Seman That Smells Like Fish

The missing link: Commodore Amiga (2 / 3)

If we talk about video games market many will surely come to mind companies like Nintendo, Microsoft with its X-box, Sony PS3, or maybe SEGA, Capcom, LucasArts, Blizzard, or any other major company. However, probably very few people think of Atari. But this was not always so.

Although Atari did not invent the game, it was the first company to make money with them. This was by far the largest company dedicated to video games from the 70's and first half of the 80 with legendary games like Pong, Breakout, Centipede, and so many others. Your game console, the Atari VCS 2600, was the favorite toy of all children (and not so young) of the first generation of video games, generating billions of $ for Atari.

One of the designers who worked on the VCS (acronym for Video Computer System) was Jay Miner. Miner was an engineer born in 1932 who was hired by Harold Lee on Atari. Like many other engineers, his passion was to design new electronic devices increasingly advanced and sophisticated. Jay's work was to design chips for the console, and the success of this work was that Atari will charge in 1978 to develop a more ambitious project: a personal computer.

After several months of work, Atari released the Atari 400 (pictured), a computer with amazing graphics and sound capabilities for the moment, and soon after introduced the Atari 800, a version a little more evolved and a professional keyboard Atari 400.

After the departure of these two computers on the market, Atari Jay Miner wanted to continue to develop computers within the company, and Miner would have been happy if Atari had followed his instincts instead of showing the more conservative side of the business.

At that time (1979), Motorola was working on a new microprocessor, the Motorola 68000, far more advanced and sophisticated than any other time microprocessor, either Intel or MOS Technology (remember, owned by Commodore .) Although the processor was still far from complete and could work on the design new computers, and Jay Miner (pictured, though some years later) began designing a computer with capabilities unthinkable at the time home computers.

However, there was a problem. As advanced computer design involved using a lot of chips and components that would make this damn expensive (consider, for example, the Apple Lisa and its $ 10,000 price). Unfortunately for Miner, Atari executives did not know or did not trust the so-called Moore's Law (the number of transistors doubles every 18 months, reducing by half the money it costs to do so. In short, what is now a in 3 years will be stupidity normal, costing even less than normal now.)

Therefore, in early 1982 Jay Miner left Atari taking the ideas of computer dreamed it, starting to work on a small chip maker called Zimast .

Shortly after mid-1982, Larry Kaplan, one of the very first programmers of the Atari VCS, Jay Miner called to offer a business opportunity. Larry Kaplan, following his departure from Atari, the company was founded Activision (Activision Blizzard, along with Electronic Arts, are currently the two largest building companies in the world game.)

The business opportunity was given by Larry Kaplan of founding a company to create a new game system, so that Jay Miner Zimast Kaplan produced the hardware and software and Activision, and all won tons of money. The venture would be financed by private capital, namely $ 7 million out of a consortium formed by a businessman in the oil and three dentists with no experience or knowledge of the world in which they got to that kind of money seemed an appropriate price enter into a business that already moved in 1982 billion $.

Finally, the company was founded Hi-Toro, whose name was chosen because a side sounded a high-tech company and another gave him a touch Texas, where he was the consortium that financed the entire business. Leading the project was Larry Kaplan was hired as vice president David Morse.

But months after Kaplan left the project, so to be without a leader was offered the job to Jay Miner, who accepted only under two conditions: that the final product will use the Motorola 68000 processor that could operate also as a computer.

And then the bubble burst of video games. And create the ultimate gaming machine a project no longer seemed so appealing. In fact, everything that had sounded like videogame longer sound appealing. So the Hi-Toro investors, worried about the turn of events, anxious to Jay Miner asked if he could turn the project into a fully functional computer and forget some of the gaming machine. Music to the ears of Miner.

However, there was a problem, although not with the computer, and there was already a company called Hi-Toro, a Japanese manufacturer of mowing machines. So it was necessary to find a new name. Miner wanted a name that sounded friendly and sexy at the same time, similar to how Apple could be a nice name and pleasing to the ear. Finally, although it seemed Jay horrible at the time, the company name changed to Amiga, mainly because nobody thought any better and also because the Amiga name was on the phone before Apple and Atari.

Following the recruitment of several engineers both for hardware and software, work began on the development of the computer. Since what was intended to do something spectacular compared to the competition at that time, were careful to prevent industrial espionage. Nobody knew what he did or what made the Amiga company, so they wanted. However, to avoid attention, planned to establish developing some small unimportant enough not to take many resources from the firm but attractive enough to generate good income, so he launched several products, both hardware and software for the console VCS with the Amiga brand (you can see the Amiga Joyboard in the accompanying photo.) Another measure

anti spy was to give women's names to different parts of the computer. The project itself is called Lorraine , as the name of the wife of Dave Morse (remember, the vice president hired by Kaplan).

One thing I was surprised to discover is that the Lorraine was designed by committee. Since the number of engineers working on the project was rather limited, in meetings that were attended by all and everyone could comment and give ideas, coming up to the various compromises between efficiency, speed or final cost for all. Yes, Jay Miner was head of the project, but decisions were made in a group where everyone could contribute their opinions and vision.

Unlike what were the computers of the era, the Amiga each task (sound, graphics ...) was controlled in a decentralized manner, much like you would a modern console. This feature made the Amiga had outstanding performance in their personal computer equivalent range. Besides, other features novel that brought the Amiga was sharing IRQs, I / O or memory mapped real preemptive multitasking (think that Microsoft did not have it until Windows NT, and Apple to Mac OS X, and the latter was released in 2001).

The difference between multi-tasking Windows 3.0 or Mac OS 8 (the first Macintosh did not have any multi-tasking) and the Amiga is that the former are called cooperative multitasking, ie, there may be multiple applications running on the computer but they are the ones who have control of the computer and, therefore, are the ones who decide when to let the other run. A so-called cooperative, it is not the operating system who time distributed applications but they are when they decide when to stop running to the other. In this way, if you have an application that locks the system does not choice but to restart, because the application never passes the bar to the other. However, the preemptive multitasking operating system, and not the applications, decide when an application is running and for how long. In this way, if a program crashes just kill the program and ready, do not hang the entire system.

Returning to Lorraine, to understand the titanic effort of the development of Amiga, consider the example of how it designed the Apple II or IBM PC. In these cases, engineers are "limited" to catch the chips that were in the market and place the best possible way. However, the engineers designed Amiga several of these chips from the start. Not that I made for Steve Wozniak on Apple II or what was done by IBM engineers did not have merit or were easy, it's just that the chips they used were already designed and manufactured, they had to make them from scratch and therefore is a job that was saved.

Amiga And as they were not flush with money made the old way, none of powerful workstations with that design but with paper, pen, platelets, logic gates, cables and lots of patience. In the attached picture you can see a prototype of the Amiga Lorraine or the design of three of its major chips (and to complete the picture, we think that the goal was to bring to market a computer for about $ 2,000).

respect to software, Jay Miner was aware of its limitations in this area, so Bob Pariseau hired to work with the software. Jay did not want an operating system like MS-DOS, CP / M or Appled. Bob had no experience in software development for microcomputers since he came to work with large mainframes used in banking, where the preemptive multitasking was normal and did not see any reason why a Personal Computer would not have to have these advances. Another decision of the software development group was to create a graphical interface, an important decision when you consider that we still speak in 1983/1984 and very very few computers still had a windowing environment.

Finally, the Lorraine was mature enough to be displayed for the CES 1984. The goal of the project, designing a personal computer several years ahead of what was in the market was achieved. Now all that remained was to find a way out to the market. It needed a partner able to bring to fruition the Lorraine. Would you be able to find girlfriend at CES?

Registration Number Proshow Producer

the last entry that I will dedicate ...

I seek,
in the world to drown me,
hugs me and I forget,
in rush of people to return
the corner, and you escape
like fish the banks
like night and day
always close and do not look,
never look ...

And I wanted,
meet face to face,
return from injury,
Atraves from scratch, without reservation or
lies
and delivered without fear,
in the light of a new day, always looking
illusions ,
by the footprint of life.

And I face at night to a bed

very empty and filled with stories, adventures and mischief

then comes your memory,
and
farewell song and find myself every night,
point starting ...

morning I wake up, and breakfast

a new day and paint colors, if you return

my life and I dress up as a poet, minstrel of Andalusia

and I look around the streets, and
people do not look at me ...

And again at night, this bed is so empty

that filled with stories, adventures and mischief
, then comes your memory

and
farewell song and I am night after night, in
starting point ...


Every night I find myself on this point. *

. Rocio Jurado

[press play]

*

Pablo Neruda once wrote:

"Although this is the last pain she causes me,

and these the last verses that I write "

*

This will be the last pain that causes me and

this the last entry that I will dedicate ...

*

Final Post Date Australia

The missing link: Commodore Amiga (third)

Never before had gone to a RetroMadrid, that is, a fair retrocomputing with a small exhibition, lectures and other activities where Spectrums, Commodore C64, old retro consoles and other paraphernalia permeating a central role forgotten. When I saw some of the most revolutionary personal computers of all time, which went unnoticed at the time too and then his legacy has been unjustly forgotten. I speak, of course, the Commodore Amiga.

I knew of the existence of this computer and video game magazines, namely the Micromanía magazine (yes, I had regular size) and since then I was impressed by his ability to chart (and that he never had come to see in motion!). However, the first time I finally sit down in front of an Amiga computer, specifically an Amiga 500, was in August of 1994. I had purchased a few months earlier, in late June, a 486 DX2 66 Mhz with 4 MB RAM and 340 Mbytes of hard disk and the computer of the 80 did things that my brand new computer could not do (I had no card sound yet.)

So here is my tribute to the Commodore Amiga. Since it is a bit long I'll have to divide it into 3 different items. Hope you like it, and you know, if you have any comments or questions do not hesitate to write.



A company in trouble

The story of the birth of the Amiga platform consists of a set of circumstances and converging forces. One was, of course, Commodore, the company that eventually released the computer.

Commodore was founded by Jack Tramiel in 1958, engaged in the manufacture of mechanical typewriters. In 1966 a Canadian investor Irving Gould called the company bought keeping in front of it to Tramiel. But now that Irving was Commodore, it decided to focus on the emerging business calculators.

the 70 already entered the competition in this market (electronic calculator) was terrible, with manufacturers like Texas Instruments or HP monopolizing the Japanese market and pulling the price (and, therefore, profits) down. As a way to compete, Commodore bought MOS Technology 1976, the company, which had a strategic product for Commodore: MOS 6502 microprocessor.

is possible that many this processor you are familiar, for he was wearing, for example, the Apple I. However, the initial idea of \u200b\u200bJack Tramiel was, of course, use this chip on their calculators, but since before the acquisition by Commodore MOS was already working on the construction of a new computer using the 6502 as a processor, the KIM-1. Using this computer as a model, in 1977 came the Commodore PET, Commodore tucking at the top of the personal computer business.

In the 70's had three major manufacturers of personal computers. On the one hand, this Tandy with Radioshack, who was the top-selling computer. On the other hand, we had Apple, which was the fastest growing and knew best how to invest your advertising, but of the three was, until the arrival of VisioCalc, the least selling. And then we Commodore, the number 2 in sales by focusing on home computers and economic, as also deduced from its slogan "Computers for the masses, not classes."

Al Commodore PET was followed by the Commodore VIC-20 in 1981, a computer that cost about $ 299 and offered all he could offer a home computer over a high capacity for video games. The following year came the Commodore 64 computer for some time became the world's best selling computer. While in some respects was even slower than the Commodore VIC-20, thanks to its "huge" capacity of 64 kbytes and to be particularly well endowed time graphics and sound and a smart sales strategy in Europe (especially Germany) was auparon the first in the world of home computing.

Tramiel In 1983 Jack decided to focus on the domestic market and sharply cut the price of the Commodore VIC-20 and C64, thus starting a price war that swept away many computer manufacturers. However, while the Commodore's market share increased with this strategy, the price cuts had also associated with reductions in the margins of the company, which its owner, Irving Gould, was not willing to tolerate, so it began a small proxy war that ended in giving Commodore Jack and his men out of it.

What's more, just to exploit the market bubble of the game. Since the birth of Atari in the first half of the 70 to 1983, the video game business had done nothing but grow and grow uncontrollably.

Atari was by far the number one worldwide in this area, but a myriad of home computers and platforms have emerged to tow several Atari and took advantage of the stunning fashion and the golden future that seemed to promise this business just emerging .

But as happens in all markets who can only grow exponentially, at one point around 1982/1983 that the situation was untenable. Famous is the expression of one of the directors of Atari boasting how good they were selling video games if cagaran crap game in a box and put on sale probably would remove it from the hands.

To all who have witnessed the explosion of several bubbles already know what that is. The bursting of this is considered the release of the game ET, of which was paid an exorbitant amount for those then in respect of operating licenses ($ 200,000 at the time plus a trip with all expenses paid to Hawaii) and was a failure monumental. Atari games and consoles manufactured both sold assuming that everyone would want to play this game and, while not sell as many games, it sold more than half of expectations. However, the game was so bad and had so many failures that triggered an avalanche of returns, so that Atari came across a stock of millions of cartridges occupying site and not likely to use them for anything. To say I had to eat is not enough, Atari decided to go middle of the desert of New Mexico and buried. In a hole in the ground game would take place not in a warehouse to be paid monthly.

This was the starting signal for the crisis of video games so that the fall of Atari (with huge losses the next year) dragged the whole market and have games left this halo of modernity and attraction that had until that time. And, by the fall of the games, also stopped selling consoles of course, but also home computers where the main attraction was the ability to run games attractive. So if we sell fewer computers and also sell them cheaper ... for that, good crisis.

Commodore tried to go through with what I had and was duped in the development of a new computer, the successor to the Commodore 64. Finally, in 1985, Commodore 128 came to light, with a more powerful processor, double the memory and many more improvements, such as the incorporation of the operating system CP / M 3.0 (although it was a very fine implementation) and the ability to run in C64 mode sure (ahem) 100% compatibility, then not so very high.

Unfortunately for Commodore, the C128 was not a sales success as it was at the time the C64, and indeed was the old model that still kept the company afloat. Had to do something and had to do it now, because if not paint a very black future for the company ...

(continued)

Whey Havevintage Receiver Repear Shop

On

I've always been amused by the texts that talk about what opportunities were lost this or that company. It is as if a company or project is going to be successful regardless of who leads. However, the computer world is full of examples of successful projects and technologies that have not been set and no fruit set. For example, it has left on this blog, we have the opportunity lost by Xerox PARC invented technologies in its laboratories at the 70, which were imposed on the market in 80, and many others who enriched and non-Xerox (the graphical interface, the laser printer, Ethernet network ...).

Another example too. Commodore was able to buy Apple in the 70's. An opportunity lost by the Commodore? Possibly not. "Apple would have been the same under the guidance of Commodore or would have been lost in the oblivion of history like so many others? Compaq, the leading manufacturer of PCs in the 90's, could also be bought by Apple in the 80's. "Apple missed the opportunity to become the No. 1 PC or Compaq would have been lost in the idiosyncrasies of the apple company?

Today I will talk about a missed opportunity, perhaps come too soon, perhaps for business blindness. But better start at the beginning.

A new generation of computer may only ring the company they DEC (acronym for Digital Equipment Corporation ) as a manufacturer of large machines that lost for the Paleolithic of information, something we can sound like many of us UNIVAC. DEC was a company that could say that practically invented the minicomputer market, much less powerful machines and pretentious large systems of the time but also much cheaper and with fewer requirements, say, environmental.

This market, the minicomputers, was to develop and grow, making the DEC in the second half of the 80 in the # 2 in the computer world (and here we talk about computers in general, both software and hardware).

However, the 80 came with very very deep changes throughout the business ecosystem turned over to the new paradigms and business models. There were companies that have adapted very well (eg HP), others were hard to adapt but eventually became as IBM, and others were unable to adapt and over the years were getting smaller until they finally disappear. Like, for example, DEC.
DEC
The situation in the mid 90's was a bit tricky. I have a couple of years without generating profits (his latest results in 1995 were 2,000 million losses). However, they had to his credit several technologies that could turn around your situation.

One was the Alpha processor. The chips were light years ahead in technology and performance of their x86 equivalents and were generally much higher than its competitors Sun and Silicon Graphics. However, DEC was a company throughout its history of minicomputers and therefore had failed to take advantage of the Alpha processor (in fact, reached 18 months delay to release for the simple reason that a microprocessor, however advanced it was, sounded a personal computer or as much workstation. DEC minicomputers did not single-person machines.)

However, there was an internal project that he could take advantage of great performance and capabilities of the 64-bit Alpha processor (yes, still in 1995). The project consisted in using the enormous bandwidth available for DEC had the time, traveled the World Wide Web completely and create an index that could be consulted at any time. His name was AltaVista, and although in the mid 90's was just an internal project, and therefore only used from the DEC's intranet, those of the company that used it were in love with him.

What was so special about AltaVista? Seen through the eyes of 2010, not much, mainly because both Google and Bing do the same. But remember we are talking about 1995, Google did not exist Bing and he had more than a decade to be born, so let's see what the situation was at that time.

The main website to mid 90's was, undoubtedly, Yahoo. However, Yahoo was not a search but it was just a directory. What does that mean? Then there was a spider to analyze the web looking for new links and including them in a weighted index that would be available then it simply was a list of websites stored. Yes, like a yellow pages or telephone directory. To understand the success of Yahoo, we must understand that before this there if you wanted to access a web-based resource management had to know of it or of any site that we link. Yahoo was simply a collection of sites, so you just had to memorize www.yahoo.com and once there, find what you wanted. Yes

had, however, projects to create search engines. Most of them were projects with very limited or not particularly ambitious objectives. For example, searchers had processed only titles from sites and not the content, or some who analyzed the contents, but of course, to encompass the web TOO (about 18,000 sites in early 1995) was needed a lot of bandwidth and processing power enough, otherwise you to finish processing all websites the result would be useless by the ever-changing nature of it. Also, of course, it was necessary to create a proper intertaz to interact with the entire system to perform searches, and most browsers "pure" of the time were quite cryptic (some had to connect via telnet and learned a few commands to perform a query). AltaVista had

solved all the problems of search engines before it. They had the huge (for the time) bandwidth of DEC, had a powerful processor and several parallel processing units all the information gathered by the spiders (so that the index was quickly obsolete) and also offered very clean interface for the time.

So in 1996 DEC agreed to publicly open your firewall to make public the AltaVista service. Like any business, the ultimate goal of this movement was to make money, but ... DEC sought how to win?

This is the part where it shows that what matters is not have the right technology but knowing what to do with it. If you do not have the possibility always exists that you can buy or at least license, but if you have it and do not know what to do with it, is naught badly.

As this was the problem of DEC. DEC for the dome (not project managers AltaVista), the engine was a great opportunity to get good positive publicity ... to sell computers with Alpha processors. That is, for them AltaVista was not a public demo of how great it was their hardware. It's as if Pixar had wanted to do business by selling computers that created Toy Story instead of doing business the film itself.

Were managers DEC blind? Yes, but because the world was full of blind by those then. In 1996, when Compaq bought DEC, the amount of the transaction was approximately $ 9,600 million, of which, in respect of the acquisition of AltaVista, paid $ 0 (and why should have been paid anything? It was just a demo and not generated not a single $. Maybe it was good publicity, but it was only, at least for the time, expense). Did

despite the blindness of their parent companies have become AltaVista Google before Google even existed? The technology was there, but not the business model. When AltaVista was made public, the mentality of the time was to capture Internet users and keep them inside as long as possible. The fashion at that time was to create portals where clump together all the services that a user might need in a way to remain always within the portal. These services ranging from email to weather information, news, chat rooms and dozens of other services. Despite the fact that AltaVista had advocates of maintaining clean and simple as AltaVista, ie focus on search technology and consultation, the triumph of the more "traditional" portal to create a large, heavy laden with a multitude of services.

What was finally AltaVista? Compaq sold to CMGI in June 1999 by $ 2,300 million, which wanted to bring it to bag the next year. However, the dot-com bubble had burst, so they stopped the IPO. In 2003, CMGI AltaVista sold the site to Overture Services, Inc. for $ 140 million. Today, AltaVista www.altavista.com still operational, but as an unimportant minor player in the world of web browsers.

And this is just an example of having the best technology does not give you guaranteed success. That is why when I see any news that this or that company could buy a few years ago euros for four current or a large company that sold for almost nothing a giant present I can not help but smile. The opportunities presented to us daily, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not ...