What if Amiga, Never Was? | Nostalgia Nerd
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- čas přidán 30. 06. 2016
- I know it's an outrageous notion to pose. A spill chilling, shudder inducing one. But if Amiga didn't exist, what could have happened? Imagine a past where Jack Tramiel didn't exit Commodore to go and setup Tramel Technology, nor did he purchase the remnants of Atari from Warner Communications, and therefore, nor did he put up funding for Amiga to continue with their work. Instead he perused a system he'd been contemplating for a while, but of course, we're no longer talking about the ATARI ST, oh no...
No Commodore Amiga, No Atari ST, just a strange combination of the two, along with some other unexpected consequences. Let's stroll, together, down this mysterious path of technology and business that wasn't.
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The reason I picked this particular alternative history by the way was because it felt such a clear division of routes between if Tramiel had stayed at Commodore or if he'd have left (which he of course, did), and I also love how Commodore and Atari were so intertwined in either case. It feels like Jack himself is a linch pin in space time.
If Commodore marketed the Amiga as a serious business machine they could be in Apple's position today.
Patchuchan ...only if they had kept developing the Amiga as well, instead of actively prohibiting their R&D department from R&D'ing (which they actually did!). I read in one of the Amiga magazines of the 90s that the engineers were about halfway through the development stage of what would have become the AAA chipset (Advanced Amiga Architecture), which, if rumours can be believed, would have catapulted the Miggy into the next millennium (i.e. where we are now).
As it turned out, the AAA chipset was then reduced to the AGA architecture we know, and all further development effectively stopped there.
To be honest Atari and CBM where more intertwinded then its persived. At the time my opinion it was more of a Steve Jobs move then Tramiel. Lot of inside swapping at management levels. NEC was inventing alot of patents at the time, then in the 2000 s sued and won against the big branded computer names. Also the Amiga idea started in 1972 !! When Atari had Amiga, my opinion it was still passing to CBM. The story is very weaved between them all, and inside dealings, Philips was also involved.
@Zen Reaper Philips took it (A-cdtv), and made the CDi, of which sold that on to become the Playstation 1blue.
The CDi was going to have a new FMV card upgrade that included a graphics card, but Philips dropped Philips Computers Division due to a argument with Dixons over MSX, and sold it to Sony Japan, (and left overs to Acer).
@@Patchuchan CBM said PC clones was the future not the Amiga. C64 is where CBM made the money and milked it.
if amiga never existed psygnosis never had your power and dma design was never have money to make lemmings and grand theft auto.
and that means that in a world when amiga never existed,gta never existed too.
There's a load of software companies that wouldn't exist without the Amiga. DICE is another one who's legacy is pure Amiga (Pinball Dreams/Illusions/Fanatasies). A lot of big players today owe their existence and success to the Amiga.
that´s weirdly true.
without the amiga, in the long run we wouldn´t have battlefield or mirrors edge.
yes but other companies would exist instead for better or worse
@@juansmeeth Team17 and bullfrog also got their start on Amiga. Peter Molyneux would've become a baked bean salesmen if Commodore didn't mistake him for another company and send him a bunch of amigas...
Delphine was another game company that started on Amiga. Another World/Out of this World was a big game that according to wikipedia, "It also influenced a number of other video games and designers, inspiring such titles as Ico, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, and Delphine's later Flashback."
Imagine a world where we didn't have MGS or Silent Hill because Delphine never existed. The video game industry instantly changes for the worse with no Amiga
@@Zellio2011 Oddly as I still live in Wakefield, I used to buy my Spectrum games from Microbyte there. When the Amiga and the ST came along I'd get PD discs from the guys upstairs who were known as 17 Bit Software, prior to becoming Team 17.
I don't think you know how difficult it is to screw butterflies
I want an alternate history where IBM goes with their first choice of Digital Research and the already well established CP/M operating for their new line of Personal Computers, instead of the upstart Microsoft and their recently cobbled together MS-DOS...
Would we be running GEM 10 now?
Possibly. But it all depends on if Gary Kildall would have been smart enough to negotiate similar deal with IBM as Bill Gates did. If not, there would have never been PC clone market in which case PC as we know would not be the dominant architecture.
In that case we maybe as well would be running some Unix based OS on ARM architecture ... oh wait ... many of us do exactly that ... in our bloody phones.
But... What would our phones be running if unix was never invented?
It's an OS with a pretty strange history, so it's not much of a stretch to imagine it not ever existing in the first place, or never catching on because nobody took it seriously.
And I don't know why anyone ever DID take it so seriously, it is, at heart, a toy operating system that was designed so a uni student could play games on a minicomputer nobody needed. I'm not joking. How did it get from that, to being a 'serious business mainframe OS'?
The change in how people viewed it is bizarre.
Maybe GEOS would be the most popular smartphone OS, if Unix/Linux weren't available. After all the first commercially available smartphone (Nokia 9000) used it.
Popularity of Unix is easy to explain:
It was simple, It was written in high-level language and early versions even came with source code. This resulted it being ideal OS to teach operating system internals in universities.
This lead to it's widespread use in university world and when students went to corporate world they brought it with them.
You're talking about Linux, not Unix. Unix was designed as a 'serious business mainframe OS' from the beginning.
To people in the USA like me, I had never heard of the Amiga before it was way obsolete, so it's like it never existed for us
Yup in the USA the primary school computer in the 80s was the Apple IIe. well at least in California.
We had the Apple IIe but nobody realy knew how to use them. Everyone I knew had IBM compatibles at home.
UR blind what really is Amiga Wont , Cant , then never was,, I have been saying this all along so now he took this up pff ..I am Amigaman
@@SAM-ru4vx thats a lie the Illuminati endorsed company wanted u to think .In fact apple went hust 4 times. Apple asked commodore for help in 1990,, Commodore outsold everyone till about 1992.
I'm in the US and of course I heard of the Amiga. I almost bought one in the mid 1980's but couldn't afford the $1600+ price tag so I bought an Atari ST with a monochrome monitor. It got me through 3 years of college before I had to take a class that would only accept programs written on an IBM PC or a clone.
Having had and still having an Amiga... I found this interesting... and frightening
Same, same and same.
I have 3 1200s and 2 500s.......... all need repairs.
The disk drives have died
Commodore's plans before buying out the Amiga centered around the CBM900 which used a Zilog Z8000 chip and ran UNIX.
Supposedly Tramiel while at Atari considered buying out a company called Mindset Corp which marketed a PC compatible with greatly improved graphics chips and the Atari ST ended up using almost the same screen modes.
Oddly enough, I think Atari Corp would have been better off putting out a graphics-focused PC-compatible. Something that could do all your DOS applications while also delivering a compelling 16-bit gaming experience would have been a top seller in most markets, and might have actually had a chance in the US.
Also Atari already had a plan for their next generation 16-bit platform (Gaza and Rainbow project)...btw I don't think any company focused on the consumer market could have kept up with the PC clones..... the open and highly expandable nature with big companies behind it was simply unbeatable .. even the biggest players failed (DEC, SUN, SGI etc...)
I think a commodore ST range was very possible. Major difference? The sound chip would not have been as wank!
The ST didn't have the graphics co-processor when it came out while the Amiga did. I with Atari would have continued with supporting the development of the Amiga. After all, in some ways, it was the Atari 800's "little" brother.
There's that little bit of Amiga history where Steve Jobs was shown the Amiga, but passed on it. Had that happened we'd have never known about the Amiga, but the OCS chipset could've been driving early generation Macs had it played out differently. Had that happened, the Atari ST probably would've never existed.
i loved this video !! :) i totally saw where you went on each machine, and had a big smile the whole show. well done m8!
btw i used commodore comps since the PET, and had a vic20 and c64 at home as they came out. if this timeline was viable, i am sure i would have commodore comps to this day.
also, 3d capabilities would have progressed differently, as you said, but by today, would be on par(probably)
The Commodore ST. I love it :)
The 90's chart show would have looked a little wonky as well as it used an Amiga video toaster to overlay text on videos.
Today I have 2 A500's and an ST. Purely because now I can afford them. Back then (87) 400 or 500 quid was a sizable amount of money for my humble family. We had car's that cost less than that more than once, so a computer that price was not really an option. Today I buy them broken and I fix them. Nerd that I am. Had the Amiga not been there, the Commodore ST would have featured a lot in my life. I bought an Amiga A600 (with 20MB HD. You know, for disk swapping reasons) with my 3rd pay in 1992. Instead it would have been a Commodore ST. But again the same outcome: sold for a PC. In my A600's case, less than a year later. The C-ST's lack of expansion potential would still have meant it died. :(
For some advanced thought, what about an Sinclair/Atari story where the ZX Spectrum successor code named "Loki" became a reality and there was no Atari Jaguar / Mega Atari ST as a result. Back when the Loki was being talked about (83-85), a system as powerful as an Atari Jaguar with a keyboard, all built by Sinclair, might have upped the game quite a bit.
The way the Flare1 turned out, it was similar to an acorn a3000 in speed, which is good. The TV-toy would have been even faster (using I'm guessing an Inmos T212), and with both of these it's unlikely that Linux would exist as the QL was truly awful and wouldn't exist!
Alternative routes:
The Jaguar was "Flare 2", an updated version of the "lost" Konix system hardware.
Atari was toying with upgraded CPUs (notably the 16 bit WDC 65816, later seen in the SNES and Apple 2GS, ) which they might have returned to when the Amiga deal fell through (might have been Sinclair QL like with a 16 bit CPU, 8 Bit board, Atari 1400 ES as in Eight/Sixteen anyone?), Especially if they had not been rude to Nintendo (Nintendo originally wanted Atari to do distribution for them in the USA, so a possibly SNES chipset based Computer).
Commodore was developing a Z8000 based Machine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900 and may have gone that route with no Amiga to spur the ST development.
Man you need more subs for the awesome content you create.
Oddly, this butterfly story could have been, but when I was at CBM GMBH working on Amiga, CBM was more bothered about the PC market, and was said internally the PC market would dominate the computer market and Amiga would go no where and be dropped by CBM. CBM was looking to put a Agnus into a PC, not really built on the Amiga3000 which all had some for of multilayer pcb faults which could not be rectified and that why the A3000 was dropped and more time spend on A500 designs, The A500plus and A1500 are in fact old pcbs revs to be used up. A600 A1200 CBM never believed in the at the start, and wanted to do only a game console and PC clone market. Also oddly the C128 was going to be redeveloped with the a C+4 flavour. The C64 is where CBM made money and CBM wanted to milk it, a ram upgrade was planned by Ocean, and we played round with a moded C64 128kb and quickly dropped to spend more time on CDTV in a A1000 style.
Oddly less known, CBM made money doing after sales engineering for Sinclair, Philips and Olivetti, then Dixons Group, we had over 200 engineers working on projects.
Lots of weird Amiga hardware designs became internally but was dropped because CBM said the future was in IBM clones.
If anyone finds a Amiga with a boot disk icon that has a blue fingernail, thats me doing a easter egg April fools joke in firmware.
It was fun working at CBM, even the drinking parties at lunch time.
It seems to me that different subsidiaries had different market focuses. Commodore UK were focused on the games market so wanted the A500, 600, 1200 machines. Commodore Japan wanted cheap low-end machines. Commodore Germany was focused on business applications.
Atari was similar, with Atari Germany pushed for the Mega STE, TT, and a desktop Falcon040 to compete against Apple for the DTP and pro music market, whereas the UK and US wanted to focus on the home/games market.
Wouldn't have mattered either way - the distribution network under Tramiel-Commodore and Gould-Commodore were practically identical in the sense that the dealers hated the company with great passion, while companies like Apple, and the clones worked with dealers and embraced one another. The growth potential for Commodore after the C64 line were pretty much in permanent ink that it would never come close to the PC market after 1985.
Loving your vids, your channel is ace matey
if you were going to do that, then show how the playstaion would not exist without the amiga tech
Oh my poor brain. I knew the idea behind the video before I pressed play and it still confused me. Good job haha.
You oughtta to related what-if to this one. One where Atari had the Amiga and Commodore had the ST. In my head, I always imagined Atari would have stuffed in the 7800's Maria graphics chip into the Amiga's design so that it could have even more fancy graphics modes at its disposal.
Though I always thought the first Amiga should have used a Motorola 68010 CPU and a 68451 MMU. Then its OS could have had memory protection from the start. Would have totally upped the cost tho.
This is a really cool concept. Would love to see more videos like this in the future.
The best plot twist ever would have been a deal between Commodore and SNK, with the Amiga using Neo Geo's motherboard for enhanced 2D performance and total compatibility with NG arcade games...
Very nice video indeed.
RIP Jay.
Here in Canada, I was aware of the Video Toaster, but not the platform it ran on until I accidentally ran into an Amiga emulator back in the early 2000. It was all 68k Mac and later PPC Mac in school. Homes were a mix of x86 DOS/Windows and Mac. I remember visiting a technical college in high school and they had rows of funky looking blue and purple SGI systems.
The names "Atari" and "Commodore" evoked thoughts of poor people game consoles and low cost computers you saw in catalogs that no one ever bought...
Thank goodness for captions!
Any particular reason?
So I can watch it with audio off...
Not because there's something wrong with your voice, though! It's that I often find myself in situations where I cannot have audio on and don't have access to headphones. So then it's nice to be able to watch these anyway!
Mr Nerd please, make a video on what kind of Amiga we would have today if Commodore didn't balls everything up.
1:37 "The Duane?" - Joel "Vargskelethor" Johansson
Excellently done
What a great video... congratulations
If the Amiga didn't exist, Atari would have bought out the rights to it as they were funding it, and either release it themselves or shelves it in favor of their Atari ST. That is the alternative story. Commodore would have been selling the Commodore 128 and been years behind the 16-bit computer market. Because after Tramiel went to Atari with commodores engineers and designers, commodore has nothing.
Very clever. Well done sir!
Commodore wasnt interested in 16-bit computers, there will be still 8-bit c-128/ c-256 and c-65 hahah it would bankcrupt in few years without Amiga after PC-junor failure.
cool vid look forward to a few more like this maybe?
nothing would be different, ibm pc will still be the default computer standard, the industry would be the same, amiga didn't matter even when it was new
Oh, I think Tramiel would have found a way to get Commodores IBM-compatible line of computers into every home before long... Would have liked to own one back in the day, with a known branding and off-brand pricetag it shouød have been all aces!
Amiga tech(as in when Atari was funding Amiga) was supposed to be an Atari console, so if Jack had stay it possibly would have come to light, beating NES handily if they figured out the licensing thing Nintendo perfected..
The main insight here is a point that's often been made: The Amiga and the ST were too similar to each other, while being incompatible, that they split into pieces what could've otherwise been a thriving market if it had only remained in one piece at that early stage. (We could even throw in the Apple IIGS, as part of this problem.) Thus in a world that had only the Amiga or only the ST - and it really doesn't matter which one - that kind of computer would've been a major hit in pioneering the multimedia personal computer.
At least, it would've been a hit until the maturation of Windows in the mid-1990s, which wiped out nearly everyone else except Apple. And even then, Apple had just barely survived until their renaissance starting in the late 1990s thanks to Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive.
They fought for the same market, but they really weren't that similar. The Atari came with more memory and had built in MIDI. The Amiga had without question the fastest graphics from 85 all the way up until 91-92. The Amiga also had the best OS of any PC up until OS/2 2.0 came out in 93. Most of the stuff we take for granted today, interprocess communication, running multiple executing programs at the same time, etc, none of those things were in existence until AmigaDOS came out, and they wouldn't be replicated in the mainstream until OS/2 2.0 and Win 95/NT
How lucky we are it didn't go that route
Unfortunately , it still could end up worse or better
This would make for an excellent Black Mirror episode 😂
i got confuzzled. this is on some alternate time line 1985 BTTF hell valley shiz!!! i am so glad i am sitting in front of my A1200 w/060 @ 80MHz right now.
Imagine if Microsoft had chosen to put office on the Amiga instead of the Mac.....
I think it's a bit extreme to think Commodore would have done exactly everything Atari actually did, including the Jaguar console... There's also a possibility that without the Amiga company existing, the engineers would have developed the Amiga hardware for Atari instead (given its actual similarity to previous Atari models), making the Atari ST essentially what the Amiga was, only with a few Atari-isms instead of Commodore-isms... and Commodore then would have followed-up to the C-64 with the C-65 which was in development, but scraped in favor of the Amiga. A similar thing would have happened if Amiga would have been taken over by Atari instead of Commodore, only that in that case the computer might have been called Atari Amiga.
If the Acorn Photon was a 256meg Archimedes for the sub 400quid home market...
what music is playing in the bg?
You are right: -- if Jack Tramiel did not leave Commodore there would be no Amiga! --
Let me explain: Dave Morse was trying to sell Amiga to numerous companies for quite time in 1982/1983. He was turn down by Sony, Apple, HP, Philips, SGI, Commodore...
On 21. November 1983. Amiga Corp. sign with Atari Inc. (owned by Warner Communication, NOT Jack Tramiel) NDA and technical aspect of Amiga technology.
CES show come and went and since Dave Morse STILL could not find ANY company interested in Amiga, he sign another agreement with Atari Inc. (6. marh 1984.) where they agree about licensing Amiga technology. Same document also gave right to Atari Inc. to buy some stocks of Amiga Corp. they also agree on price and terms of stock options and price of licensing Amiga technology in Atari Inc. products. As part of agreement Atari Inc. gave Amiga Corp. 500.000$ that should be used to produced real chips from breadboards that only exist back then. There was also special bonus for Amiga Corp.: three times 500.000$ for each custom chip upon their completion.
So this was best deal that Dave Morse could make for Amiga in 1983/1984.
What happened in this time frame, two major things for Amiga:
1) Jack Tramiel left Commodore after disagreement with Irvin Gould in January 1984.
2) Atari Inc. was losing around 400 MILLIONS dollars two quarters consequently(!) and Warner Communications start to panic early in 1984.! Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communication, called Jack Tramiel (while Jack was on trip around the world with his wife, enjoy and resting from work - possible first times in decades!). Steve Ross offer Jack a job of CEO of Atari Inc. (to replace James Morgan) since he conclude that Jack would be right person to save Atari. Jack refuse to be CEO of Atari Inc. but eventually make agreement with Warner to take over Atari Inc. and to run it for two years. Two years should be enough time to evaluate how much Atari Inc. really worth, and after two years to make final deal with Warner.
So how all this effect Amiga?
1) if Jack stay at Commodore, Commodore would NOT buy Amiga: Jack stated in 1983., when Dave Morse offer him Amiga, that he is not interested in Amiga team, but only in Amiga chips (pretty much same offer as Atari Inc.-Amiga Corp. deal from 1984.!).
---sidenote: Commodore withou Jack eventually did bought entire Amiga Corp., with team, since many Commodore engineers left Commodore and follow Jack Tramiel to Atari Corp. so Commodore was lacking of engineers! Commodore even sue ex-employees for allegedly stealing corporate secrets and taking them to Atari Corp (but Commodore could not prove this on court)!
2) if Atari Inc. would continue with Warner Communication and CEO James Morgan, they would go bust pretty sure in short time so there would be no one to finance and to produce computers and video games with Amiga technology.
So Jack leaving Commodore and Warner selling Atari Inc. practically gave birth and opportunity to Amiga (these events push Amiga Corp. to Commodore)! As Dave Morse realize what would happen (Jack taking over Atari Inc. with aim to bring RBP Rock Bottom Price computer aka Atari ST to the market) he approach again to Commodore but this time Commodore without Jack Tramiel and without concrete plans for future computers, and start negotiation with aim to Commodore buy entire Amiga Corp. He practically break agreement with Atari Inc. from March 1984. but it was understandable according to new situation. --- sidenote: eventually Atari Corp. used this Atari Inc.-Amiga Corp. deal from March 1984. to CONTRA-SUE Commodore. Commodore/Amiga Corp. lost this court case and had to pay to Atari Corp. lawsuit expenses and non-disclosure amount of money in off-court settlement.
It would have been funny if atari released a remastered first person adventure E.T. Video game that was exclusive to the atari st which helped sell millions of copies on the atari ST.
How did we end up with D'Alema in a NostalgiaNerd video?
Awsome , you should do a alternate reality where 3dfx takes over the world
or WHAT IF Bill Gates never got into the OS business.
Someone else would have built upon CP/M and dos would have come about eventually. That CEO then would have bought out other companies and copied Amiga's window like interface. To make a IBM PC compatible OS which would be on every business/consumer machine eventually. We just live in a alternate reality where Bill Gates was born and did well in software engineering. Just be thankful Sony left Nintendo after the SNES CD protype was made. That might be a different story as well
I wanna live in the world where MAC OS beat Win 3.11. And that Halo games was gonna be on the skittles colored iMacs and the RISC was the better CPU.
We've got the man in the high castle and for all mankind. Maybe Netflix could pick this up? I'm not saying it will be a blockbuster. But I'd watch it.
The Atari Amiga...that has a nice ring to it.
if amiga wasn't existed the psygnosis don't become the greatest pc delevolper and because of that dma design maybe not existed leaving to the fact dma turned to rockstar and maked and make grand theft auto, in this world gta doens't exist.
somewhere there is a universe where due to different business decisions in the late 80's and early 90's, Apple Computers went bankrupt in the mid 90's because the Amiga was given the technological development it needed to stay ahead of the market. In this time line, Steve Jobs instead of going back to Apple, is hired by Commodore to work on new machines in the mid 90's, leading to the iAmiga, an all in one computer with a budget laptop model to follow in the form of the AmigaTraveller,a laptop based Amiga. Having a background in graphical superiority, the Amiga becomes the Tool Of Choice for artists and designers everywhere. In the early 00'ss, Commodore rocks the world with the development and release of A-Tunes, and the AmigaPod, a portable music device. Eventually, in the late 00's, Commodore, to much acclaim, release the AmigaPhone. Around the world people now sit in coffee shops on their AmigaTraveller laptops, updating their MySpace, while people on Vimeo make videos about what a world would be like if the Macintosh never existed.
... Something about the thought of people calling anything an APhone really makes me giggle... XD
What a nightmare!!!!!! Of the commodore st....
ST probably would have eaten the consumer market whole, and then died trying to move away from 68000
An interesting thought. As Bedrooms to Billions had it, though, the ST was a hastily cobbled together response to the Amiga, wasn't it, in order to get to market first? In other words, no Amiga, no ST?
Just spitballing ... and before I get jumped on I say this as someone who owns and loves both machines.
I think Tramiel knew what needed to come next and I like to think that without Amiga, the ST would have been put together in a more "loving" way, which may have contributed to it's success.
Without the Amiga there was still the Mac to compete against, which was the ST's target anyways.
Cheers! Keep it retro!
What's the music clip at 1:36? :)
Interesting. I think you should do more of these. :)
Your alternate scenario is plausible, however I don't think there's any way that Commodore would've dominated the console space. That was always destined to become the preserve of the big Japanese companies, IMO by virtue of their gaming legacies, starting from the arcade days. Also, the likes of Capcom, Konami et al favouring a western console over a Japanese console are incredibly slim.
In any event, I think the hypothetical Nintendo Playstation would've come out as the dominating console by that point.
So, this would also be an alternate history where Nintendo doesn't stab Sony in the back at CES?
Wow. It's like 'The man in the High PC tower'. :)
Somewhere in a parallel universe there's probably folks commenting on CZcams videos about the Atari Amiga and Commodore ST, and how good Eric Stoltz was in Back To The Future :-)
Now, THAT'S a thought!
The advantage that the PC had, other than its use by business, was it's limitations.
Kind of like Man; we suck at almost everything except thinking, compared to other animals.
The PC had that expansion bus, and almost no native capabilities. Amiga's custom chipset, which made it so revolutionary, made it fall behind when the PC could have new graphics standard upon new graphics standard because the graphics were not integral to the machine. Same with audio.
When Atari was Amiga & Amiga was Atari..... !!
What would have happened if Atari & Amiga had merged in the 90's to become one.....
Would they have got stronger and more powerful sharing resources or would they have gone down the path of bankruptcy & distruction, its hard to say ..
Come on now, Nintendo still wouldn’t have stayed with Sony as they were concerned that Sony was going to get all the money. The jaguar would probably not exist, and commodore would still probably die like most of the other computer corporations or get bot out and Atari would have had the amiga
i like to imagine if the QL was better adopted, its only a 68008, people could easily have made it work, it was a great machine. i still hope it has its day.
That is some tenacious degree of hope you're holding on to there sir. But I'm with you all the way.
aye well it could be easy to forget such a machine if it were not for channels like these reminding us. so cheers.
Welcome.
Perhaps the SAM Coupe would be a lot more common and not so ridiculously expensive to buy!
Nostalgia con D'Alema?
I doubt much would have changed if Amiga never was created. PC was on the uprising and alot of games started to get ports to the PC-AT/XT and so on very early.
Well, had Commodore not booted Tramiel, they would have kept their home dominance in Europe longer, but the States would have been even more of a lost cause. The ST, while being a great machine for musicians, wasn't the multimedia powerhouse the Amiga was. At the very least, the Amiga had the creative market on lock... Not that Ali knew what to do with it, the moron.
Sharp may have made an attempt at entering the US market with their X68000.
The X68000 was even more powerful then the OSC Amiga but it was more expensive.
It had near perfect arcade ports and may have sold well outside of Japan if it didn't have to compete against the Amiga.
The ST also may have not existed without the Amiga to spur it's development so it would have had no real competitor other then the Mac II which was even more expensive.
Patchuchan They might have tried Europe, but I don't see any path for the X68000 here in the US. In addition to the dominance of the IBM PC in the latter half of the 80s, America soundly rejected the MSX, which was less expensive than the X68000.
The ST likely would have come into existence in any case, if only to try to keep the European market from IBM compatibles (and a possible Sharp x68000 entry) as long as possible. 8-bit computers wouldn't have survived long against IBM, certainly not as long as the ST and Amiga did.
Wait a minute, why would this lead to Nintendo and Sony making the Nintendo Playstation?
when you watch a video without the title and wonder what the hell is this guy talking about.. Lol good times!
the video says "Commodore ST / FM" in various spots !!!..needs editing :)))
Interesting, but wouldn't have happened like this. Because, without the Amiga, C= would not have had the incentive to put a GUI into the C= ST, and that market would still have been dominated by Macintoshes and SunOS and Silicon Graphics workstations. Millions of programmers who learned GUI and multitasking programming on the Amiga would not exist, and MacOS and Windows would still have cooperative multitasking (b/c the Amiga was the only competitive computer in the price segment at the time that did have preemptive multitasking). So, Windows 96 would still look like Windows 3.x, and Windows NT 4.0 would have been a reiteration of Windows NT 3.5 (which looked like Windows 3.1). OS/2 would have gained more popularity, perhaps. Desktops would probably not have evolved as much as they did, and many sophisticated apps that were built by ex-Amiga developers would not exist. Probably software houses would still struggle with writing multitasking capable applications. Perhaps even the Web would not exist in the form it exists today: Perhaps it would have a text-based interface, since corporations would still see no benefit of a graphical user interface for the end user.
I very much disagree with you. If Tramiel had stayed with Commodore, Commodore would have released the ST in early-mid 1985. The ST was specced against the Mac, and once the Mac was released, imho, for Tramiel the direction was clear. The next step in his mind, or Shiraz Shivji's mind was the Atari TT, and that would be released in 1987/88. A 68020-based 32-bit machine, which they failed to realize, and because the A500 was eating up sales they released the STE as a stop-gap solution. In this hypothetical scenario, Commodore has the resources to complete the TT and Commodore keeps chasing after Apple. Without Amiga there is no need for the STE, instead a 16MHz ST is released by 1990 and a 32MHz 68030 TT is released in 1990-1991 with Unix, following the steps of Apple.
Like I said at the start of the video, it's impossible to know. There are just too many variables. Your version might be more likely, who knows, it's just a story, but both scenarios are pretty interesting.
A story and an interesting one, it is just that I doubt this is the most probable scenario :). There are some variables, that you might ignore I think. What I think is worth to weigh in that Tramiel did not see Commodore as the competition in 1985, but Apple, the ST was born with the Mac in mind, not as a game machine. If Tramiel had stayed and he had not had a half year break before the work on the ST started, the ST could have completed earlier. That's why I would think that by early 1985 the ST could have been completed. The other thing is the Shiraz Shivji and the Sam Tramiel interviews and some news paper information from the era that I read: after the ST was complete, Atari Corp started to work on the TT immediately, with the proper resources I am sure that would have been completed earlier too. And no Jaguar in this timeline, definitely no Jaguar :)
Indeed, with no Amiga, Commodore would have unified the user and developer bases for the "budget performance enthusiast don't need a PC" market, so we would have seen the STe/TT/Falcon sooner, and Apple and Microsoft would have needed much more time (at least the "late 90s" like Nostalgia Nerd says) to "finish off" such an exponentially better bigger more profitable Commodore.
I remember someone saying that Commodore needed Jack's "killer instinct" and without him they were lost. Atari made good stuff, but always fought their "game machine" reputation. Commodore by itself without Atari, could have gone much farther, perhaps even far enough to supplant Palm.
The Atari ST would probably have slayed the Mac. Other than that IBM PC would have still prevailed! The UK Game Development scene would be an irrelevance today without the Amiga however!
Nice alternate history
No NewTek, Toaster, Lightwave3D or decent Babylon 5??? scary .
I liked Amiga over Atari's ST from day one, the GEM desktop was a turnoff for me. It would be interesting to see how far the Amiga could have gone if Commodore had marketing the computer and not made SO many STUPID mistakes (not selling Amiga Unix stations via Sun Microsystems, not releasing the A3000+ and so many many others)
Vegeta from DBZA. 'I don't give a sh*t about butterfly's.' I remembered to censor curse words, since I don't know if they are allowed in the UK. Like the N word aka N*nja.
I think I can sync this up with dark side of the moon
Well, that was a strange set of theoretical events...
Fascinating though. I did find it interesting you assumed the Sony/Nintendo deal would have made it in this reality.
Considering what caused it to fall apart that seems unlikely, but I guess if you get desperate enough...
Would that mean we'd now have Commodore, Nintendo and Microsoft? (Microsoft entering the market seems somewhat related to Sega's failure as a console manufacturer.)
... Actually, since the playstation as originally conceived is to the snes what the Panasonic Q is to the gamecube...
If you presume Sony never tried to go it alone, what would the next generation have looked like?
The playstation isn't a console of it's own, it's the integrated model of the snes + snes CD...
...
But, would Nintendo's next console end up being some horrifying amalgamation of the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 technology thrown together? Since it's Nintendo controlling the design, I would lean towards an N64 with a CD drive, but with Sony audio hardware (like the snes has), and obviously in this context also a Sony supplied CD drive.
I imagine they might have been more willing to go with CD's here...
Or at least, a hybrid cartridge/CD system like the Sega Saturn, if they really couldn't quite let go of that idea.
(a cartridge slot is a fairly cheap thing to ad. The CD drive would have dominated the costs of the system. - part of the justification Nintendo gave recently about the n64 is they were unwilling to accept the performance of anything less than an 8x CD drive, which, if implemented in the N64 as it otherwise is, in 1996, would have doubled the cost of the system. CD drives were not cheap at the time...)
But wow... A world in which the Amiga didn't exist...
No Amiga well then everybody would have had an ARM based machine : Acorn Archimedes then RISC PC, Phoebe etc ... and the world would have been advanced much sooner.
If Commodore never bought the Amiga Corporation then Commodore would revolutionise the LCD market with the Commodore 900. They would follow up that series of computer over the years, but just like history is they wouldn't forget their number one cash grabber: The C64. Now, the Commodore 128 would probably be released. Probably with a lack of Commodore software, just like in the real world. But they would most likely go ahead with the Commodore 256. The first 16 bit computer. As the specs to the system were there was no C64 compatibility. Fans would complain about this so they would release another computer to adress this. Now, the Commodore 65 as we know it would probably not be around. Commodore would release a new computer with the WD 65816 CPU. Would the C128 have picked up sales at this time? Surely the C256 did some 128 compatible titles, but mostly the releases were 16 bit. So this new computer, let's call it the Commodore 65 would have been 16 bit and compatible with all three machines. Berkely Software would have done 16 bit Geos for it and the world would have been different then now due to Windows being pretty much crap in comparison. The Genlock technology was by Commodore engineers and a follow up to the Commodore 65, let's call it the Commodore 2000 (because EVERYTHING is cooler with 2000) would be THE multimedia machine to have. Yeah, Commodore would have thought of High Definition years before who ever thought it up in the real world. Thank you. Bye. :D
I really be suprised by this alternative world. 😎
What really puzzles me is that Atari's 8bit computers had amazing custom chips which blew everything away for at least 6 years. Then they bring out the ST with NO custom chips? The Amiga was the perfect next computer for Atari.. the "Atari Amiga" even looks cool :) They really messed up.
Atari desperately tried to acquire Amiga. They had given a loan to Amiga($100,000) on the presumption they couldn't pay it back so they could take over. $100,000 I wouldn't think was enough to finish their failing bloated project. Instead, commodore bought them and then paid back Atari. They sued for ownership on the grounds that commodore had paid them back instead of Amiga. There were actually a firestorm of lawsuits. possession being 90% of the law, Atari lost and the rest is history. Jack Tramiel sadly this time didn't have any Chuck Peddles or Dave Haineys in his pocket and although the ST is a pretty awesome machine...it was no Amiga.
Yeah, that rings a bell. I knew there was some shenanigans going on. Thanks for the overview.
Don't forget that the Atari of the ST was a completely different company. Warner split the company into two halves, Atari Games (the software division), which would go to Namco, and Atari Corporation (the hardware division), which went to Tramiel. Worse yet, Tramiel fired practically everyone who was already at Atari Corporation, replacing them with people who'd defected from Commodore to follow him.
Put bluntly, Commodore released Atari's 16-bit computer, while Atari Corporation released Commodore's.
Ya but that has nothing to do with the founding and financial/intellectual theft of amiga. Both companies wanted it. Commodore got it. Do a core dump of any amiga computer and you will find the ascii text "amiga showed the way, commodore f*cked it up". Jack Tramiel destroyed the Atari business culture and staff. He gutted the company to create a commodore style corp. only he didnt have commodorians.
To put it exactly...both commodore and Atari were trying to release someone else's computer. Neither one had a decent 16 bit replacement because they had dumped all their funding into production.
Ah now u are using my saying of course-Amigaman
WHAT A HORRIBLE THOUGHT. Pass the Whisky.
I don't think there's any post-crash scenario where the ST dominates the US. The crash destroyed the market for microcomputers as well as games. I can see Commodore kicking ass in Europe, but we in the States would have the same post-crash attitude where you worked on an IBM clone and "played Nintendo."
My intention was merely to convey that it performed better in the States without the competition offered by Amiga. No, I doubt it would have dominated. Let's call it dominating the 16 bit home computer with RF modulation demographic.
+Nostalgia Nerd One thing that I always wonder is how the market would have been with no North American crash. There wouldn't have been the tension in Commodore to start with, Atari would likely release the Amiga, but would there have been no Nintendo? Perhaps Atari would take Nintendo's license deal and just sit on the system while the Amiga console was finalized?
Nostalgia Nerd can resent my this writing: how easy it is to fool people!
Brain hurt bad.
My brain.... Ahhhhh.
Somewhere, in an alternate universe, this has happened.
I would prefer if the situation where Apple and IBM compatible machines failed and the Amiga went on to world dominance. That way I would be typing this on my Amiga computer, alas it didnt happen. Oh well it would have been a better computer world if it had.. :(
Holy shit, you broke my reality
Amiga (or ST) never really was popular in the US. They were very niche computer platforms there. Most people managed with 8-bit machines and later PCs and Macintoshes just fine. In fact I skipped the whole 16-bit home computer era too, as a Northern European. Straight to PC from C64. Even in Europe the Amiga and ST were really relevant for only a couple of years, say 1988-1990. After that is was downhill for them, with PC and consoles increasingly gaining momentum.
@Neb6 Amiga and ST had their niches in the US, but it was quite marginal and they certainly were not popular. And to my understanding, Amiga's role in video and graphics production is much overhyped. There were much more capable platforms for those, namely the Silicon Graphics. Amiga in itself couldn't do anything really, it needed expensive add-on boards for that. Atari ST had the advantage of having a build-in MIDI interface, and the price, but other than that it wasn't any better in music sequencing than other platforms.
Helps to pay full attention to this video or else WTF about 3/4 of the way in?
Being in the states i did own a c64 but never an amiga . It just was never popular here and games were next to impossible to find. I just remember before vga there was screen shots on the back of ibm pc big box games of every computer version showing off a particular game for that system. Amiga always stood out to me as freakin incredible . Of course this was years before sega genesis 16 bit was released and the amiga 500 still had an edge vs any console or computer system made at the time i.e. c64 , ibm ega. This was back in 1989 and then it happen to me where my eyes and ears came to life.. VGA pc gaming and a adlib sound card using DOS 5.0 with norton commander as my command line. My friends back then used to compete who could type dir/w the fastest and how test how fast everything would pop up on the screen. First pc was a old 286 16 mhz and then a 386dx40 40 meg hdd. Stacker was used to double your hdd but ended up being useless due to expanded memory issues
Haha, never did know the pleasure of screwing around on the command line (my Tandy 1000HX had a version of deskmate on it), but man, that does seem like quite the time to be alive.
I had the exact opposite experience. No one had a c64 but knew plenty of people with an amiga here in canada. There were several places in town that even rented amiga games.
Confusing timeline :p
It begins in 1984 and finishes in the late 90s. Pretty straight forward.
I don't mean confusing in this sense, I mean for my experience (someone who grew up in the 1980s), this timeline (as in alternate timelines from the multiverse theory) is confusing... But I was an Atari ST kid, don't mind me.
Which timeline would you have preferred? As an ST user.
I really enjoyed my youth in the 80s with my 520ST, I respect Atari as a company and I think it has a great story. I was really shocked when I saw the Commodore 520ST in your video, though. This picture cracked the space-time continuum in my mind, I'm now scarred for life. :D
The lights flickered several times as I edited it...... I was both, I used an ST throughout the 80s (albeit, my mates), then when I finally got one, I got an Amiga 6 months later. But I kept the ST... In fact, I think it's the only original machine I retained from my youth!
The Amiga would never been the same if Atari would have bought it !
The 1000 would have been the 1000, yeah, but if Tramiel had bought it and gutted the team who made it, there'd be serious questions about whether we'd see the 500, 2000, 600 or 1200, at least in the forms they ended up taking in our timeline.
The Amiga was murdered by its own parent company. Too many products out at the same time and terrible snobby marketing which tried to appeal to businesses. Only David Pleasance and the UK branch of Commodore knew where the money was and how to market the machine, but they sadly lost the bid. If they had taken over, I could see the modern day PC wars being between Microsoft and Commodore instead of Apple.
The title for this video makes me feel a bit sick.
I wouldnt have my profile pic thats for sure.
workbench for lyfe
You have literally peered into an alternate reality lol
This isn't "what if Amiga never was". This is "if Amiga were aborted" The technology was invented. I don't know that Jay would have created a new chipset for the "Commodore 520ST"; and without his chipset and the Amiga technology serving as example, the ST would have been even more limited than it was.
It came down to the wire on funding. They (Amiga) borrowed $500k from Atari to finish the design and if they didn't pay it back by a certain date, Atari would have got all the plans to all the custom chips in there. They were essentially bailed out by Commodore who bought Amiga and paid off the debt. Had Commodore not bought them the tech would have gone to Atari albeit broken... I recommend watching 'The Amiga Years - From Bedrooms to Billions' particularly the SE version with the disk of extras. Superb documentary for anyone with an interest in the Amiga.
I'm aware of all this. I was an Amiga software developer and an acquaintance of Jay Miner.
This scenario presumes that the Amiga technology languished on the shelf; in this scenario it definitely didn't go to Commodore. And I don't think Jay would have created a chipset for Commodore under these circumstances. So this CBM 520ST would probably have been most like a C128 with a 68k CPU.
Really interesting insight! cheers!
love that photoshop!!!!!
The beeping sound at the start of all you videos gives me a headache. DX