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 am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: over at How Stuff Works and a lot of all
Speaker 1: things tech. And we are continuing our discussion about Amiga.
Speaker 1: We have this episode and one more to go, because
Speaker 1: that story is crazy complicated, not from a technology standpoint
Speaker 1: so much as from a business standpoint, because Amiga was
Speaker 1: so involved in the political maneuverings of other companies like
Speaker 1: Atari and Commodore. But in the last episode, I left
Speaker 1: off with the debut of the Amiga one thousand, the
Speaker 1: initial original Amiga computer. Commodore, the electronics and computer company,
Speaker 1: had purchased Amiga in four and had saved it from
Speaker 1: being gutted by Atari and hold out all the stops
Speaker 1: to show off this new computer in a lavish presentation
Speaker 1: at the Lincoln Center in New York City. And I
Speaker 1: talked all about that in the last episode, and the
Speaker 1: computer was heading towards store shelves eventually, And because it's
Speaker 1: going to come back in this episode a lot, here's
Speaker 1: a quick reminder. Jack Tramiel was the founder of Commodore,
Speaker 1: but he was forced to resign by the board of
Speaker 1: directors UH, led by investor Irving Gould, after Tramuel had
Speaker 1: led Commodore to push Texas Instruments out of the computer
Speaker 1: business using drastic competition and price cutting. But Tramuel then
Speaker 1: went on to go to Warner Communications, which owned Atari,
Speaker 1: and in the wake of the video game crash in Nree,
Speaker 1: that company seemed to be worth very little. So Tramuel
Speaker 1: bought the video game console and computer divisions of Attari
Speaker 1: from Warner Communications for no down payment, and he was
Speaker 1: the one who would really go after Amiga, using a
Speaker 1: five thousand dollar loan to Amiga, and if Amiga was
Speaker 1: not able to pay that loan back, Atari was going
Speaker 1: to get control of Amiga's chip set design. But then
Speaker 1: Commodore got into the picture and ended up buying Amiga
Speaker 1: for twenty four million dollars. And all of that is
Speaker 1: important to remember when we talk about the things that
Speaker 1: happened in the next couple of years. So while the
Speaker 1: folks at Amiga continued to work to get their Amiga
Speaker 1: one thousand ready to ship, they had shown it off
Speaker 1: at a big press event, but it still wasn't ready
Speaker 1: to buy in stores. Commodore was going through a bit
Speaker 1: of a cash crisis. The Commodore sixty four was the
Speaker 1: best selling computer of all time, but one of the
Speaker 1: reasons it sold so well was that Tramuel had been
Speaker 1: so aggressive pricing the Commodore sixty four at a low
Speaker 1: fee in order to fight off Texas instruments that the
Speaker 1: computers really popular, but the profit margin was pretty low,
Speaker 1: so they weren't making a lot of money per sale.
Speaker 1: Commodore had launched several eight bit computers to follow up
Speaker 1: on the Commodore sixty four. Commodore sixty four was also
Speaker 1: an eight bit computer. These computers were technically competing against
Speaker 1: the Commodore sixty four, which was a bit strange, and
Speaker 1: some of them were a little interesting. There was the
Speaker 1: Commodore s X sixty four. That one was a semi
Speaker 1: portable PC. I called semi portable because it weighed more
Speaker 1: than twenty pounds and you had to plug it into
Speaker 1: a an a c uh wall outlet. There there was
Speaker 1: no onboard battery that would let you work with it
Speaker 1: without it being plugged in. It was interesting but didn't
Speaker 1: sell very well. Commodore would discontinue it in nineteen eighties six,
Speaker 1: but they also launched the Commodore Plus Slash four four.
Speaker 1: This was built on an earlier computer architecture called the
Speaker 1: Commodore sixteen. Commodore sixteen was a holy incompatible architecture with
Speaker 1: the Commodore sixty four. You could not run software written
Speaker 1: for the Commodore sixty four on the Commodore sixteen. The
Speaker 1: same was true for the Commodore Plus Slash four You
Speaker 1: could not run Commodore sixty four software on it. And
Speaker 1: so there really was no place in the market for
Speaker 1: this odd computer, and so it didn't sell well either.
Speaker 1: The question came up, why would I buy this other
Speaker 1: eight bit based computer if it's not compatible with this
Speaker 1: really popular one, And no one really had the answer
Speaker 1: to that. And then there was the Commodore one. This
Speaker 1: was still an eight bit computer, and you might wonder,
Speaker 1: why are you we calling them eight bit computers if
Speaker 1: you have Commodore sixty four a Commodore. Well, that actually
Speaker 1: referred to the amount of RAM or read access memory
Speaker 1: in the machine, not not the the processor, but the
Speaker 1: actual amount of memory. So the Commodore had a D
Speaker 1: twenty eight kilobytes of memory. It actually had two processors,
Speaker 1: one of those was meant to handle processes or applications
Speaker 1: that were associated with Commodore sixty four, and the other
Speaker 1: was meant to handle Commodore one eight software, so we
Speaker 1: could work on both. Unlike many of Commodore's other computers,
Speaker 1: this one was actually backwards compatible. It sold modestly well.
Speaker 1: But the one came out just at the end of
Speaker 1: the eight bit computer era, so it was kind of
Speaker 1: a and also ran because there were more advanced computers
Speaker 1: coming out immediately following that. So Commodore was a company
Speaker 1: that was not making much from its products. In five
Speaker 1: and it purchased Amiga for twenty four million dollars, but
Speaker 1: Amiga did not yet have a computer available on the market.
Speaker 1: There You couldn't buy an Amiga yet, not until late night.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, Jack Tramuel was suing the heck out of
Speaker 1: Commodore for forcing amount of the company. All of that
Speaker 1: meant Commodore wasn't able to dedicate the resources that the
Speaker 1: Amiga team needed to get the Amiga one thousand out earlier.
Speaker 1: They were able to develop it, but they weren't able
Speaker 1: to produce it as fast as they wanted to. Amigo
Speaker 1: was finally ready to take orders for the Amigo one
Speaker 1: thousand in August nineteen five, but Commodore was strapped and
Speaker 1: couldn't actually move into high capacity production yet, so in
Speaker 1: October they had only managed to produce fifty of the
Speaker 1: Amigo one thousand computers. Five zero, just that many. That's it. Now.
Speaker 1: None of those were actually in customer hands. They were
Speaker 1: all internal computers. They were either being used to develop
Speaker 1: software or they were used to give demonstrations to potential
Speaker 1: customers and to make matters worse over at Atari, Jack
Speaker 1: Tremuel had been busy in nineteen eighty five. He had
Speaker 1: pushed his engineers and programmers, a lot of whom had
Speaker 1: left Commodore to follow Tramuel after he had been ousted
Speaker 1: from the company, even pushing them really hard to rush
Speaker 1: a new computer system to market and get ahead of
Speaker 1: the Amigo one thousand. Jack trying Meal was always one
Speaker 1: of those people who took these things very personally, and
Speaker 1: so he thought, well, if you're gonna force me out
Speaker 1: of my company, I'm going to come back and launch
Speaker 1: a computer that's going to completely take the wind out
Speaker 1: of your sales. So in the spring of nineteen five,
Speaker 1: months before the Amiga would come to market. Atari introduced
Speaker 1: the Atari ST computer and the ST stood for sixteen
Speaker 1: thirty two. That meant it was a PC with a
Speaker 1: CPU that had sixteen and thirty two bit components or
Speaker 1: or busses, that's the facilitators for a communication between different
Speaker 1: components within a computer. This would be the Motorola sixty
Speaker 1: eight thousand CPU. That's the same chip that served as
Speaker 1: the CPU for the Amiga one thousand. And the Atar
Speaker 1: E ST also had a graphical user interface or g
Speaker 1: u I or gooey. It also had a mouse, and
Speaker 1: it had a color monitor option, although the base model
Speaker 1: was monochromatic and it was relatively inexpensive, so it is
Speaker 1: a true shot across the bow of Commodore. Now. Atari
Speaker 1: had a head start, but Commodore got more units moving
Speaker 1: and by November it was actually finally possible for your
Speaker 1: average customer to go and buy an Amigo one thousand
Speaker 1: at a computer store. But that late entry was still
Speaker 1: a disadvantage. It was not able to take the full
Speaker 1: advantage of the holiday shopping season because it came out
Speaker 1: so late. And also Commodore made another very odd decision,
Speaker 1: and I honestly don't know what the logic was behind it.
Speaker 1: They decided to only sell the Amigo one thousand in
Speaker 1: computer stores. And the reason why I say that's weird
Speaker 1: is because back in the eighties you could find computers
Speaker 1: in lots of different places, including big department stores, and
Speaker 1: Commodore had previously used big department stores to sell their computers.
Speaker 1: The department store Sears had even offered to carry the
Speaker 1: Amigo one thousand in its store, and Commodore declined the offer.
Speaker 1: So if you went into a Sears and you went
Speaker 1: to their computer section, you could find the Attar e
Speaker 1: st but not an Amigo one thousand. And Commodore also
Speaker 1: did not do a really good job on the marketing
Speaker 1: front for this computer either. For one thing, the ads
Speaker 1: they debuted all seemed to be a pale imitation of
Speaker 1: other ads that were on the market. Specifically, there was
Speaker 1: one that was obviously a copy of Apple's famous Night
Speaker 1: four ad. And just in case you don't know what
Speaker 1: I'm referring to, I'll give a quick rundown. But if
Speaker 1: you've never seen this ad, you need to go to
Speaker 1: YouTube search Apple commercial. It'll pop right up. It is
Speaker 1: one of the most famous commercials ever made in Apple
Speaker 1: released a commercial. It was directed by Ridley freaking Scott,
Speaker 1: the film director directed this commercial, and it showed a
Speaker 1: bunch of people walking down a hallway that had monitors
Speaker 1: all over it and their lit in these very kind
Speaker 1: of bluish lights. So it's got this very drab gray scene.
Speaker 1: Everyone's kind of dressed in uh and very uh dull
Speaker 1: clothing and they're all kind of staring lifelessly ahead of themselves.
Speaker 1: And then they file into what is essentially like an
Speaker 1: amphitheater and they sit down there looking at an enormous
Speaker 1: screen with a huge face on it, and it's essentially
Speaker 1: a character who's like big Brother in George or And
Speaker 1: that is inter cut with shots of a woman who's
Speaker 1: wearing like a white tank top and red shorts and
Speaker 1: she's running down the hallway and she's carrying an enormous hammer.
Speaker 1: She eventually runs into the room with the giant screen
Speaker 1: on it and hurls the hammer at the screen and
Speaker 1: that shatters the screen. It shocks the lulled people who
Speaker 1: had been watching it. And the message was that Apple
Speaker 1: was going to break the model of the dull lockdown
Speaker 1: in utilitarian PC that had been introduced by IBM. So
Speaker 1: IBM was the big brother. Apple was the woman throwing
Speaker 1: a hammer through the screen. It made a big impact,
Speaker 1: and that was in early so late, we're talking nearly
Speaker 1: two years later. Commodore releases an ad during the Christmas
Speaker 1: season and it shows a group of emotionless, drone like
Speaker 1: people shuffling slowly up some stairs. At the end of
Speaker 1: the stairs was a pedestal upon which sat the Amiga
Speaker 1: one thousand, and the monitor is just got this blinding
Speaker 1: white light coming out of it. So this was clearly
Speaker 1: an imitation of the earlier Apple commercial, but not nearly
Speaker 1: as impactful. And because it's an imitation, you don't you
Speaker 1: don't admire it the way you would with the Apple commercial.
Speaker 1: You'd say, oh, they're just copying what's already been done.
Speaker 1: They had another commercial that showed an older man walking
Speaker 1: through an mc escher light collection of weird staircases. You
Speaker 1: get a real Labyrinth vibe from it, although to be fair,
Speaker 1: Labyrinth would come out after this ad did. He eventually
Speaker 1: gets to a similar pedestal as a computer on it,
Speaker 1: also emanating a blinding white light they lost at the screen,
Speaker 1: and he smiles, and then the screen cuts to black,
Speaker 1: and you then see an illuminated fetus fill the screen. Yep,
Speaker 1: little baby fills the screen glowing. It's weird, and it's
Speaker 1: obviously an homage to Stanley Kubrick's film two thousand one.
Speaker 1: I do not think it made many people want to
Speaker 1: buy a computer. I did see one ad from that
Speaker 1: era that made me chuckle. There was a man walking
Speaker 1: his dog in a suburban neighborhood and inside one of
Speaker 1: the houses is a boy who's working on his computer,
Speaker 1: and he's created a replica of his own house on
Speaker 1: his Amiga one thousand and then he clicks his mouse
Speaker 1: and he makes the the image of his house rise
Speaker 1: up off the bottom of the the image he's working on.
Speaker 1: So he's lifting his house up, and meanwhile his actual
Speaker 1: house starts to lift up out into the sky. And
Speaker 1: none of that really got me chuckling. But what did
Speaker 1: get a reaction out of me as the music that
Speaker 1: was playing in the background of the commercial, because I
Speaker 1: recognized it and I realized eventually that it was from
Speaker 1: the movie score to the film The Goonies, and then
Speaker 1: I went and listened to the Goony soundtrack. The ads
Speaker 1: were not doing Amiga any favors. By the end of
Speaker 1: n Commodore had sold fewer than fifty thousand Amiga one
Speaker 1: thousand computers. Now here's hoping this ad break is more effective.
Speaker 1: We're going to take our quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: In addition to the sales and marketing woes, the initial
Speaker 1: batch of Amiga one thousand computers had some stability issues.
Speaker 1: You might remember from an earlier episode that I talked
Speaker 1: about how they had programmed the system crash error to
Speaker 1: read Guru Meditation error. It was sort of a tongue
Speaker 1: in cheek message. Unfortunately, this particular error was popping up
Speaker 1: with frequency, and Amigo one thousand was quickly associated with
Speaker 1: not just being unreliable, but this whole Guru Meditation error message.
Speaker 1: And the team was able to patch the problem and
Speaker 1: address it in future shipments, but the reputation of the
Speaker 1: computer was already damaged. People associated the Amiga one thousand
Speaker 1: with being unreliable. One product that worked in Amiga's favor
Speaker 1: came from Electronic Arts. It was actually some software, so
Speaker 1: Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, was impressed by
Speaker 1: the Amiga. He had received an Amiga as sort of
Speaker 1: a developer kit and was working within playing with it
Speaker 1: to figure out what he might be able to make
Speaker 1: with it. Over an electronic arts he led his team
Speaker 1: to rewrite a program called Prism for the IBM PC
Speaker 1: that in turn was already an evolution of an earlier
Speaker 1: piece of software called Doodle for the Xerox computer. And
Speaker 1: this new product for the Amiga was called Deluxe Paint.
Speaker 1: EA produced what was then a truly incredible image of
Speaker 1: King Tutin commons golden death mask, and chances are if
Speaker 1: you've ever looked at art from earlier computer eras, you've
Speaker 1: seen this picture. It was icon It would become a
Speaker 1: very important piece of art that Amiga would use in
Speaker 1: a lot of its advertising moving forward, and it was
Speaker 1: a go to for Amiga for marketing. And Amiga was
Speaker 1: in desperate need of good software, because without good software,
Speaker 1: your computer doesn't really do any good. You have to
Speaker 1: have people develop stuff for it. Developers were less keen
Speaker 1: to create software for the Atar e ST largely due
Speaker 1: to Jack Tramuel's reputation for being difficult to work with.
Speaker 1: So there were developers who were shy about working for
Speaker 1: Atar E s T because they didn't want to have
Speaker 1: to deal with Tramuel. And there were people who are
Speaker 1: getting more and more excited about Amiga. So while the
Speaker 1: Autar E S T was priced lower than the Amiga,
Speaker 1: it had more trouble getting good software investor. Irving Gould again,
Speaker 1: he was the guy who led the effort to force
Speaker 1: Jack Tramuel out of Commodore had put a man named
Speaker 1: Marshall F. Smith in charge of the company of Commodore.
Speaker 1: Smith had previously worked in the steel industry, which, as
Speaker 1: you might imagine, is not very much like the computer industry.
Speaker 1: In the computer industry, tech changes very quickly and the
Speaker 1: business has to adapt to that. Steel does not tend
Speaker 1: to change very quickly, and Smith just didn't seem to
Speaker 1: quite have the mindset to head up a computer company.
Speaker 1: He also made some decisions that some critics would point
Speaker 1: out later as being very questionable. So, for example, back
Speaker 1: in early at C E S, he got into a
Speaker 1: conversation with somebody else, and that someone convinced him that
Speaker 1: Commodore's line of portable computers with l C D screens,
Speaker 1: which they were showing off at C E S was
Speaker 1: going to be terribly unprofitable. They were just going to
Speaker 1: end up languishing in the market, and the company was
Speaker 1: going to lose money as a result for really backing
Speaker 1: a portable computer with an l c D screen, and
Speaker 1: Smith took at the heart and he canceled the line
Speaker 1: of computers. So while they showed one off like a
Speaker 1: prototype over at c E S, it would never become
Speaker 1: an actual Commodore product. Here's where people got really upset.
Speaker 1: The person who told him that it wasn't going to
Speaker 1: be profitable was the CEO of Tandy Tandy Slash radio shack.
Speaker 1: That was the company that was making its own line
Speaker 1: of pordable computers. So essentially Tandy was able to talk
Speaker 1: a competitor out of launching a product that would have
Speaker 1: gone toe to toe with their own products, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people said that Smith let a competitor sabotage
Speaker 1: his own business. Marshall Smith began to cut costs at
Speaker 1: the end of nineteen eight five because Commodore was not
Speaker 1: going to be profitable unless they were able to trim
Speaker 1: a whole lot of the expenses. That included cutting payroll
Speaker 1: by forty five per cent. Commodore had suffered losses in
Speaker 1: all but the final quarter of five and night at
Speaker 1: the last quarter it posted a one million dollar profit.
Speaker 1: That was not enough to set off the losses from
Speaker 1: the rest of the year, and it had a lot
Speaker 1: of debt to pay off as well. So over the
Speaker 1: course of the fiscal year of nineteen eighty five, Commodore
Speaker 1: lost two hundred thirty seven million dollars. Clearly that was
Speaker 1: going to affect Amiga as well as a division of
Speaker 1: the company, and commodore struggles in spilled over into nine six.
Speaker 1: The company made the decision to skip both c e
Speaker 1: S shows that year. Remember the Consumer Electronics Show, which
Speaker 1: these days has one show a year. It's in January.
Speaker 1: It's in Las Vegas in the United States. There are
Speaker 1: some international shows too, but that's the one big one
Speaker 1: in the US. Back in these days, it had two shows,
Speaker 1: one in the winter one this summer. Well, Commodore skipped
Speaker 1: both of them and also skipped Comdex, which was a
Speaker 1: huge computer trade show at that time, and it had
Speaker 1: always maintained a very large presence during these shows, so
Speaker 1: it's absence was notable On the executive side. Over in
Speaker 1: the corporate section of Commodore, Chief operating Officer Thomas Radigan
Speaker 1: was preparing to move into the role of CEO with
Speaker 1: Marshall Smith stepping down. This had been the plan all along.
Speaker 1: This was not a sudden decision. It was a long
Speaker 1: term strategy, and so rat Agan had been groomed to
Speaker 1: become the CEO of Commodore, and he was given a
Speaker 1: five year contract that would expire in nineteen and he
Speaker 1: assumed the role of Commodore CEO in March nine, and
Speaker 1: it was down to him to turn Commodore into a
Speaker 1: truly profitable company, which was going to require some really
Speaker 1: tough decisions. Rat Agan had previously served as the CEO
Speaker 1: of Pepsi co International, which was a pretty interesting move
Speaker 1: because Apple had previously hired away Pepsi CEO John Scully
Speaker 1: in nineteen eight three, So now you had two former
Speaker 1: leaders of Pepsi leading personal computer companies that were in
Speaker 1: competition with each other. Ratigan would lead three rounds of layoffs,
Speaker 1: and the first round targeted people who were described as layabouts.
Speaker 1: So I'm guessing these were folks who are either were
Speaker 1: not particularly productive at their jobs or they held jobs
Speaker 1: that did not seem to contribute to the bottom line
Speaker 1: of Commodore in any real way. So that was the
Speaker 1: easiest cut to make and probably was the one that
Speaker 1: was making the most sense. From a business standpoint, The
Speaker 1: second round of layoffs involved cutting the people who were
Speaker 1: working on what were now irrelevant or underperforming projects, so
Speaker 1: rad again would discontinue things like the pet or PET
Speaker 1: computer line, which had been introduced way back in ninety seven.
Speaker 1: He also discontinued the VIC twenty, which came out in
Speaker 1: the Commodore sixty four was still selling, so he kept
Speaker 1: that going. The Plus Slash four and the Commodore sixteen
Speaker 1: models also were cut, and a few other projects that
Speaker 1: were for systems that had not yet debuted but were
Speaker 1: in development. Those were eventually acted as well, and a
Speaker 1: lot of those people, most of them were let go.
Speaker 1: The third round of layoffs was the hardest to make
Speaker 1: because they're still needed to be cuts in order to
Speaker 1: get Commodore back to profitability, but now they were cutting
Speaker 1: into people who were contributing directly to Commodore's business. So
Speaker 1: a lot of people referred to this as cutting into
Speaker 1: the bone because it was It was beyond the the
Speaker 1: the folks that you could more easily say goodbye to
Speaker 1: because they were not contributing to Commodore's business. So here
Speaker 1: was where pro programmers and engineers found themselves out of
Speaker 1: a job both at Commodore headquarters in Pennsylvania in Westchester
Speaker 1: and the folks over in Las Gatos in California. The
Speaker 1: Amiga folks, they all of them, saw cutbacks, but another
Speaker 1: big change was coming, and that was that the Amiga
Speaker 1: team was told that their operations were going to move
Speaker 1: across country and that the team was going to join
Speaker 1: the Amadore headquarters in Pennsylvania. People working for Amiga had
Speaker 1: to make a decision. They could continue to work for
Speaker 1: the company, but that would mean they'd have to move
Speaker 1: across country or they were going to have to quit.
Speaker 1: J Minor, the guy who had led the design for
Speaker 1: the Amiga chip set, the co founder of Amiga, the
Speaker 1: one guy who had been a consistent presence at the
Speaker 1: company from its start, decided he was done. He resigned
Speaker 1: from Commodore as a full time employee. He would continue
Speaker 1: to act as a consultant for the company for several
Speaker 1: more years, and ultimately J. Minor passed away in due
Speaker 1: to kidney failure. One other reason Commodore wanted the Amiga
Speaker 1: folks to move closer to their headquarters had to do
Speaker 1: with an embarrassing prank that went a little too far,
Speaker 1: So the Amiga had a graphical desktop environment that was
Speaker 1: called Workbench, and there was a software developer who was
Speaker 1: working on an upgrade to work Bench. The you know,
Speaker 1: a later version like one point two, and as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, this person's identity has never been revealed.
Speaker 1: But this software developer hid a message in the code.
Speaker 1: And the only way you would unlock the messages if
Speaker 1: you pressed a certain key combination simultaneously. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: a common one, so it would require you to know
Speaker 1: about it or to have heard about it in order
Speaker 1: to do it. And if you did do it, a
Speaker 1: message popped up on screen. That message read, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to paraphrase a little bit we made the Amiga.
Speaker 1: They left it up. The message did not obvious skate
Speaker 1: the curse word. They they actually said it in the message.
Speaker 1: The head of software over at Amiga was perhaps amused,
Speaker 1: but told this developer that the this easter egg was
Speaker 1: going to have to go. It could not stay in
Speaker 1: the software. And at first it seemed like this engineer
Speaker 1: had taken that to heart, because if you did the
Speaker 1: key combination. After the engineer had made some more changes
Speaker 1: and now said Amiga born a champion. But This turned
Speaker 1: out to be a smoke screen because if you held
Speaker 1: down another set of keys, the message we made the
Speaker 1: Amiga would pop up. And then if you were to
Speaker 1: keep holding those keys down and then have someone insert
Speaker 1: a floppy disk into the disk drive, a second half
Speaker 1: of that message would pop up. The they left it
Speaker 1: up part would flash on screen for one six of
Speaker 1: a second. Now, it sounds like such a thing would
Speaker 1: not be discoverable, like this was just there for the engineer.
Speaker 1: No one else would ever know about it. It would
Speaker 1: just be this sort of insubordinate behavior that ultimately wouldn't matter.
Speaker 1: But in fact, someone in Europe found the code embedded
Speaker 1: in the read only memory of the chips. They could
Speaker 1: see that it existed there, and managers her worked at
Speaker 1: Commodore UK issued a recall on all the existing machines
Speaker 1: and demanded that the affected ROM chips would have to
Speaker 1: be replaced with new ones that did not contain that message,
Speaker 1: which set Amiga back three months and sales in Europe.
Speaker 1: And just so you know, traditionally in Europe Amiga did
Speaker 1: much better business than did in the United States, so
Speaker 1: this was a big deal, and so Commodore wanted to
Speaker 1: bring these jokesters, maybe a little closer to home where
Speaker 1: they could be a bit more carefully observed. I have
Speaker 1: no idea what sort of dressing down that engineer might
Speaker 1: have received as a result of this prank gone awry,
Speaker 1: but I imagine it must not have been a very
Speaker 1: good day for that person when all of this shook out.
Speaker 1: I've got more to say about Amiga, but first let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Commodore CEO
Speaker 1: Radigan wasn't just cutting jobs and moving people around. He
Speaker 1: wanted to make the Amiga platform a success. He didn't
Speaker 1: want to get rid of it. He thought a good
Speaker 1: strategy would be to create two lines of Amiga computers.
Speaker 1: One would be dedicated toward a lower price point. It
Speaker 1: would be a lower power machine to be kind of
Speaker 1: the budget version of the Amiga. The other would be
Speaker 1: a powerful computer aimed more at professionals, high end users,
Speaker 1: people who wanted to have a lot of power in
Speaker 1: the graphics and audio side of computation. And so he
Speaker 1: thought we should make two brands of Amiga. That would
Speaker 1: mean making one machine that was similar in spirit to
Speaker 1: the old Commodore sixty four, something that would be accessible
Speaker 1: and could get people excited about Amiga's approach, and the
Speaker 1: other would be a more powerful and more expandable computer
Speaker 1: than the Amigo one thousand was. So the one thousand
Speaker 1: would be kind of the middle of the road, and
Speaker 1: these two would take more of an extreme path off
Speaker 1: of that middle. Ratigan's methods, while harsh with all the layoffs,
Speaker 1: worked from a in a standpoint. In the last quarter
Speaker 1: of NIX, Commodore posted a twenty two million dollar profit.
Speaker 1: In the previous year it had suffered two d thirty
Speaker 1: seven million dollars in losses, so this was a good move,
Speaker 1: but he was also setting people against each other. Ratigan
Speaker 1: had wanted that lower powered, lower priced Amiga super Fast.
Speaker 1: This would become the Amiga five hundred, and he had
Speaker 1: to figure out who was going to actually develop this.
Speaker 1: Now you had all of Amiga under the umbrella of Commodore,
Speaker 1: so you still had some engineers and developers and programmers
Speaker 1: who had been part of Amiga, the ones who hadn't
Speaker 1: been laid off and the ones who had chosen to
Speaker 1: move across the country. But on the other side you
Speaker 1: had engineers who had been at Commodore for a while.
Speaker 1: And Radigan decided that the Commodore engineers would be the
Speaker 1: team to work on the Amiga five hundred. He felt
Speaker 1: that they would have the motivation to do it quickly.
Speaker 1: They had a challenge ahead of them. They were being
Speaker 1: told this other team developed this architecture. I need you
Speaker 1: guys to make a less powerful version of this as
Speaker 1: quickly as possible. So they had something to prove, and
Speaker 1: so they had to work super hard to get the
Speaker 1: computer on the market earlier than if the original Amiga
Speaker 1: team were to work on it. The thought being that
Speaker 1: the original Amiga team would probably do a better job,
Speaker 1: but they would take a lot longer to do it.
Speaker 1: Jeff Porter became the director of New Product Development. He
Speaker 1: had previously led the effort to design and build that
Speaker 1: LCD portable Commodore computer and I talked about earlier, the
Speaker 1: one that Marshall Smith had canceled. After the Tandy CEO
Speaker 1: was so helpful. George Robbins and Bob Welland, who had
Speaker 1: been working on a Commodore workstation that ran on Unix
Speaker 1: before that project had been canceled by Radigan, would become
Speaker 1: the lead engineers for the Amiga five hundred. George Robbins
Speaker 1: decided to increase the amount of RAM on the Amiga
Speaker 1: chip called Agnes, up to one megabyte. The goal was
Speaker 1: to give the chip enough memory to support higher graphic resolution,
Speaker 1: and his decision kind of ruffled feathers with the original
Speaker 1: Amiga team who had designed this chip, but that reaction
Speaker 1: ended up being a motivator for the Amiga five hundred
Speaker 1: team at Commodore, not something that detracted from it. The
Speaker 1: new chip was called fat AGNES, and it worked. It
Speaker 1: boosted the Amiga's abilities to display graphics without breaking backwards
Speaker 1: compatibility because it still was using the same architecture as
Speaker 1: the previous chip, but it did slow things down a
Speaker 1: little bit in the process. The machine itself ran a
Speaker 1: little more slowly. However, the improvement in graphical output helped
Speaker 1: balance that out. George Robbins also took a look at
Speaker 1: the motherboard that the Amiga team had designed to try
Speaker 1: and figure out ways that they could simplify things to
Speaker 1: reduce the cost of fabrication and get that Amiga five
Speaker 1: hundred down to the level that Ratigan wanted. One of
Speaker 1: the things he cut was the original Amiga's ability to
Speaker 1: connect directly to a television set. Robbins would replace that
Speaker 1: capability on the motherboard. By including an adapter that could
Speaker 1: do the same thing but would not be incorporate did
Speaker 1: directly into the actual motherboard. That simplified the fabrication process
Speaker 1: for the motherboard itself. He also took the power supply
Speaker 1: out of the computer and he made it an external component.
Speaker 1: He designed the Amiga five hundred to integrate the keyboard
Speaker 1: directly with the computer case, so as part of the
Speaker 1: computer case as a whole, and the computer case included
Speaker 1: an expansion slot that would let users plug in devices
Speaker 1: without having to open up the computer case. Each move
Speaker 1: helped bring the Amiga's price down a little bit. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Radigan had decided that the high end machine which would
Speaker 1: become the Amiga two thousand, would not go to the
Speaker 1: original Amiga team either. They're just weren't enough engineers left
Speaker 1: to carry the projects, so he initially assigned the development
Speaker 1: of the Amiga two thousand to a team of engineers
Speaker 1: at Commodore's German subsidiary. That team took the Amiga one
Speaker 1: thousand design and then they essentially added more stuff to it.
Speaker 1: They added in an interface for expansion cards. They changed
Speaker 1: the case to a more standard PC case, but then
Speaker 1: Ratigan sees this design and he says, that's not really
Speaker 1: what I wanted. It's not it's not powerful enough. It's
Speaker 1: not a step far enough from the Amiga one thousand.
Speaker 1: He felt the team had failed to deliver upon the
Speaker 1: goal of building out a truly powerful computer for the
Speaker 1: high end market, so he turned to Commodore designer David Haney,
Speaker 1: and Haney looked at the designs of the original Amiga
Speaker 1: chip set and motherboard design, and he began creating new hardware.
Speaker 1: One thing he built was a chip called Buster and
Speaker 1: Busters purpose was to handle the operations of the expansion bus.
Speaker 1: And again, a bus is a component that facilitates communication
Speaker 1: between different computer devices or even different elements within a
Speaker 1: computer itself. Busters design worked on an architecture that was
Speaker 1: called Zoro and uh It would allow for almost a
Speaker 1: plug and play a coroach with expansion devices, which was
Speaker 1: uncommon in that era. The Amiga two thousands sported five
Speaker 1: expansion slots using this Zoro bus design that Haney had built.
Speaker 1: It also had four IBM pc I s A slots.
Speaker 1: I s A, by the way, stands for Industry Standard architecture.
Speaker 1: That was a term IBM used for its sixteen bit
Speaker 1: internal bus. For computers that were built on the eight
Speaker 1: two eight six CPU architecture and beyond two three sixty
Speaker 1: six those this gave the Amiga two thousand incredible expansion
Speaker 1: abilities when paired with the right devices. Haney also put
Speaker 1: the processor on a separate board from the motherboard. So
Speaker 1: why would you do that? Why would you put the
Speaker 1: CPU on a separate board. Well, the idea was that
Speaker 1: that would allow you to swap out the CPU more easily,
Speaker 1: so you could conceivably upgrade the same machine over time,
Speaker 1: as long as the CPU was compatible with the rest
Speaker 1: of the architecture of the computer. Haney also incorporated a
Speaker 1: generator locking mechanism the Amiga that's also known as gen lock.
Speaker 1: The gen lock would allow a user to output computer
Speaker 1: images to display on top of a video feed without
Speaker 1: affecting the image stability, so you could overlay computer graphics
Speaker 1: on top of a video feed. This is the source
Speaker 1: of stuff you see in broadcast systems all the time
Speaker 1: where you might see a graphic appear on top of,
Speaker 1: say a live news report, that's due to stuff like this,
Speaker 1: like a gen lock. This feature would make the Amiga
Speaker 1: two thousand the go to computer for video production and
Speaker 1: broadcast once a very important product would debut. More on
Speaker 1: that in a bit. For a case, Hainey was able
Speaker 1: to pull a design from the canceled Commodore nine hundred.
Speaker 1: That was that Unix workstation that got canceled. I had
Speaker 1: mentioned that a little bit earlier when Radigan was canceling
Speaker 1: all those projects. That was one of them. The Amiga
Speaker 1: two thousand was certainly more powerful than the Amiga one thousand,
Speaker 1: but some people like J Miner, felt that the computer
Speaker 1: did not go far enough. It wasn't really transformative enough.
Speaker 1: Minor believed that the technological advancements that were in the
Speaker 1: industry had outpaced the two thousand, and that Commodore had
Speaker 1: made a mistake by not going far enough with the design.
Speaker 1: Like the Amigo one thousand, the five hundred and two
Speaker 1: thousand both experienced delays in development. It takes a while
Speaker 1: to build out a new computer design, even if you're
Speaker 1: starting from an already established foundation like the Amigo one thousand.
Speaker 1: The team's building the five hundred and two thousand were
Speaker 1: not the same people who had designed the one thousand
Speaker 1: to start with, so it took some time just to
Speaker 1: get up to speed before serious design work could begin.
Speaker 1: Investor Irving Gould and the Board of Directors wanted to
Speaker 1: see new computers hitting the market right away, replacing the
Speaker 1: Amigo one thousand, which was doing modest sales. And remember
Speaker 1: the Amigo one thousand debut at the end of nineteen.
Speaker 1: They wanted the new five hundred and two thousand models
Speaker 1: to debut in nineteen eighty six, but it was taking
Speaker 1: a while to get them ready to go, longer than
Speaker 1: Gould would like. He was notoriously impatient. Irvin Gould pushed
Speaker 1: the board to hire a management consulting firm to evaluate Commodore. Essentially,
Speaker 1: from the way I've read it, it sounds like he
Speaker 1: was looking for a reason to be able to fire Ratigan. Well,
Speaker 1: there was a man who was part of this consulting
Speaker 1: firm who came in named Mehdi Ali, who was then
Speaker 1: a special advisor, and he prepared the report, and one
Speaker 1: of the suggestions that Meddi Ali made in this report
Speaker 1: was that the board should fire Ratigan as CEO right away.
Speaker 1: Radigan knew what was up, He could see what was happening,
Speaker 1: so he went to work the next day anyway, he
Speaker 1: was then met by security and lawyers and was escorted
Speaker 1: off the premises, but reportedly no one could actually tell
Speaker 1: him why he was no longer employed. He had made
Speaker 1: some really tough decisions as CEO. A lot of them
Speaker 1: were not terribly popular because they involved tons of layoffs
Speaker 1: some of really good people, and they some of those
Speaker 1: decisions might have been harmful in the long run, but
Speaker 1: he had returned Commodore to profitability. He had pushed for
Speaker 1: the next generation of computers in the Amiga line, and
Speaker 1: now he was history almost You see, there was the
Speaker 1: matter of that five year contract he had signed. So
Speaker 1: Ratigan sues Commodore for breach of contract, claiming nine million
Speaker 1: dollars of unpaid wages. Commodore counter sued Ratigan for twenty
Speaker 1: four million dollars. This case would go on stretching all
Speaker 1: the way to which fittingly would have been the end
Speaker 1: of that five year contract. The courts ultimately found in
Speaker 1: favor of Ratigan, and they dismissed the countersuit against him.
Speaker 1: In Ratigan's place, Gould would serve as the chief executive
Speaker 1: for the time being. As for Amiga and two thousand
Speaker 1: would both launch just a short while after Ratigan had
Speaker 1: been let go. And I've got a lot more to
Speaker 1: say about how those computers turned out, but we're going
Speaker 1: to cover that in our next episode where we learn
Speaker 1: about the ultimate fate of Amiga. If you guys have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's
Speaker 1: a technology, a company, a person in tech, anything like that,
Speaker 1: send me an email. The address you should use is
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