The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : Adios, Amiga--You Had the Know-How but Not the Niche
It aimed to be the world’s best game computer. By the time it was introduced in late 1985, it was instead the most technologically sophisticated personal computer of its time, but it lacked a clearly defined market niche and application software.
When it finally did find its niche, it revolutionized television and video production.
Now the Amiga and its troubled producer, Commodore International Ltd. of West Chester, Pa., are gone, victims of a personal computing world where the path to success isn’t based merely on innovation: Tapping into a mass market is also vital.
The IBM PC and its legion of clones replaced typewriters, desktop calculators and drawers full of files in millions of offices. The Apple Macintosh gave professional-quality typesetting to the masses while replacing traditional typesetting equipment in small print shops, along with the pens and ink and rub-off symbols used by graphic artists.
Unfortunately for Commodore, what the Amiga ended up replacing was a few very expensive computer and video production systems that a few people used to make animation and titles and fancy transitions from one video image to another. In the process, it created a new video cottage industry. But it found too few niches on the desktops of corporate America or in the family rooms of middle America.
The Amiga, which had the most powerful graphics capabilities of any small computer when it was introduced, might have found a more permanent place if its designers had stuck with their early aspirations of making a super game machine.
And maybe out of Commodore’s announced liquidation, the Amiga, or at least parts of it, will end up in the next generation of someone else’s super game machine.
When the original Amiga was introduced in 1985, it used the same Motorola 68000 microprocessor as the Apple Macintosh. But it also had three custom graphics processing chips that could manipulate much of the screen display without the help of the 68000 chip. In an era when you could go out for coffee waiting for the Mac to redraw its screen after making a change to a drawing, the Amiga was capable of real-time animation.
And in an era when the IBM PC could produce eight colors on its screen and the Mac none, the Amiga could easily show 32 colors--and 4,096 colors were possible with special programming.
From the beginning, however, there were problems. The Amiga’s Santa Clara, Calif.-based designer was bought by Commodore while the innovative computer was still in development. When it finally arrived on dealers’ shelves, it had a crude, unfinished operating system and a low-resolution “workbench” interface that belied the machine’s sophisticated graphics features.
Commodore had once been a serious player in the small-business computing market in the late 1970s with its Pet. But by 1985, it was best known as the maker of the low-priced, low-powered, low-reliability Commodore 64 game computer.
And it had undergone major management upheaval with the departure the previous year of Jack Tramiel, the man who had built Commodore into a home computing powerhouse. Tramiel’s subsequent purchase of troubled Atari and development of computers that more clearly targeted the home market didn’t help Commodore’s future, either.
Thus it simply wasn’t very credible in 1985 that the company that defined the bottom end of home computing was suddenly also going to supply the most sophisticated multi-tasking, four-channel stereo, high-speed graphics computer of its day. As a result, most major computer dealers wanted nothing to do with the Amiga.
There was no mass market for high-performance computers in those days, so Commodore’s failure to get the Amiga onto the shelves of corporate-oriented dealerships was a serious blow.
Software was slow to come for the Amiga, which was incompatible with any other computer of the day. (Eventually, however, it became the only computer capable of running both IBM and Macintosh software in addition to its own programs.)
And when software did appear, it was the kind that appealed mostly to computer hackers or animation artists, not secretaries or bookkeepers or middle managers or even neighborhood print shops.
Despite all the problems, the Amiga had one feature that no other personal computer could match: It could deliver a signal that matched the standard for televised images. That artifact, from its original conception as a game machine that would use a TV set for its monitor, made the Amiga the only choice for low-cost video processing.
People could feed in images from videotape and overlay titles or graphic images, re-recording the results back out to videotape.
Eventually a company called NewTek in Topeka, Kan., built an expansion board and software for the Amiga, called Video Toaster, launching this embryonic video industry into high gear. With a little training, a little money, a lot of imagination and a lot of patience, it was possible to create professional-quality video effects, ranging from fancy titles and scene transitions to complete animated features.
Suddenly the Amiga was a must-have machine, from the local cable franchise to the networks to MTV.
A resurrection of the Amiga is doubtful. Its video features are already available on specialized add-in boards for the Macintosh and the PC, so the industry it created will live on without it.
In the short history of personal computing, however, the Amiga’s nine-year life span left a meteoritic trail that will persist long after its death.
