after the collapse of Commodore,
Speaker 1: so there's no place to make new computers. They could
Speaker 1: sell the ones that were in inventory, but they couldn't
Speaker 1: really make more of them. Work was being done to
Speaker 1: bring new facilities online, but for the most part the
Speaker 1: company was existing off selling the Amiga twelve hundred. They
Speaker 1: did do some tweaks to the twelve hundred to try
Speaker 1: and remain relevant because the system was quickly aging out.
Speaker 1: It was a few years old, so they had to
Speaker 1: keep making minor changes to it, but they couldn't just
Speaker 1: make something new yet. S Com, the parent company of
Speaker 1: Amiga Technologies, followed in the footsteps of Commodore, falling prey
Speaker 1: to what some people called the Commodore curse, and it
Speaker 1: too declared bankruptcy. The company had expanded too quickly, it
Speaker 1: had overextended its reach, and the Amiga assets again went
Speaker 1: to auction. This time, the company Gateway two thousand, later
Speaker 1: known just as Gateway, would win the intellectual property and
Speaker 1: Amiga brand in and the new philosophy would require a
Speaker 1: huge change in direction for Amiga. The idea was that
Speaker 1: Gateway was going to create a line of Amiga products,
Speaker 1: ranging from tablets to workstations to set top boxes, all
Speaker 1: of them would run on the same operating system. This
Speaker 1: would have required new architecture and new software, and so
Speaker 1: it would not be based off the old Amiga design,
Speaker 1: but it was meant to follow a philosophy similar to
Speaker 1: the one that Amiga embodied. Sadly, apart from some prototypes,
Speaker 1: this never really got off the ground. Management changed at
Speaker 1: Gateway and the project was ultimately scuttled as the company
Speaker 1: moved to all off Amiga to someone else. This time
Speaker 1: there were fewer contenders. The Amiga was rapidly heading toward obsolescence.
Speaker 1: The last new machine to come out was the Amiga
Speaker 1: twelve hundred, and that had come out in n So
Speaker 1: a couple of former Gateway employees were able to put
Speaker 1: together a new company called Amino Development, and they got
Speaker 1: some investors and they purchased the non patent technologies of Amiga.
Speaker 1: Then they changed their company name to Amiga Technologies later
Speaker 1: Amiga Incorporated. They had big plans, but apart from a
Speaker 1: game pack that could turn a p d A into
Speaker 1: an Amiga compatible gaming system, it didn't really pan out.
Speaker 1: The dot com crash dealt another huge blow. The company
Speaker 1: partnered with some manufacturing facilities to make some motherboards, and
Speaker 1: there was a software developer called Hyperion Entertainment out of Belgium.
Speaker 1: I believe it was that was designed to or designated
Speaker 1: to make the next generation of the Amiga operating system,
Speaker 1: Amiga OS four, but the whole system never really quite coalesced.
Speaker 1: Amiga Incorporated existed at least in name until two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: but then the owner did not renew the copyright on
Speaker 1: the name, and now that's essentially gone as well. You
Speaker 1: can get hold of some of those motherboards, and the
Speaker 1: Amiga OS four point oh still exists. But a lot
Speaker 1: of people say that Amiga is kind of stuck in
Speaker 1: time now because there's just not enough development behind it,
Speaker 1: so there's not gonna be any advance in Amiga technology.
Speaker 1: You could use an emulator and play old Amiga games,
Speaker 1: but no new ones are going to be developed most likely,
Speaker 1: or if they are developed, they're gonna have to exist
Speaker 1: on that older architecture because there's no one there to
Speaker 1: develop the next generation. So it's pretty sad. It was
Speaker 1: a tough, tough story. I mean, it was one of
Speaker 1: those things that started off so promising back in the
Speaker 1: early eighties, but multiple setbacks leg Demiga throughout its history.
Speaker 1: From the video game crash of three, to declaring Commodore
Speaker 1: declaring bankruptcy, and to this essential fizzling out in two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixteen, although you could argue that the company
Speaker 1: was long gone before that. Anyway, maybe one day we'll
Speaker 1: see a re emergence of the Amiga brand in a
Speaker 1: serious way. Maybe it will be able to to hold
Speaker 1: true to j Minors vision when he first founded the
Speaker 1: company back in the early eighties. But for now, that
Speaker 1: is the end of the Amiga story and the end
Speaker 1: of this series of episodes. If you guys have any
Speaker 1: suggestions for future topics, whether it's a company, a technology,
Speaker 1: someone in tech, maybe there's someone you want me to interview,
Speaker 1: send me a message let me know. The email address
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