Yeah-- the Atari roots (and Jay Miner's influence) clearly show in the Amiga.
An alternative future fiction I think about, when Commodore or Atari come up in conversation, is one where Irving Gould didn't run Jack Tramiel out of Commodore and Warner Communications listened to Atari's old guard engineers and released new platforms (versus running the home video game industry into the ground trying to milk the 2600 forever).
Obviously, in that world the Amiga would have ended up being an Atari product and the ST a Commodore product. I think both companies would have been healthier and, as such, would have been able to do more with the platforms. Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
I think Atari would have done right by the Amiga. A properly executed version of it would have been a fantastic games console and I think Atari could have done that. It's hard to say what the home and business computer future of an Atari Amiga would have been, but it Atari would have made a kick-ass Amiga console.
Likewise, the ST could have been a lower cost Mac killer, especially if they leaned-in to Mac emulation / compatibility. I think Commodore had the chops and credibility to execute the ST as a business computer in a way the real Tramiel-run Atari never could. Atari couldn't overcome the stigma of Atari being a video game company.
I remember reading a fan-made alternate history for some sort of cyberpunk game setting back on usenet in the day.
The instigating effect that diverged the timeline was some sort of technological innovation around 1983-1984 that allowed an instant leap in CPU speeds and memory densities by many orders of magnitude. The timing of the advancement was such that the IBM PC architecture was hopeless outmoded and soon died off. Apple retrofitted the tech into their Macintosh line, so they stayed relevant, but the Amiga was still in the design stage and so was able to build their new OS and UI around the enhanced capabilities. It went on to dominate computing for the next several decades.
Their version of Amiga Intuition was able to include photo-realistic VR, global networking, massive neural nets, and so forth, which all contributed to the cyberpunkness of the setting.
> Their combined influence might have actually given the IBM PC and Macintosh a run for their money.
Not a chance, I think. Combine both and you still would not have beaten the sound philosophy, openness, speed, and flexibility of the IBM PC & compatibles. Ironically, to increase your chances massively, you'd needed to have enhittification (with its preference for locked-down rubbish antithetical to general-purpose computing) already dominating the market. Even as Amigas and Ataris were much more open than their cousin's terrible grandchild of today: Apple. A platform which many Amigatari nerdlingers of yesteryear gravitated to...
Being earlier to market seems like it would have made a huge difference in competing with the IBM PC. I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985. If the Amiga and ST could have been relased in 1984 it might have made a difference. Either way it's fun to think about counterfactuals.
I think the Amiga could have been released at least 6 months earlier if not for the litigation between Tramiel's Atari and Commodore gumming-up the works. The Amiga was massively more capable than the Macintosh of the day-- with preemptive multitasking, color, and NTSC video compatibility. There wasn't a Mac that held a candle to to the OCS Amiga graphics until the Macintosh II in 1987. I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.
VGA didn't come to the PC until 1987. The Amiga easily exceeded the capabilities of EGA. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and is much less capable and sophisticated than Workbench. I don't know much about the evolution of the native Amiga productivity software market. Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC. That wasn't until 1987 in our timeline. It might have happened sooner in my hypothetical, but probably not years sooner.
Atari could have marketed the Amiga better than Commodore ever did. I recognize that's not really saying much. The post-Tramiel Commodore was an adrift ship of fools when it came to choosing which products to produce and how to market them. Commodore couldn't figure out what to sell (and how not to cannibalize or compete with their own products) or how to sell what it did produce.
I'm less sure what would have happened if the ST had been released as the Commodore product it arguably was. I do think a world where Tramiel stayed w/ Commodore would have made them more focused. They would have have developed fewer products (and likely no products that competed with other Commodore products) and aggressively driven costs down. I think a Commodore with Tramiel still heading it up would have been in a better position, financially and in terms of market perception, to put out a GUI-based business computer than Atari. I'm just not sure how much sooner I'd want to speculate a Commodore ST could have been released in this hypothetical.
The ST was also positioned more as a Mac killer than a PC killer, like my hypothetical Amiga.
You're likely right, though-- by 1985 the IBM PC was probably destined for dominance.
> I don't know if the dominance of the PC was a foregone conclusion by 1985.
I firmly believe it was, as it's the philosophy (i. e. the open architecture) that gave it such a headstart that the competition couldn't have catched up. Keep in mind what an open architecture really means in the world, i. e. not just the West.
> Failing the growth of that market in this counterfactual world arguably the A2000 and a bridge board was probably the first Amiga that could have seriously taken-on the IBM PC.
Pitting an already well-established and rapidly expanding open architecture and Commodore's first foray into an open architecture against each other wouldn't have, and indeed didn't, play(ed) out in the latter's favor.
The A2000, a workstation-class machine, arrived in March '87. Too late. Around that time Compaq had already sold around 25,000 of their first Deskpro 386 machines, which hit the streets half a year earlier. According to Michael Geran of E. F. Hutton & Co., Compaq sold 90,000 Deskpro 386 computers in the second quarter of '87 alone.
The bridgeboard was an option for cost-conscious operators, especially those with small businesses. They were well-received especially in West Germany where the A2000 sold well. Their limiting nature and performance wouldn't have made them relevant.
> I think a stronger Amiga marketing presence could have killed Macintosh.
yeah, substantially agree. But I also think if only Atari and Commodore teams could have just been one company... it would have been glorious. Somehow. The market couldn't afford to be split like that, the pie wasn't big enough.
Also I was an Atari ST user back then, and loved it. But the Tramiel's didn't "get" software in the early days. They failed to make the right investments to keep TOS/GEM actively developed (e.g. as a Mac alternative) until it was too late (they hired Eric Smith to work on MiNT and then MultiTOS in the early 90s but they were already done as a company by then).
And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
2. forcing the ROM size down to 192kB so they had to size optimize the crap out of GEM before shipping (waste of precious development time), especially including tossing away all of GDOS (which had support for proportional fonts and printer drivers etc). A 256kB or 512kB ROM would have solved a lot of problems with what I'd think wouldn't have been an insane BOM cost bump.
3. Minor but long term annoying -- tying the cartridge port to only have 128kB of address lines. If they had given it 256kB or 512kB address ability their later expansion issues (OS upgrades etc) would have been much improved.
As for the Amiga, great machine but a) it cost too much at the start so failed to catch immediate fire (the 500 rectified this to some degree) b) interlace.
> And then three fundamental hardware mistakes with the ST were:
> 1. not shipping it with the Blitter from the start so it couldn't compete on games, obviously with the Amiga but even with 8-bits of the time
I don't think a blitter is that big of a deal, especially for games. A sprite/tile architecture would be better for games.
I wish that the ST came with the YM2203, instead of the YM2149. That would make it an even better machine for music, with the addition of 3 4-op FM voices.
Frame rates on games on the ST were terrible, which just came down to there not being enough cycles in a single frame to really move stuff around. Sprites or tiles would be great but are a bit specific. Blitter hardware subsumes all of that under a more general utility. The STe's blitter when it finally came along was great. But by then it was too late, nobody was going to make games for it because the market was too small.
Once clockspeeds got up to what the Falcon could do, it was unnecessary. But again, too late.
The Amiga also struggles with frame rates, with most games running at 30hz/25hz. There are quite a few games that have better gameplay on the Commodore 64 port than the Amiga port.
The only arcade games that use the bitmap/blitter architecture were mostly Williams games like Robotron, Joust, and so forth. Everything else was tiles/sprites, except for the Atari vector games.
The frame rate of games of the era was dictated by the frame rate of the video output. They would have struggled with higher frame rates, but that was entirely moot.
I mean, that's just pedantic. Of course the display frame rate was fixed. The point is what the effective game loop responsiveness was. which was often a fraction of the actual display's capability. If you go back and play some of the classic games of that era, there's often low responsiveness to joystick movements etc.
Graphic fidelity on the 16-bit machines was great. Latency was sometimes bad, depending on how much they were trying to do in the game loop.
It's not pedantic because it means it was categorically not that the machine "struggled with frame rates" but that the frame rates were imposed by external factors.
I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.
It is being pedantic, the others are talking about Amiga games when they say "the Amiga struggles". While the video output was always 50/60Hz, there were plenty of games that failed to update at that rate, taking 2 frames (25/30Hz) or 3 frames (16/20Hz) or some jittery janky mix inbetween.
It could be that what they wanted to do just couldn't be done in 1 frame. Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.
There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.
Compare games with perfect framerates like Turrican 2, Superfrog or Leander, with games that don't, like Magic Pockets, Xenon 2, Driller. In fact, compare the official version of Stunt Car Racer with the cracked version, where the crackers massively improved the drawing speed and thus the framerate!
Despite its obviously far lower MIPS rating the 6502 could just get more "video game" type work done in a clock cycle than a 68000. 68000 interrupt responsiveness was also pretty terrible.
Looking back 68000 had little business in video game type machines. I like the 68000 from a programming POV but it's faster for doing a pile of fast integer calculations than it is at moving memory around and responding to interrupts.
But Atari and Commodore were also imagining their machines to be targeting productivity more than games, so.
Why would someone spend their time online advocating for themselves to pay a higher percentage of their wealth to taxes than people who make more than them?
You already pay a wealth tax. It's called property tax. Most people wealth (if any) is concentrated in the house or appartement they live in. And so the real wealth tax is already here.
Idaho. No. Idaho has almost the worst per-capita GDP in the country but California dollars go a long way there, although not as far as they used to. Californians also like to use the phrase “don’t Califonicate Idaho”, because high wages there would ruin their lifestyle, which is paid for by their California dollars.
There is a very weird but real phenomenon where it costs more to build/remodel in an upscale part of town. Roof repair: same roof, same company, two jobs 10 miles apart with wildly different invoices.
Explainer videos are dark patterns that replaced written howto documents in order to serve ads. Not seeing them pop up any more in search results is one of the few positive outcomes of Google switching to AI-first search results.
A few years ago, to configure a printer I had to watch a video because all the written explanations were uninteligible. The screen is tiny, the menu confusing, and I couldn't find where to enter the wifi+password until I followed the video.
Given we can write the documents in LLMs and summarise/explain the documents with LLMs one would hope we would go back to written documents instead of videos now.
Instead we've worked out how to get the LLM to make videos.
People are bad at writing clearly what a new startup or product actually does. A video is a richer medium, it can show the thing being used, the UI during use, tell a clearer story with a person using it, some context etc. It also forces them to prioritize more, and have to distill their message down to a certain bounded timeframe.
Neither gives any guarantee. Both static text and videos can be done well and badly. But I usually find it useful to have both. A video is like being guided through their vision of what the thing is (a "push" message). This can be annoying to many nerd types who want to cut through all that and just want to "pull" the info they need, for themselves, at their own fast pace, quickly identifying it and not being spoonfed. But the typical user is not like this, and prefers the spoonfed/edutained approach.
I was getting ready to rant when reading your "A video is a richer medium" line, and then read the whole thing and saw you followed up with a point explaining exactly why: "just want to "pull" the info they need, for themselves, at their own fast pace, quickly identifying it"
Needless to say, usually if my choices are video or nothing, I'll choose nothing and figure it out myself.
Yes that's the trick. And much more. If you have any sort of content, you should express it as a slideshow, a white paper, a blog post, a video, a podcast, etc. Get it out in as many forms as you can. Maybe even performative dance or song if you've got that energy.
12.4% of the world is illiterate and I'd guess more like 20% would have trouble quickly taking text and turning that into instructions faster than a video could do the same thing.
Yeah this is true - 4 bullets and an image vs a 10 minute video… dayum son ‘I’m a visual person’ - no, no you’re not - not if it’s ten mins vs a 40 second read
When we provide written documents with embedded videos revealed by on-screen toggles, covering different sections of a help document, almost no one reads the doc, they just find the relevant video. Many of our docs require images, and videos do a better job of, for example, showing how to clamp an arm onto a structure.
Video that cover different parts of an outline are a great use of videos. Videos that try to cover too much all in one are a lesser use. Yes, you can use scrub to find in a video, but showing a text outline and letting users click to reveal videos for specifics topics works very well.
Kind of whitewashing howto docs here--which in recent years have been replaced with (human-made) solely optimized for SEO to serve ads. That's why explainer videos took off in the first place.
I sometimes run yt-dlp against YouTube or TikTok URLs to extract an mp4, then send that to Gemini to ask questions about the content.
It's particularly good for those frustrating recipe videos where they don't tell you quantities of ingredients to use - you can have Gemini hallucinate the quantities and it normally gets them about right.
Not saying you're wrong. But maybe there's a reason Tiktok got so popular. Maybe for many people this way of communicating information is more effective and doesn't feel as boring/tedious.
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