Brian Bagnall did sterling work in his series of books on Commodore.

If there’s one thing missing, I’d like to have heard from the people who are often portrayed as the villains of the Commodore / Amiga story – Irving Gould, Mehdi Ali and Bill Sydnes.

Gould of course died well before Bagnall started writing, but Ali in particular is an interesting, often demonised figure and he’s never told his version of events. Bagnall actually changed my mind about him.

According to Brian’s telling, Ali was the driving force behind the A1200 and he made the sensible call to OEM Commodore’s PC line. So yes, Ali made a lot of bad decisions but he was a more nuanced personality than the folk history suggests.

I’m with you on IBM’s industrial design. They look dated now but they were designed to look good in an early 1980s office, and to look equally good in a cubicle or, crucially, on an executive’s desk that likely cost a lot more than that PC.

I didn’t care for the design of some of the early 90s PS/2s, but the 1987-era PS/2s looked good too. A little more modern, but still blended in well with office furniture and equipment.

I agree with you, the Amiga was so good at so many things, Commodore didn’t know what to do with it. And they never picked a direction for it and stuck with it. When I had a long conversation a couple of years ago with a longtime Commodore employee, that was something he brought up.

As for Brian Bagnall, he did his homework. I reviewed several of the chapters in one of his books pre-publication, and he was thorough. And there was nothing wrong with his methodology. If there was something wrong before the books went to press and a reviewer found it, he fixed it. I’ve heard people ask Commodore employees if his books are accurate. Having an inside view into the production of his Amiga Years book, I’m confident they’re as accurate as any of the other computer histories out there, probably somewhat more so.

Yes, that is a problem I probably haven’t talked about enough, Commodore lost a lot of engineering talent because they wanted to live in California and didn’t want to move to Pennsylvania.

A high quality keyboard provided both visual benefit in making the machine look like a piece of office equipment and not a toy, and functional benefit in what was one of the primary modes of input in the early days. Even despite the early missteps in layout which they corrected and set the standard that persists to present time.

There’s also something to be said for the industrial design of IBM’s PCs throughout the years– the brutalist and utilitarian, beauty and cohesiveness that was seldom seen in the PC market that became dominated by clones, probably until the resurgence of Apple and its attention to detail in design.

Red Taylor left Commodore to join Jack Tramiel’s fledgling Tramiel Technology company (soon to acquire Atari) and he was the guy who interested Jack in buying Amiga himself. The rest, of course, is history.

But what stands out at the start of the Amiga story is the confusion over what the machine was supposed to be and who it was for – console or computer? Low end or high end? Commodore never really resolved that quandary successfully, veering between professional Amiga desktops and cheap mass market wedge computers, never really having a clear roadmap for either market.

The rise of clones was only a matter of time; even IBM didn’t expect the BIOS to be reverse-engineered so quickly. While this mass adoption of the PC platform may have hurt IBM in some ways, I don’t see it entirely in a negative light—the company cemented its reputation from that point on, and to this day, IBM remains a technology benchmark, even after shifting its business focus a few times.