Commodore

Following the purchase of the Amiga platform by Commodore, unfortunately due to issues over cost and design the launch of the computer was delayed another year and a half. However as soon as it did finally arrive, followed by the A500 shortly after - it was obvious that the Amiga was going to win the battle for domination in the 16-bit computer sector.

In the early years the platform continued to gain popularity at an incredible pace - with that came all the quality software you expect to get on such a machine. A large percentage of today's most talented and well known designers, programmers, artists and musicians started out their careers on the Amiga.

Although the A500 was more expensive than the ST, that fact that the former was more powerful led many to buy into the platform and also it became the platform most developers wanted to work on. You see it had a proper Operating System, powerful processor (running at an amazing 7 MHz!!) and massive amounts of RAM - well 512Kb was a lot then.

Unlike the console market, developers of software for the Amiga were not required to pay license fees or even have their finished product approved. Since the machine had a standard floppy drive, no cartridges were required (costly to manufacture) and most importantly no expensive duplication equipment. Programmers were able to create games themselves and duplicate it themselves - the only cost, their time.

The fact that the shareware scene took off on the Amiga meant the development tools were easy to come by and even commercial tools, like Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint (better known as DPaint) were considerable cheaper than tools on other platforms. In fact until fairly recently the Amiga still boasted the finest selection of graphics packages available.

However, things had been going wrong since Commodore had taken over the company - at first they marketed the machines as business computers and then, especially in Europe, mainly as games consoles; doing the machine an injustice.

Commodore wasted huge amounts of capital on manufacturing PC clones (one of the first companies to do so), however before long everyone else caught on and soon Commodore found themselves sidelined in that market. Add to this an unwieldy corporate structure, which didn't listen to feedback from regional offices and you had a recipe for disaster.

The A500, the "base" system, hadn't received an upgrade in six years - it was coming under pressure from both second generation consoles and the PC, which was finally beginning to take off as a games machine.

In an effort to reverse their fortunes, Commodore commissioned the CDTV - it was supposed to be the perfect consumer oriented home computer. Unfortunately, the message about what the system was actually supposed to do was unclear - originally it was marketed only in Hi-Fi stores, where its appearance made it look like a expensive CD player instead of the world's first multimedia computer.

A series of further cock-ups ensued, the designers were not given enough money to effectively complete things they had been working on. Commodore started skimping on cash, forcing the use of PC style desktop boxes for the supposed flagship A4000 and the use of an IDE interface instead of the marginally more expensive SCSI.

The final Amiga to make it to market was the CD32, still more advanced than anything else on the market - including both the Megadrive/Genesis and Super Nintendo. Confidence in Commodore's ability to promote the platform undermined any success it could have had. Eventually the financial problems mounted and the company fell apart - Commode finally went under in May 1994.

[continues tomorrow]

//agi. [agi@fsmail.net]