“As the 1990s began, Commodore should have been flying high. The long-awaited new Amiga models with better graphics, the A1200 and A4000, were finally released in 1992,” Jeremy Reimer writes for Ars Technica. “Sales responded by increasing 17 percent over the previous year. The Video Toaster had established a niche in desktop video editing that no other computer platform could match, and the new Toaster 4000 promised to be even better than before. After a rocky start, the Amiga seemed to be hitting its stride.”
“Unfortunately, this success wouldn’t last. In 1993, sales fell by 20 percent, and Commodore lost $366 million,” Reimer writes. “In the first quarter of 1994, the company announced a loss of $8.2 million—much better than the previous four quarters, but still not enough to turn a profit. Commodore had run into financial difficulties before, particularly in the mid-’80s, but this time the wounds were too deep.”
“Sales of the venerable Commodore 64 had finally collapsed, and the Amiga wasn’t able to fill the gap quickly enough,” Reimer writes. “The company issued a statement warning investors of its problems, and the stock plunged. On April 29, 1994, Commodore International Limited announced that it was starting the initial phase of voluntary liquidation of all of its assets and filing for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, once the savior of the Amiga, had failed to save itself.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: In addition to our Macs, we owned Commodore-64 units with which, among other things, we attempted to wear holes through our Jumpman and Star League Baseball floppy disks and later used Commodore Amigas for broadcast television character generation (CG).
SEE ALSO:
Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dead at 83 – April 9, 2012
Apple pulls Commodore 64 emulator for iPhone from App Store – September 8, 2009
Apple co-founder Woz helps celebrate Commodore 64’s 25th anniversary – December 12, 2007
I had an Amiga 1000, I loved that computer. Still have my AmigaDOS manual.
I started with a Vic-20 then made the mistake of “upgrading” to the C-16. Then got an A500, “upgraded” to the A600 only to find it was basically an A500 in a new shell. Then got an A1200, finally a CD32. Most were great machines but Commodore made many, many mistakes.
Dan Wood – kookytech.net on YouTube has great videos of Commodore history plus an interview with David Pleasance including what was wrong with Commodore at youtube.com/watch?v=V3ef8ronz9E
I always thought the mistake was originally selling Amiga out to Commodore, losing control of a great product. But I guess they did what they had to do, damned shame.
From what I remember of the history of the Amiga is that they sold to Commodore to save the machine, they were toast without the buyout.
right, that’s what I meant, a danged shame.
A British friend of mine Ron Thornton used Amiga’s (with early LightWave 3D app) initially to transform TV visual effects on BABYLON 5. He was a model maker I worked with who turned to using computers and actually got that show made because of what he could do. He later built a big company Foundation Imaging and worked on many projects including. Ron died last year sadly.
So much computer history has been written in the last 30 years and innovators have come and gone. But the important thing is they made a valuable contribution in their wake.
A few years ago there was talk of upgrading and rerendering the Babylon 5 CG shots for high definition. But they were unable to find the original CG files.
Great show with one of the best story arcs ever for a sci-fi show – at least for the first four seasons. The fifth and final season was rather anticlimactic. Michael Straczynski could have stopped at four and we all would have said well done.
Had an Atari 800. Learned Atari Basic and set myself up for a computer engineering future (only to find myself switching directions in college). But I remember all of the ‘platform wars’ with commodore back in the day!
My way to Mac (in Poland behind Iron Curtain): Atari 800 XL (1984), Atari 520 ST (1990), Amiga 500 (1990), Amiga 500+, 2000, CDTV, 1200, CD32 (1991-1995), Macintosh LC in work (1991), Macintosh LC630CD (1995 and counting) 😉
Russia hacked into the mainframe! We must have a recount! The microagressions must stop 😭😭😭🤧
I bet my software development’s company on the Amiga … and lost.
The Amiga was the computer I always wanted, but couldn’t afford. I had a Commodore 64 and prior to that the Vic 20. I had the 300 baud modem for the Commodore 64 and was a Sysop for a BBS.
The good old days.
To be honest my Commodore was the only computer I “adored” until I bought a Mac mini in 2005. I went through a few PCs but never had any emotional attachment to them.
I too adored my C64 and later upgraded to the C128. 😀
Very nostalgic indeed… My early days of 3d … … what amazing days they were..
For those who may be interested there are couple cool documenteries on itunes..
Viva Amiga.
From bedrom to billions.
And if you are also interested
Atari: Game over … also on netflix
While we’re on the subject of old home machines…
Any Tandy CoCo 1/2/3 users around here?
When I was a kid, my family had a TI-99/4A (Texas Instruments), including with the speech synthesizer module. After typing in BASIC programs, we had to save the resulting file using an audio cassette recorder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
Never had an amiga, but did have a Commodore 64. I had the tape drive attachment for it and the disk drive, it was hooked up to a 12″ black and white Montgomery Ward television, which later became a 12″ color Monkey Ward’s tv which eventually had a Super Nintendo hooked up to it. Those were the days
I have always thought that the Commodore 64 was ahead of it’s time.
-computer built into the keyboard
-OS on ROM
-solid state
-no fans
-ability to connect directly to a television (or the Commodore 1702 monitor)
I owned a Commodore 128 and a Amiga 500. Amazing tech and amazing mismanagement. What could have been!
The Amiga was the computer for those of us who could not afford a Mac. Some great software came out for it. I still have mine, including all its software, developer manuals, and C compiler. I wonder if the floppies are still readable, lol.
Eventually I had to give in and get a PC to work with the rest of the world. But to me the Amiga was the first true desktop multitasking operating system. Still one of my favorite machines: multitasking and color for half the price of a mac.
“The Amiga was the computer for those of us who could not afford a Mac.”
Agreed, the MSRP for the Macintosh II was $5,498…Apple’s first color Macintosh. The Amiga 1000 was $1,295…both ran on the Motorola 68000.
Tried using a Commodore 64 when they were brand new. They were inexpensive and compact and could be hooked up to nearly any standard TV. Unfortunately, the native random number generator was only good to two independent dimensions so I couldn’t use it in my work. But it probably was a great machine for home and learning.
In some of the Compute magazines I think they had a listing for a random number generator that used the output from the ‘noise’ function of the SID chip. Maybe that could have worked for your purposes back then.
Ah the venerable SID chip. Still used to this day for retro music and in the modern demo scene.
I still have 9 c64s in my attic somewhere. I’m sitting on a gold mine of SID chips. haha
Why didn’t you code a better RNG?
Great article many memories has all the products mentioned except the last 32 bit game console the atari st was the best computer for writing music so it was a superior machine in many respects.
Sadly the bells were wringing as i read about the company heads changing and the new head slowly chocked the products by putting out less than top spec computers and lining the pockets of the top tear over real R&D innovation.
They should have added the word ‘Pro’ to those poorly advanced or thought out products.
Too close to reality repeating itself but i suppose thats why you brought it to the MDN readers.
Started with Atari 800, then got an Amiga, its logical successor: both designed by Jay Miner with custom graphics chips. Besides, by the time Amiga came out, Commodore had become Atari and Atari had become Commodore with Tramiel’s purchase. After those, I lived a lot of years in Windows hell until the original iPhone brought me into the paradise of Apple.
Commodore’s biggest mistake was taking the profits they made off the Amiga 500, which were substantial, and using them to develop a line of bog standard DOS PCs for the business market which had sales pretty much nowhere except Germany. If they’d put the profits back into the Amiga the chipset that powered the 1200 and 4000 models would have been available sooner. As it was those models launched at a time when the consoles were taking the gaming market away and the amount of software for PCs exploded thanks to Windows 3.1. The later Amigas were fantastic bits of kit, they were just too late to market.
I loved the Amiga. Had an A1200 and for a time the Amiga couldn’t be touched when it came to audio & video.
Started on a good ole’ C64 with a clunky 1541 disk drive.
Ah good memories.
I had a ’64 and replaced it with a Amiga500. Real multitasking (pre-emptive), windows moving including content without flickering instead of moving outlines split in line segments. Amiga1200 later but then CBM went belly up. Just recently sent both Amiga’s to the local Computer museum and they are now being played on by 100’s of visitors.
I also have lived through about 8 years of Windows dark ages but after deciding I wanted to use the computer instead of having to maintain it, I bought a MacBook.
I had the Vic20 and the Coleco vision ADAM. Brings back many memories, especially the Scott Adam’s adventure games for the Vic 20.
I bought an Adam from a friend of mine in the late 1980s. It was already a dead platform but the price was right and I wanted to mess around with it.
I remember the printer weighed about a ton and was hard wired to the computer, there was no separating them!
The best thing about the Adam was that it could load Colecovision cartridges. The computer itself was largely useless. lol