As far as Ali goes, either Ali or someone claiming to be him reached out to me several years ago. I responded, asking for a chance to tell his side of the story. He never responded. I’ve had several similar requests from other people who worked in the industry in the 80s and 90s and I’ve always gone back and revised those blog posts to include their perspective.

I don’t know if that person really was Ali or just a prankster. But my door is open. I’m sure Brian’s door is also open, and I can think of several others who would be glad to tell Ali’s side of the story and would do their best to be fair.

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 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.

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.