
Crash and Burn: The Amiga ST Story - simonpure
https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/crash-and-burn-the-amiga-st-story
======
kabdib
> Shivji’s Atari 130ST display units were hollow cases, but people could see
> them.

Those were live STs, running actual OS bits. There weren't many of them
working (I think we had five machines, and limited supply of the custom
chips). But they were there for people to see, pushing real honest pixels.
From time to time a display machine would die (IIRC they were overheating a
lot), and the hw folks would take it away and fix it.

------
pmoriarty
_" Commodore's phones rang off the hook. They had 50 calls a day from people
wanting to sell the PET. Distribution couldn't keep up with demand. The PET's
success was partly due to it's built-in BASIC interpreter. Commodore
outsourced BASIC to a small firm called Micro-Soft. Micro-Soft agreed to be
paid per PET once delivered. Delays hurt cash flow so much they nearly went
under. Micro-Soft were saved only by Apple licensing Micro-Soft BASIC for
their Apple II."_

Twenty years later, in 1997, with Apple near bankruptcy, Microsoft invested
$150 million in to Apple.

It's interesting to wonder what would have happened had these companies not
throwing each other a lifeline at these critical times, or if they instead
just bought the other outright.

~~~
betamaxthetape
It was in the renewal of the Applesoft Basic license that Apple gave Microsoft
a perpetual license to the Mac interface:

> Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a
> term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still
> depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would
> be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software
> base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of
> his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that
> Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing
> to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from
> Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of
> Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac
> displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user
> interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history,
> executed by John Sculley in November 1985.

source:
[https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBasic.txt)

~~~
ethanpil
Wanna try it?
[https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10](https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10)

------
detritus
This ended too soon! For me the real age of the Amiga started with the 500,
which this article - wonderful as it is - stops exactly short of.

~~~
mastazi
Yes we need a Part 2, it was a very enjoyable reading! The YouTube channel
“Nostalgia Nerd” [1] could scratch that itch in the meantime - look for the
“Amiga Story” documentary (made up of 2 videos, about one hour each), it’s
well done. On the same channel there are also several longer videos about the
various Atari product lines (ST, Jaguar etc).

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd](https://www.youtube.com/c/Nostalgianerd)

~~~
ansible
For even more about the computers back in the 1980's, check out The 8-bit Guy:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22](https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22)

~~~
mastazi
Oh yes, great channel I agree

------
cycomanic
I owned an St when I was a teenager, I still think it stands a lot in the
shadow of the amiga. I was excited to read a bit more about the background
story (I know bits and parts of it), but this article is terribly written. It
is very incoherent and different characters are mentioned at random without
any relation to each other. It almost feels like a row of (only marginally
related) bullet points that seem to have been pulled together from different
sources. There are lots of grammar mistakes kissing definite and indefinite
articles...) which makes it very hard to follow.

As a note to future writers, if you put together a story like this and
seemingly start with a "main" character, don't just start talking about other
characters (also companies) without telling how they relate to the main
characters.

~~~
karmakaze
Same here. I had an Atari 8-bit and couldn't wait for the Amiga to be
released. The ST fell short of expectations but was still lots of fun that I
couldn't get with the 8-bit like Megamax C and Minix. Gem was fine but not
that exciting and I had the higher res monochrome monitor so not many games
just Magaroids and Balance of Power.

I read the post as a fairly complete collected history and overlooked the
incoherence. There were some details I didn't know or had forgotten. I had a
good view of the Atari side of things as I had connections that got first ST
units and early beta software and programming docs.

------
ethanpil
For some post Amiga post Commodore drama you should check out the Amiga
Documents...
[https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/](https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/)

------
teknopurge
what a great article - fantastic 10m read on a specific part of the computer
business.....part that is arguably responsible for where the compute industry
is today.

These are the people that were superior to Apple at the time - both in
technology and business acumen. Then they imploded...

~~~
icedchai
I would argue that they lacked business acumen. The fact is Commodore's
marketing of the Amiga was terrible. After the 1985 head start, they let the
technology languish for years.

The 500, 2000, and even 3000 were all refinements of the same original system.
The basic platform hardly changed at all until the Amiga 1200 and 4000 in
1993, when they added AGA graphics. And it was too little, too late.

~~~
flywheel
The expandability of the original Amiga platform is what kept the ecosystem so
vibrant that there almost wasn't a need to update the platform for so long -
so many expansions that the Mac people could only dream about. Video Toaster,
to name but one. I started with an A1000 that I hacked a 20MB hard drive into,
along with the usual RAM expansions. I moved on to a fully-loaded A2000 system
with a 68030 CPU, 1GB of hard drive space, 64MB of RAM, ethernet card (coax),
an Apple Mac emulator card, a PC card that ran PC software on the card, a PBX
card to hook up to interface with the phone line, and just so much more -
while the Mac was still pushing black and white graphics and 512KB RAM (and
very, very difficult to expand the RAM).

I later got an A1200, and then an A4000 as well. While the platform updates
were great, those weren't what really made the Amiga shine - it was the
multitasking OS that the Mac and PC didn't really have - they were nowhere
near Amiga OS, which was pretty amazing. Through AREXX any application could
control any other application, which is something Windows and OSX still don't
really do. I mean to some extent it's sort of possible now, but not as easily
as it was with Amiga OS.

If Commodore was still around and had not gone out of business, I'd absolutely
be using Amigas today. (yes, I know it sort of still exists, but it isn't
really funded or widely used)

~~~
DerekL
> Through AREXX any application could control any other application, which is
> something Windows and OSX still don't really do. I mean to some extent it's
> sort of possible now, but not as easily as it was with Amiga OS.

AppleScript was introduced in System 7.1.1 back in 1993. Maybe ARexx scripting
was much better, I don't know.

(Support for scriptable Macintosh applications actually arrived in 1991, but
there was no built-in scripting language for it.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript)

~~~
flywheel
AREXX was around in 1987. It was amazing. Pretty much every application had an
"AREXX port" to allow scripting. And I used it extensively. The closest I've
seen to anything like it is OLE on Windows, but it's not very accessible or
pervasive like AREXX was in every application.

------
johnyzee
For those curious, there was never an 'Amiga ST'. The headline is just a play
on the competition between Amiga and the Atari ST.

------
andi999
"By late 1983 Tramiel had crushed his enemies, seen them driven before him and
heard the lamentations of their dealerships. ".... wait.. isnt this a Conan
reference?

~~~
pmoriarty
The _Conan_ scene paid homage to by this quote:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos)

