At the Consumer Electronics Show on January 7, 1984, a mysterious startup called Amiga showed signs of emerging from stealth mode. At the time, Amiga was known as a producer of controllers and games for Atari game consoles and 8-bit computers. But it was a front. Their long-term plan was a revolutionary new computer that it first demonstrated at that January show.
The Amiga booth at the January 1984 CES
The booth only showed their software and controllers in public view. If you walked past the booth, you could try out their games and controllers and have no idea what else they had going on. But if you had an invitation, you could come inside the booth and see something radically different. Inside the booth, they had a prototype of their upcoming computer on display and working.
The computer used a Motorola 68000 CPU, which was special, but far from unique. What made Amiga unique was the chipset they built around it. Rather than making the CPU do all of the heavy lifting like other computers did, its custom chips acted like co-processors. The main CPU handed off much of the work and spent much of its time acting more like a supervisor. That’s not terribly different from how a modern computer works, with the CPU handing graphic-related tasks off to a GPU. But in 1984, this was revolutionary.
The demos included very high resolution, high color images. They also included the famous boing ball demo, where a red and white ball bounced around on the screen, rotating as it traveled and playing a sampled sound effect as it hit the edges of the screen and bounced back.
Nothing else in the consumer space in 1984 could touch this.
The Amiga custom chips in embryonic form
But the chipset didn’t exist yet. The design existed and it was present at the show, but in the form of three large board stacks that were hand built. Engineers transported the board stacks to the show in boxes, and they bought seats on the plane for the irreplaceable cargo, rather than checking it as luggage or shipping it via more conventional means.
The machine got some attention from the press, mostly short write-ups describing an advanced computer with advanced graphics and sound capabilities based on the same CPU the Apple Lisa and Macintosh used.
What nobody mentioned was the company was in trouble. The hardware design was solid and largely finished. But the operating system was not, and they were running out of money. They were looking for either a partner or a buyer.
Finding a buyer
It’s no great secret that Amiga talked to both Atari and Commodore. But they talked to almost everybody in the industry. Steve Jobs showed up, but it was more of a fishing expedition than anything serious. Jack Tramiel showed up, before he had purchased Atari. But the negotiations with Tramiel went like negotiating with Kevin O’Leary on Shark Tank, so they never really got anywhere.
Ultimately, Amiga signed a very one-sided agreement with Atari, then continued looking for other options. By June, Amiga was talking with Commodore, and Commodore showed up at the last minute with enough money to pay off the debt to Atari, then bought Amiga.
That same summer, Jack Tramiel bought Atari and he and his sons discovered the agreement. Rather than cash the check, the two companies traded lawsuits. Atari’s grievance was that Amiga breached its contract, while Commodore’s grievance was the Atari ST bore a striking resemblance to a canceled Commodore product. The two companies settled and the specifics of the agreement were never made public, but essentially both companies admitted wrongdoing, and some money changed hands in both directions, but in the end it seems Atari received more than Commodore received.
It took about 16 months to bring the Amiga to market. But the first glimpse most outsiders received of the technology happened in January 1984, and the board stacks that were on display in 1984 still exist. The custom chips named Agnes, Daphne, and Portia became Agnes, Denise, and Paula by the time the computer shipped. But the concept of each chip being a coprocessor and having a smooth multitasking operating system, were very much present in the hardware that shipped in the fall of the following year.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Would love to read more about how they got the OS sorted out. From what I remember reading years ago, it was derived from tripos?
Yes, the original Amiga OS was derived from Tripos, and large parts of it were written in BCPL, a predecessor of C. Somewhere I have some information on how that came about, I’ll see if I can find it and write something about it at some point.
The Amiga operating system was originally supposed to be CAOS, based on a spec developed by Carl Sassenrath working with a contractor in Arizona. For various reasons that effort failed leading Amiga to Tim King and Tripos.
“Rather than cash the check, they sued for breach of contract.”
Common mistake when ppl talking about this.
Jack Tramiel use this agreement to COUNTER SUE Commodore!
Commodore already sued their ex-employess and blocking Jack Tramiel to continue work on Atari ST. When they discover this Amiga-Atari agreement they use it to force Commodore to back down and allow both Atari ST and Amiga to continue develipment.
what If Tandy Radio Shack bought Amiga and sold that instead of the Tandy 1000 or color computer 3
could Amiga successful
I guess what you’re saying is could another company, rather than Commodore, have made the Amiga more successful?
It’s an interesting thought experiment. But I don’t think anyone could have done better with the A1000. It was too expensive for the home market and lacked key features the professional market wanted – a hi res non-interlaced graphics mode, a large case with lots of expandability.
The A500 was a more successful design and Commodore marketed it very well in Europe. But their US sales & marketing operation was terrible. Commodore US went through a strange phase in the late 80s of wanting to be a premium computer brand like Apple, but they never had the reputation or product line to pull that off. Of course, the counter-argument is that the American market had already moved on by the late 80s, so the mass-market strategy which worked in Europe wouldn’t have worked in the US.
” guess what you’re saying is could another company, rather than Commodore, have made the Amiga more successful?”
I convinced my mom to buy me a Tandy 1000SX back in the day and bought Sierra Black Cauldron from Radio Shack, having debating between that and the Color Computer 3 as a reward for good grades.
One of my classmates owned the Amiga 500 and I was blown away and I wanted that instead.
I kinda wish Radio Shack sold their own version of the Amiga instead of Tandy 1000/Color Computer 3, perhaps keeping the 286 Tandy 3000HL for business and their “Amiga” for home use.
It would for example have Deskmate on this version of the Amiga, sadly i now know Radio Shack is much more expensive than PC clones, by 1992 when the Tandy 1000TL was sold you could buy a 386SX with VGA graphics VGA monitor and Soundblaster sound and Windows 3.1 for less than a Tandy 1000TL with CM-11 monitor and TGA graphics.
But yes I kinda wish my mom bought the Tandy 1000SX which was really an Amiga 500 under Tandy name.
I don’t think Commodore ever considered licencing its IP to enable the production of cheap “Amiga clones”. You’ve got to remember that Commodore was already a low-cost producer, because it was a low-end brand AND it had vertical integration: its MOS subsidiary made the Amiga custom chips in-house, which kept costs down.
Distribution seems to have been Commodore’s problem in the US: Amigas were hard to buy. Again this reflected the self-importance and self-delusion of Commodore US execs “wanting to be like Apple” rather than flog the A500 Batman Pack in Sears and K-mart.
From a middle-aged Brit’s perspective this seems weird, as Amigas were everywhere here from about 89 to 94. You could buy them from department stores, electrical goods chain stores and specialist computer dealers.
maybe Radio Shack could create a Motorola 68000 based computer with similar spec of Amiga and Atari ST and off the shelf part to reduce costs
Apple Computer Macintosh and Sega Genesis Sharp Corporation also have a Motorola 68000
The Atari ST was built with off the shelf parts and already very competitive on price. It was the first computer to offer a megabyte of memory for less than $1,000. So why didn’t it sell better? I think Dave has a post about that in his archive.
in the 80s the only place computer my mom would only buy from the local Radio Shack
Radio Shack offer the Color Computer 3. I wish it had Motorola 68000 and a megabyte of memory for less than $1,000
maybe Microwave OS9 and GEM gui and graphics and sound processor like c64
was Color Computer 3 good enough to C64 or even Atari st?