A few straws in the wind which haven’t been raised in the article – Commodore lost a ton of money on a succession of disastrous product launches at the start of the 90s. The CDTV we can excuse to some extent, because Philips made a similar bad bet on the CDi. But the Amiga 600 was poor in both concept and execution, and destroyed sales of the still-successful A500.

At root though, Commodore’s problem was that it wasn’t a computer company. It was a widget maker. Commodore sold typewriters, calculators and thermostats before computers. The company’s corporate leaders had no vision, ever, beyond selling stuff for a short-term profit. It never had a strategy, a business plan, a product roadmap, a mission statement. And because of this they never really capitalised on the success of the C64 or the capabilities of the Amiga.

It was unacceptable in 1984 for them to create new computers with closed architectures when the PC was growing at an alarming rate in all world markets. Even worse, each new computer line was completely incompatible with the previous one.

In 1984, it would have been insane for anyone to buy the Commodore Plus/4 instead of modern PCs or the Commodore 64, which already had millions of applications.

why was Apple mac se so much more expensive than a Commodore and Amiga or Atari st but similar specs

i with tandy sold a 68k for $799 1mb in 1987

Why Apple survived is complicated, very much off topic for Commodore and Amiga, and I’ve written a lot of blog posts about that. Short answer is they were the last to run out of money, and soon after Microsoft bailed them out in the 90s, Steve Jobs figured out he needed to shift to an infinite game.

IBM and Motorola did offer something called the CHRP. A few clones using it did reach the market, generally running Windows NT, but they weren’t popular.

well okay thanks.

so why did Apple Mac survive even though it was originally monochrome had a 9 inch monitor, was it because its GUI was superior to Atari/Amiga?

I recall that IBM wanted to offer a common powerpc platform that any cloner could copy.

did Motorola ever offer a cloneable 68k reference platform, no royalties?

how come ARM Acorn Archimedes wasn’t sold here in the USA and why didn’t Apple or Amiga/Atari consider ARM instead of 68k

in my childhood fantasy Tandy Radioshack, instead of selling the Tandy 1000 or Color Computer, offered a 68k or ARM computer with just off the shelf parts and cloneable. it made money selling deskmate and OS/9 and GEM

Yes, the irony of Gould building Commodore up and tearing it down and having no idea what he could have had is significant.

No, Commodore didn’t survive long enough to move to another CPU. Selling clones would not have helped, the same way it didn’t help Apple. And switching to off the shelf parts would have been a very long transition, the thing that made the Amiga so special was its custom chips. And it was Ad Lib that was 11 channels.

I used a trick I learned in Edina-The store manager there had a small budget to order Mac-specific software which sold. I decided to use our inventory in our warehouse to specialize in Amiga software. I would request any Amiga titles, kept in-stock on other stuff like top-selling Windows products, and we ended our fiscal year 33% over our total year sales goal.

While they did bring in various video game stuff that led to the chain morphing into Game Stop, we had the highest percentage of sales of Amiga software and accessories, which helped me hit that goal. So I owe Commodore a lot for that year’s bonus…

Unfortunately, this isn’t correct. The Amiga’s success in video was almost entirely due to the Video Toaster. However, the way the Toaster achieved its extraordinary value vs traditional television production gear was by being *tightly* coupled both with the Amiga’s custom chips AND with NTSC analog composite video. The Toaster was a brilliant hack to create the miracles it delivered. The trade-off was it could never work on any other computer and it could never work on any kind of video that wasn’t exactly, precisely old-school NTSC analog composite video. It relied on the arcane pixel clocks, front porch timing, interlace and color sub-carrier of broadcast television standardized in the 1950s in the RS-170A standard.

This is why, despite its incredible success, the Toaster was never ported to another computer, there was never a component video version, and there was never a PAL Toaster for Europe. It wasn’t due to lack of demand or desire. It was literally impossible. The Toaster was so innately analog, NTSC and Amiga all the way down to its DNA, that changing literally anything about those complex analog timing relationships would break ALL of the Toaster’s magical abilities.

I can speak authoritatively on this since I worked at NewTek during the entire creation of the Toaster and for years after it shipped. Also, to a lesser but still significant extent, much of the Amiga’s graphical prowess was tightly coupled to 15khz standard definition video. Even just de-interlacing the Amiga to 31Khz involved some non-optimal downstream processing that created its own issues. That’s why Commodore was working on retargetable graphics toward the end. The brilliant custom graphics chips that so defined and differentiated the Amiga in 1985 were integral to its DNA but became barriers to transitioning to the future by the mid-90s.

Sadly, in a digital video world all the analog video production magic of the Toaster and the Amiga (thanks to its analog video synced clock speed (7.16 Mhz)) just evaporated. In the digital video realm both NewTek and Commodore would have to completely start over with no prior advantages other than brand. NewTek was able to ultimately transition to the PC with the Tricaster but it required several years and creating a new technology platform completely unrelated to the analog Toaster.