Amiga and the revolution yet to come

The Atari ST should have been more of a contender, especially with its very affordable 640x400 monochrome monitor option. It was a third the cost of Mac, but it had a higher resolution screen and a faster CPU (same 8MHz clock speed, but without cycle stealing). As a bonus, the ROM based OS came up in seconds!

HOWEVER

The Atari ST was hamstrung in the USA by the fact that retailers by this point were completely fed up with Jack. Without retail outlets stocking Atari ST and without a network of enthusiastic sales distribution … oh well …

Actually the Atari ST did have about one year of promising sales here in the USA. But even in that case there was a problem. If you were a retailer with an Atari ST store display, what were you going to show off? The monochrome version? Or the more profitable and more impressive looking color version? A no brainer, right?

So, the thing which could have been the Atari ST’s strength - the monochrome option - ended up being a bit obscure … a bit second string. It could have been a real Mac killer, but it ended up being largely forgotten.

The tv show called The Computer Chronicles, deemed AtariST a Mac-Killer in 1987. :wink:

Notably, I’m not arguing against the virtues of the Amiga. It’s more that Commodore dropped it and was apparently happy with the Amiga marketing itself as some kind of post-C64 machine, whereever this may take it to. With no support by its vendor, it’s hard for such a product to find a niche in a market with heavy competition.

P.S.: I still remember the introduction with Andy Warhol, where it was placed as a creative machine. But there was no follow up on this, ever. So the broader perception was more like, “well, this must have lead to nowhere”. Similarly, the Sidecar hinted at business use, but, again, there was no follow up on this. You may have been free to figure this out by yourself, but this is not what I’d call aggressive marketing.

That is how they marketed it in USA. But here in Denmark it was different. Magazines were more involved in marketing than Commodore. But Commodore Denmark and Commodore UK did sell and promote the professional use as well. But these two markets are small compared to USA, and all revenue eventually came home to USA. I say Commodore America, botched the Amiga. Europe did not. And there are also another factor to count in, that is in the 1980’s, Europe were poor. It was a different story in USA. In USA, people had money.

EDIT:
Yup. I know that launch took place. Here in Denmark it went fully unnoticed. But things changed in 1987, when they released the 500. That was what made the Amiga populair. Sales were more based on mouth to ear here. People saw it, and people wanted it. It went wild, and Commodore did not need to do advertising. Advertising were also extremely regulated here. We had one single tv station, and advertising were forbidden. Posters in poles, ad’s in magazines were allowed. Commercials were only allowed in cinemas. Basically. The markets were so extremely different.

EDIT, EDIT:
In regards to professional use. And because there were only one tv station in Denmark. One tv station, one channel. Then it was like top professional, that the Danish TV station, used the Amiga for effects. End credits and that stuff, and editing. Also. The game that are called Hugo The Troll in English, were a Danish invention. You know, when someone call in, and use the landline phone as the controller on live television. True it was not possible before Amiga3000, and true it was after a second tv network were allowed. But still. It is fully professional use of the Amiga.

Disclaimer: My perception is based on German computer magazines, and I stopped reading them soon after the Amiga was introduced, then on general ads and how the various machines were marketed in and by the shops.
Also, the original Amiga wasn’t exactly cheap either, it really became affordable with the Amiga 500, which was somewhat hindered by its form factor to be percieved as a “serious business” machine (much like the Atari ST). All-in-one with an integrated keyboard was fine for a bedroom machine, but was not what customers had learned to expect from a machine they would found their business on. And the Amiga 2000 and higher were rather expensive as well, as I remember it. (At this point, you could well grab a Mac and have all the software and supporting communities to share with. And it was much easier to find a shop that was selling Macs. I actually don’t remember seeing any A2000/A3000/A4000 anywhere in a shop in Austria. You’d probably had to engage in some research on how to obtain one.)

Yup. Even inside Europe. The markets were different. Here in Denmark, the ST were populair between 1985 and 1987. But the Amiga500 allmost killed the ST in Denmark. Advertising were different in other European countries. Were I grew up in Denmark, we were able to recieve German television. We could recieve RTL, N3 and ARD. And I fully remember watching advertising, were they played this Die Maus Und Ollie. (or something). But I dont actually remember any computer advertising on German TV. Perhaps it was different in Italy or Austria.

But advertising or not. In Denmark, the Amiga were highly regarded as this ultimate multi-usage machine. So many children writing homework on their Amiga500. So many writers, writing books. Photo and video editing were also a sector, that used Amiga here.

Mac’s were nowere to be seen. The first Apple machine that I ever saw, were in 1992 or something. It was one of them LC machines, and it was my boss at that time, who did inventory on the machine. Tje first Apple machine that I ever touched and tried, were one of them PowerPC all-in-one machines in 1995. My then girlfriends father had bought one. But I only played like 10 minutes with it. And Apple machines never ever began to get populair here, before the iPod were released. But people ditched the Amiga in Denmark, once Doom came out.

Regarding marketing in the Europe: Flyers and catalogues where a huge thing. But these came from the shops, and they in turn had no support or incentive from Commodore. So the Amiga fell where it happened to fall, finding its niche of least resistance.
(At least, this is how I perceived it. E.g., I recall some flyers initially advertising the Amiga with the Sidecar as a potential business option, but, as there was no support or followup on this by the vendor, they just stopped. It somewhat went the same with the Atria ST: first, this was sold as this “other option” for a general machine, then it soon became this “yes, you can buy this and we’d happily sell this to you, but you have find out on own what it may be useful for, and please don’t ask us.”)

Ohhh… That “I dont know, it has a keyboard” sales pitch in shops. That bad advising from sellers were a thing for many years here as well…

I dont really remember flyers from back then here in Denmark. Mostly it was just magazines that reported on computers and new tech. Mostly people who were into computers, were looked down at. Nerd were a highly negative charged term here. Computer-nerd were actually an insult. In other words. Computers did not sell great in Denmark in the 1980’s and well into the 1990’s. That is generally speaking.

EDIT:
No company did any kind of support or something as such here. Or any general advertisement as such to do promotion. If you wanted to know stuff, about any of all the platforms, you just had to buy magazines, or know a friend that knew tons about computers. And people did prey on those peoples knowledge. Expecting to get their machine fixed for free. I did a lot back then, fro the price of nothing.

Reason why, I to this day, never fixes anyones computer. No backup? Too bad.

At this point, we may have to address some of the national peculiarities. At that time Austria was still a dead end at the border of the iron curtain and not a focus of international marketing. Moreover, it was a small country with this – in terms of marketing – huge neighbor, Germany. And there had to be a “general importer”, a single point of entry who would be responsibly for anything regarding the product, by law. And these were taking an additional margin, adding to any goods imported. Finally, as a neutral country, it was subject to export regulations regarding dual-use. (So 8-bit was fine, anything else became a bit more complicated in the Reagan years.)
At the same time, the first steps towards opening took place in the Eastern block, especially in our direct neighbor Hungary. This lead to a segregation of markets, with dedicated shops for business use and Macs on the one hand, and smaller high street shops in Vienna shelling out 8-bit machines, which may have been already phased out for the domestic market, to Hungarians, who would be eager to buy, making in turn some profit at home on this.

But there were also the great electronic store chains, which did most of the advertising (you’d find their catalogues and flyers in your mail on a regular basis) and these really shaped the public perception. These would sell you, besides the fizzling range of home computers, PC clones by recommended vendors, like Olivetti (notable for laptops, the M15 was probably the first laptop to go for a “complete” PC at a decent price) and the Commodore PC range. Commodore must have really been making some money from these, as these were comparably cheap, came from a popular manufacturer, and weren’t really that bad – and were probably less costly to produce than the Amiga, but went in a higher price segment than home computers. From this perspective, it’s somewhat understandable that Commodore didn’t focus much on the Amiga: they were probably doing fine with their PC range and the Amiga 500 filled the post-C64 niche on its own. Why bother? This may have been short sighted, but those concerned probably ventured on to even greener pastures of marketing related jobs. But the same was also true for the shops: they had to appeal to their customers, and to do so, they had to shape segments. So they would advertise that this and that was a great PC for the money (no need to explain why a PC may be useful), and the Amiga was, well, the Amiga (whatever this may be). Nobody really had any interest in shaping a special profile for it and to heavily invest in this.
(So it was left to the user communities and some special interest journalists to claim the virtues of the machine, but it was probably beyond their means to shape the perception of a broader public. – Good luck suggesting a fleet of Amigas for your company in an environment like this and the vendor apparently not backing the product.)

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In my experience, the Amiga was also preferred in Canada.

Amiga 2000/3000/4000 were a lot less expensive than equivalent Macs. And I really do have to emphasize again how non-existent Commodore Colt PCs were in North America. It was a Commodore Germany thing.

Now, Commodore (USA) was not entirely committed to rejecting anything out of Commodore Germany - the Amiga 2000 design was an example of the German design winning out (the USA team wanted something more like Amiga 3000, which they’d get with Amiga 3000).

But I do think Commodore (USA) made the right call with PC clones. Here in the USA, competition among PC clone makers was just too intense, so chances of survival in that market were slim. Even the two biggest suppliers of PC compatibles who transitioned from non-PC models, IBM and Tandy, were sent packing. IBM was big enough to absorb near total defeat and still cling on and rebuild via their laptop brand. But Tandy just went under. What chance would Commodore have had?

To survive, Commodore had to go all in on Amiga, or all in on C64/128/etc. I actually think they made the wrong choice, but they had way too much of a human emotional reason to push Amiga as they swiped it from Jack’s clutches. Oh well, if they had put that effort into a “next gen” C128 and given this Apple ||GS style Commodore computer an Amiga-like OS … that could have really done well.

As it was, there was no way for C64 users to bring their data over to the Amiga. It’s worth noting that the “Commodore” brand was never associated with gaming here in the USA - not like “Atari”. And almost all C64 users in North America had floppy drives, and C64s were used for word processing, doing homework, and such.

Oh well … the Amiga should have at least included an IEC serial port, for interoperability and networking with C64’s and C64 hardware (floppy drives, printer). Heck, the daisy-chain networking ability could have really boosted what the Amiga could have done even just with pure Amiga LANs.

The differences in the various market places – and how this adds up to the career of a machine in general – is rather interesting. Here, that extra “general importer” margin (something about 30%) was probably responsible for those not being especially known as something cheap. And there was probably not much of incentive to let go af that extra margin for an economy of scale, as there was already the PC line. (Those were named something like PC-10, PC-15, PC-20 and so on, Colt wasn’t much of a thing here.) So the higher end of Amigas and knowing what you could do with them beyond video editing, was something quite niche. I actually learned about running Mac Systems on Amiga only about 15 years ago, which may have been a bit too late for a viable alternative. :slight_smile:
But, back to Commodore PC clones, this was just for a couple of years and then there was some consolidation in favor of the more usual brands, like Compaq. But, then, it was too late for shaping a more professional profile for the Amiga and probably no money left for an investment like that. There was just too much going on at once in that time, not just for Commodore, and nobody really knew what direction this market may take. (E.g., we could have seen some more years of 8-bit and CP/M in the small office/home market, at the cost of PCs. Amstrad did quite well in the UK with the PCW.)

Marketing the Amiga as a professional machine, directly competing with IBM and Apple, would have afforded quite an investment, which would have also had a notable effect on the price. (I’d say, this may have even doubled the price, given that, apart from marketing expenses, also investments into infrastructure like business-grade maintenance and support would have come with this.) There was no way of knowing, whether or not a strategy like this would pay off. (Especially with Commodore not having a foothold in the higher price segments.) Or on the other end, was there a way to compete with 8-bit machines like the Amstrad PCW on a price point, if those happened to build a stronghold in the small business market? Was there even an intermediate or transitional segment? And, if there actually was one, could Commodore actually profit from this without even trying to serve the market to which this would transition to, as well? (Others, like Olivetti, tried to serve the full spectrum, but this didn’t end well, either.) – The market isn’t nice to technology, unless you have lots of money and rich customers.

I think the Amstrad PCW has a rough equivalent here in the USA in the form of Brother word processors. These were essentially dedicated word processors, but they could run other software from floppies also … it’s just that there weren’t a whole lot of people developing software for them. They were integrated with 80 column amber monochrome CRTs.

They were less expensive than PC compatibles, but the real big appeal was that they were less scary to start using than “real” computers. The Brother brand was already familiar as a popular electric typewriter brand. So a customer who was intimidated by “real” computers could just get a Brother word processor and know that they could just turn it on and start typing.

(Never mind that we’re still talking an old school Word Perfect style word processor program, with the learning curve of keyboard function commands and such.)

Of course, Commodore tried to do something like this with the Commodore Plus/4 … you just turn it on, and you can start typing on the word processor built into ROM. Of course, this was not very successful. There are numerous reasons for this failure, but the most obvious is that it utterly failed to take advantage of the popularity of the C64 - and in fact worked against it in a puzzling way to end consumers and the press. In contrast, the success of Brother word processors built upon their success in the typewriter business.

The most straightforward lesson is to try and build upon one’s strengths rather than fight an uphill battle where one is neither established nor successful.

Commodore’s biggest success was, of course, the Commodore 64. It could have been built upon, but it wasn’t. Here in the USA, the C64 was a general purpose computer, but not very present in businesses.

But we shouldn’t ignore the success Amiga had in desktop video and the professional video industry. So, that’s why Commodore leaned into the video production capabilities (in NTSC, with genlock and Video Toaster capabilities in particular).

The CDTV was an attempt to build on the Amiga’s strengths in multimedia capabilities to pioneer the next big thing - multimedia appliances. Only … the entire anticipated market for multimedia appliances turned out to be non-existent. Other big boys like Philips CDi and Apple Macintosh Pippen would discover this also. All of the industry attempts to make multimedia appliances a thing failed miserably.

Of course, in Europe the C64 and Amiga were used more as game machines. So for better or worse, Commodore tried to lean into this with the laughable C64gs, and the more sensible CD32. We’ll never know how well the CD32 might have gone had certain unfortunate things happened, and if Commodore were in better financial shape at that time. Oh well.

I think, we can see some glimpses of more ambitious paths that Commodore may have taken, like the rather ambitious introduction of the Amiga (with the software being about half ready), or the UNIX workstation for a higher-end market. But it’s also about every time we get a glimpse into this alternative reality, that in our universe someone must have stepped in and have a serious talk with those who tried. “Do you even know what this would cost us? Would you seriously bet the company on this?” – The times of experiments and half-commitments were over. And I think, in the light of this, the Amiga as a consumer machine did well and achieved much as it did. And it’s rather amazing that it could also establish some beyond this, over several years. (In an alternative universe, we could have seen Commodore going all-in, marketing the Amiga as Mac-killer and PC alternative at once – and failing hard in the first year, taking the company down on its way, as well. There wouldn’t even have been an Amiga 500.)

The C64 game system, BTW, is actually hilarious: a system designed and marketed by people who didn’t know what they are doing to people who didn’t know either. It could have been a partnership made in heaven, had it not been for the poor kids that were expected to play with this.

If I recall correctly, early on it was unclear what the Mac was actually supposed to “be”. It started off with true “What You See is What You Get” output - dot matrix printer that almost matched the pixel density of the screen (I think 75dpi vs 72dpi).

But that’s not good enough for serious desktop publishing. It’s more of a gimmick if you’re thinking in terms of serious publishing beyond small computer club newsletters.

The Mac only became something useful for desktop publishing after breaking the WYSIWYG principle - the 300dpi LaserWriter.

So, the Amiga was basically developed as a Mac-killer, but this development took place before the Mac had created a compelling case for itself. LaserWriter radically changed the game, though, giving the Mac a reason to exist other than “Think Different”.

One really bizarre and annoying Commodore Amiga decision was to retain the non-square pixels of the NTSC display, but stick with WYSIWYG principles to match the non-square screen pixels with non-square printer pixels. So, the Commodore printer for Amiga had 80dpi horizontally and 72dpi vertically. Oh, that was fun.

I don’t know anything about what happened behind the scenes, but I guess, the consilidation of Apple’s lineup may have sent some signals, or may have been read as a strong signal. What actually happened is that Apple was suffering hard from the faults of the Apple III and the recalls and had to consolidate its lineup from 4 lines to a single one, which happened to be the Mac.
It definitely makes a difference whether you are going against Apple with a spread of Apple II, Apple IIGS, Apple III, Lisa and Mac, attacking only a single position or against the position Apple is going all-in. Either you’re going “I’m-a-Mac-too” (when it is still unclear how the Mac will do in the market), or you have to build a very strong position, which requires intensive marketing. At the same time, you’re probably weakening the position in the gaming market and have to crank up prices.

Regarding square pixels: I’m not aware what the difficulties actually were, but apparently this is not an easy change. It seems that the Lisa team, or at least some of them, wanted a square-pixel display for the Lisa, too, but this was denied – more than a year before the actual launch –, in order to get the machine finally to market. Apparently, this would have meant a significant delay.
(One of the many fascinating what-ifs is a second gen. Lisa, built around the actual processor instead of the chip emulator, running at full 68K speed, and with a square-pixel display. As shown by the Mac XL upgrade kit, they had the display ready. Would this have totally cannibalized the Mac, but at a much higher price point? Would this have opened a window of opportunity for the Amiga?)

Regarding “oh the fun”: This still happened in the early 2000s with feature phone displays. I remember that you had to compile binary images for WAP (the ill-fated card-based mobile internet protocol) in 80:72 pixel ratio. What were they thinking?

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Here in the USA, most computers were sold along with computer monitors (including the C64, in 1982).

The 1084, which sold with the Amiga, had a vertical size knob. So, square pixels was just a matter of twisting that knob until the pixels looked square. So there really was never any particular reason to not think of the pixels as square.

OTOH, the Amiga got used for desktop video, and it was designed with the unique ability to genlock (synchronizing its own video output with the vertical and horizontal sync of an external video signal - even a really dirty uneven signal like from a VCR). In this capacity, the output would ultimately be to an NTSC TV set - with no vertical size adjustment. In that role, there would be no simple quick and easy fix to the pixel aspect ratio.

If you were using Workbench (typ. 640 px wide) on a 1084, you got pixel aspect ratios of PAL: 0.533 ; NTSC: 0.4167. That would take a lot of tweaking: possibly well into frobbing country.

I think I managed interlaced 640x512 (aka Headache) mode on my 1084s for about 10 minutes once. It was utterly useless.

I loved Amiga at the time (I wrote about 'em enough) but Commodore was a company saddled with a clapped-out fab that was an environmental liability and financiers who were used to higher returns than a cost-down home computer company could provide. It was amazing it shambled on for as long as it did.

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I actually used my Amiga 2000 exclusively in interlaced modes - at first 60Hz NTSC but then 50Hz PAL when I realized I could get more resolution that way. Not everybody reacts to interlace flicker the same, and adjusting the colors also has an effect. Using Topaz 11 instead of Topaz 8 also helped (obviously, this results in fewer lines, but the taller aspect ratio of the 8x11 pixel characters is also more pleasant to read than the square 8x8 characters).

That said, I also used an Apple Monitor ///, which has nice long persistence phosphors. I could only use this with NTSC mode, but it was pretty slick and flickerless. It’s worth noting that the market leader’s business monitor - the IBM 5151 - also had long persistence phosphors.

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