retardware wrote:What a delight this news was back then! (At least for me)
I was used to call it "Commonsore". […]
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What a delight this news was back then! (At least for me)
I was used to call it "Commonsore".
These urine-stained bread boxes with their boring spriter games, these unbearable "Amigas" with their useless (due to the lack of serious, i.e. non-toy and non-gaming applications) and boring "Workbench" and that eye-pain and headache-inducing combination of low resolution and extreme flicker.
I was glad that the flood of this crap finally ended.
Well.. They were not useless, a lot of high profiles used Amiga's. Like NASA that used Amiga's for launching the space shuttle for instance. They have said that there were absolutely nothing that was able to replace them, at a decent price. Nothing. The Amiga's are simple machines and easy to program. They were the first true multimedia and multitasking machines. They were 10 years ahead of it's time at launch. It is just, that people did not know what to do with stuff, 10 years before it became standard. And they were the first plug and play machines. Just try and have 4 programs open on top of an active GUI, with only 1mb of Ram or even 512kb of Ram in 1985 on an Mac or an PC. And then have it running for one year without shutdown and without any freeze. Now, you need a serious Unix server for that in 1985. Another thing is that you were able to do studio quality video editing in your home, running native and without any compression at all. Yeahhh.... That was what the Amiga's were all about. As a bonus, they were incredible gaming machines, and the best for gaming until somewere between 1991 and 1993. That was when games on the Dos platform, slowly began to get better. Syndicate, Dynablaster and Settlers are a few examples.
On topic...
I remember the 29'th of April like it was yesterday. What a blow in our faces. And the story are still unraveling as to why they went bust. The major issue of course, were lack of money. As in they went broke. Yet the story on to why exactly are muddy and span over lot's of years. First they fired Jack. And that was a big problem. He was the main force, the vision and the leader of the company. And without him, it left a giant power vacume. Bill herd and others have reported years after, that people were running around like headless chickens.
Then we have all them CEO's and other with positions of power within Commodore. They were only there with the intend of grabbing as much money as possible. Irwine Gould, the top CEO, had only money on his mind. He basically used Commodore as his own little piggy bag. He owned a lot of those companies, that basically surplied parts and stuff for Commodore. So he was able to profit at the expense of Commodore's health. Then we have Mehdi Ali, that saw a golden opertunity to gain power and have his annual sallery raised to sky high levels. That man, was actually the brains behind why Commodore released the C64 Games system (C64 based console) and the Amiga600. Both an absolute failure at that time. Commodore also spend tons of money on prototype projects. Like AAA, Nyx-Board and so on. Most projects was put to an grave, both early and near completion. And Commodore forgot to pay back the suppliers, and they ended up with a hard time sourcing parts for production.
People often cite the CD32 as "The cause" for the downfall of Commodore, yet the story is not that simple. The CD32 actually sold well, yet it was banned for sale in North America, due to some licensing. And then the Philipines held back a huge load of CD32's that would have saved Commodore. It was something about Commodore trying to run from the bill. (Yet again) Back at West Chester in Pennsylvania, the engineers actually saw were Commodore was heading. Even as far back as 4'th quater of 1991. They knew that things were not going to end well and they were only able to stand by and watch. Yet they are the heroes of Commodore. Bill Herd, Dave Haynie, Greg Berlin and others. They had more or less free hands, and they were more or less operating independently from the rest of the company. Like the Commodore128. Bill Herd saw that Commodore was missing a product for the future, and then he sat his ass down and started to design it on paper. Yup. One man job. When the CEO's and others on charge saw that they were missing a product, they tried to sell the C128. And they did not even know that it was under devellopment before it was finished. If they had known about it, they would have shut it down. That is actually bad leadership, and one example on how the leaders of Commodore destroyed it all.
Greed, bad leadership, tons of wasted money on sallery, tons of money wasted on unfinished projects and tons of unpaid bill's. That is how they destroyed Commodore from between 1984 and 1994. 10 years to bring down a company from within, that had the same status as Apple had around 2005/07.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
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