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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780994031082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Variant Press |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2019 |
| Series: | Commodore |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 544 |
| Sales rank: | 705,048 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Amiga 500 to the Rescue 1987
Prologue: A Worthy Sequel
Commodore had industry-wide success after it released the low-cost C64 in 1982, but after that, it flailed around looking for a new product to continue its legacy. The company eventually landed on the Amiga computer and attempted to evolve into a high-end computer company similar to Apple.
In 1985, the company hired a new CEO and president, Thomas Rattigan, who attempted to steer the company back to its retail roots. He settled on developing the Amiga 500 at the low-end and the Amiga 2000 at the high-end.
Rattigan received his baptism into Commodore during a phase in which it had little money, and he was forced to be frugal, much as his predecessor, Jack Tramiel, had been. He also witnessed the failed Amiga 1000 launch, giving him a unique education. And then, just prior to the launch of the A500 and A2000, Irving Gould terminated Rattigan's contract with the company.
As would be shown, Thomas Rattigan was the high water mark for company leadership. The succession of presidents that came and went after Rattigan became steadily worse. Each time Gould reshuffled the deck, he dealt himself diminishing cards with which to play his hand. "It had one real chance to go further after that, with Tom Rattigan at the helm, but unfortunately the company wasn't big enough for him and the Chairman, Irving Gould. After that, it was downhill," observes marketing director Paul Higginbottom.
After Rattigan's departure and closing down the original Amiga company in Los Gatos, the first task for the year was to introduce the Amiga 500 computer to the public. If everything went well, the A500 could push the company into agolden era.
Easter Egg
In early 1987, the Amiga software team was nearing completion of AmigaOS 1.2. The new system, which would be released along with the A500 and A2000 computers, was a much more complete operating system compared to the previous two releases. But it also contained a nefarious message.
According to RJ Mical, "In the end, we were feeling that we had done this beautiful work of art, and then Commodore, for their lack of experience or their lack of knowledge about the computer industry, let us down."
When working on Workbench 1.2, an Amiga engineer inserted a message expressing his feelings towards Commodore. "This happened when I was director of the whole effort," explains Mical. "One day, one of the guys showed me with great delight what they had put in there. It was this thing where you had to press a certain number of keys on the keyboard and it would bring up this message that said, 'We made the Amiga, they fucked it up.' I saw that and I made a sort of nervous chuckle."
Mical knew the parting shot at Commodore could not remain. "I said, 'This is cute but we can't really put this in the machine. That's just not acceptable.' They said, 'Aw, come on!' I said, 'No way, man. We're just not putting this in the machine. You've got to take it out.'"
Mical double-checked before signing off on the code. "The final release of the OS was done, and with great fear I did the keystrokes to make sure that it wasn't there," he recalls. "When you put in that keystroke, a line of text came up, but it said, 'The Amiga, born a champion.'"
Unknown to Mical, the offending text remained. "They didn't take it out," he says. "All they did was bury it one level deeper and encrypt it." Now it remained to be seen if anyone would discover the secret.
With the Amiga team's impending departure, Commodore engineers now had to take full responsibility for any further AmigaOS development. This was difficult but not futile because many of Commodore's programmers had already been developing parts of the AmigaOS; generally low-level support modules such as printer drivers. The team included former VIC Commandos such as Andy Finkel and Eric Cotton, as well as other programmers like Benny Prudin and Judy Braddock. They had gone from learning C-language to mastering the AmigaOS library.
A formal transition period began in January 1987 to hand over development to Commodore, and the transition completed when Amiga, Inc. closed its doors on March 31, 1987. Andy Finkel had learned the most in that time and was put in charge of the group. "Once I had gone out to California and worked with the Amiga guys, I sort of got sucked into the Amiga culture and thought like they did," he says.
Despite his mixed feelings, RJ Mical felt he was leaving the Amiga legacy in good hands. "There were a number of Commodore engineers that were brilliant people who were a real treat to work with," he says. "Not all of them were brilliant; some of them were real clunkers but you could say that about the original Amiga guys. There were a whole bunch of them, but Andy Finkel and Dave Haynie were guys that really stood out as the heroes."
Soon after the old team departed, Finkel and his team began work on the new version of the Amiga software, AmigaOS 1.3. The software transition did not go as smoothly as hoped, and Finkel soon realized Commodore needed to pull in key Amiga developers from the original software team.
In May, a few months after the Los Gatos closing, Commodore reopened anoffice at 16795 Lark Avenue, a five minute walk north of the old Amiga premises. The building rented out to at least eight different companies. Here, in suite 106, Bart Whitebook and Dale Luck, along with his garbage bag full of popcorn, continued developing AmigaOS. Caryn Havis, now married to RJ Mical and on maternity leave, would also consult for Commodore on third party software development.
GRR
Commodore pinned all its hopes on the success of the A500 in 1987. The hands-on engineer of this cost-reduced marvel was George Robbins, better known as Grr. "George used his initials when he signed things and so we called him Grr (growling noise) a lot," recalls his coworker Bil Herd.
Born in 1954 in the town of Wilmington, Delaware, Robbins grew up with a brother and three sisters. He had a natural affinity for technology from an early age, reading through electronics catalogs in the second grade. He was also obsessed with trains and restored a railway handcar in the family garage to working condition.
As a teenager in the early 1970s Robbins frequently hung out with other kids his age at a drop-in center named Brown House in Claymont, Delaware, helping to setup and run the electronics inside. He also worked at a non-profit music venue called the Side Door Coffee House. Robbins graduated a year after everyone else his age because he was forced to repeat the second grade. He also did not quite graduate from Concord High School because he missed a partial credit by failing gym class.
After high school, Robbins attempted to attend the University of Delaware. He and his best friend Ray Leonard moved into a dorm room on campus together, but then Robbins found out his university application was rejected because of the missing gym credit. However, he was more interested in using computers than attending classes, and he clandestinely lived in Leonard's dorm room just so he could sneak into the data center after hours. This lasted several months until, during Thanksgiving when all the students were gone, campus security finally nabbed him.
These youthful experiences left Robbins with a skepticism of authority. It also left him with a lifelong appreciation of computer games following his early exposure to mainframe classics like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork. From there he worked a variety of jobs, including inventory manager aboard an oil tanker and computer administration jobs before he ended up at Commodore as a consultant.
"George Robbins was one of the best engineers of all the systems engineers there," says his coworker Hedley Davis. "He had a lot of depth and a lot of knowledge. He was totally out of control in terms of being a brilliant engineer."
Robbins was unique, even among the unusual band of Commodore engineers. "George was a nonconformist in many ways," recalls Bob Welland. "He lived in a decommissioned railway station and drove a truck without registration. He's kind of a libertarian and so he didn't have tags and I don't think he had insurance."
The railway station was an apt home for the man who had once loved trains as a boy. Sitting next to the railway tracks just south of Lincoln University, the station used to see throngs of students disembark each semester. Located at the corner of Elkdale Road and Walnut Street in lower Oxford Township, it was a 30 mile drive from the West Chester headquarters.
The proximity of Robbins' home to the university was no accident. At the time, universities were among the only institutions connected to the Internet and Robbins wanted in badly. He hatched a plan to sneak onto the campus, much as he had earlier in his life at the University of Delaware. In the evening, he wandered a short distance down the road onto campus where he could use the university computers to connect to the Internet and access his favorite newsgroups.
Robbins also attended computer shows such as the Trenton Computer Festival in New Jersey, a one hour drive from Commodore's headquarters. There, he met Eric Lavitsky, who ran the Jersey Amiga User Group (JAUG). "George would come up to the Trenton Computer Festival which I frequented," says Lavitsky. "Our user group would always have a table."
Robbins attended the festival for the notable keynote speakers, such as Adam Osborne, Gary Kildall, and Bill Gates. But it also hosted a flea market filled with equipment that, even in 1986, was considered obsolete. "People would go out and have these big swap tables out in the parking lot," recalls Lavitsky. "People would bring mini-computers and disk packs and teletypes and any possible piece of hardware junk that you could name. You could sell them or barter for them or whatever."
Robbins soon began a collection of old mainframe servers which he hooked up and operated out of his spacious railroad station. In effect, he was collecting retro computers in the days before eBay and long before it became a popular hobby. "George was just the penultimate geek," says Lavitsky. "He was a real old-school hacker, a great guy."
Speeding to and from work every day in his green van without proper vehicle registration was bound to attract the notice of the law. "They pulled him over once and told him he had to get tags and insurance," says Welland. Robbins ignored the warning and continued driving, only to run afoul of the police again. This resulted in him losing his licence and a more severe warning. "They pulled him over again and said next time we pull you over, you're going to jail."
Robbins was in a dilemma, wanting to avoid incarceration while maintaining his libertarian principles. Most people would probably register the vehicle at this point, but Robbins was determined not to compromise. "George's solution was to ride his bike to work," says Welland. "This seems like a reasonable solution until you know that George lived 33 miles from work. George was alsonot in the greatest of shape and rather overweight at the time. So he started riding his bicycle."
The daily 66 mile rides soon sapped him of his energy. "It became kind of impractical for him to ride his bike to work and then ride home," says Welland. "So, his solution was to ride to work and sleep at work for a few days and then ride home."
Robbins parked his old run-down green van behind Commodore's FCC radio emissions testing shed, where he would sometimes sleep at night. There he would curl up with a sci-fi book from staples such as Robert A. Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Frank Herbert, to less known fare from C. J. Cherryh, Poul William Anderson, and Alfred Bester.
These overnight stays soon benefited Commodore because Robbins put in long hours on different projects, and after hours spent even more time administering the VAX computers.
A500 Production
The eccentric George Robbins seemed like an odd fit for someone who would create a neatly designed motherboard. "There are a thousand details associated with a printed circuit board, like EMI protection and what bypass capacitors you should have, how you should lay out the board," explains Bob Welland. "He owned all the issues around the peripherals that were hanging off the side, access to them, the side bus, memory expansion. George was one of the most meticulous designers I have ever met; which was the opposite of George in life, who was a rather messy, complicated, and very easy to get along with fellow."
Once George Robbins completed his final motherboard design, he added the words, "B52/Rock Lobster" onto the PCB surface as an homage to the music that fueled the development team. This was partly inspired by the B52 nickname given to it by the senior management. "The younger engineers took that and ran with that name to give PCBs a code name like Rock Lobster. So it worked for both generations," says his manager Jeff Porter.
By March 1987 George Robbins, Jeff Porter and Gerard Bucas (VP of engineering) were ready to take the Amiga 500 to production. The Amiga 1000 had been expensively manufactured in a Sanyo VCR factory, but now it was time to switch back to manufacturing the A500 at Commodore's Braunschweig and Hong Kong facilities.
Most of the chips within the A500 would be manufactured by Commodore's secret weapon, Commodore Semiconductor Group (CSG), known internally by its historical name, MOS Technology. Other companies attempting to analyze Commodore's profit margins wildly overestimated the costs due to CSG's efficiency. "Apple did not make chips and really did not have a good handle on chip economics," says Bob Welland. "As such, they thought that the margins on the A500 were very thin. They had estimated that the A500 chipset would cost something like $140 [to manufacture] when the true cost was closer to $20."
CSG was able to produce Agnus, Denise, and Paula for $5.49, $5.19, and $7.91 respectively. Curiously, Gerard Bucas did not trust CSG to produce the Gary chip on time. "MOS Technology, I would say, eventually became a millstone around Commodore's neck," he says. "Jeff Porter and I, but especially me, decided, 'Listen, I'm not going to do the gate array with them. I don't believe they can meet the timeline and I don't believe they can make it in volume at the right price.'"
This was not politically popular at Commodore, but Bucas felt it was the correct move. "We designed it, but the manufacturing of that, we actually outsourced to someone else," he says. "We outsourced the chip to VLSITechnology, which was a third-party chip company."
It was up to Bucas to negotiate with suppliers and make sure Commodore received the best prices. A few years ago, the 68000 sold for $15 in quantity. Now Bucas negotiated it down to $5 per unit. "I was personally responsible for every component that was more than fifty cents," he says. "Jeff Porter's nickname for me was 'the Dutch trader'. It was fun. At Commodore, we had a cost structure which was second to none in the sense that we got the best pricing from everybody. We were obviously, at that stage, a key player with Japanese manufacturers and suppliers. People that made floppy drives were all in Japan: Mitsumi and Panasonic and a number of others."
Given the time constraints and pressure of producing a new system, mistakes were bound to occur. One error came from the Hitachi-manufactured masked ROM chips that contained the Kickstart code. "We needed to send them a master to make the masks from," says Bob Welland. "The master came in the form of a bunch of 512K EPROMs that we programmed from a master file. I'll blame Jeff Porter and myself for the following, subtle error. We programmed the EPROMs using a device called a Data I/O programmer."
As a result of their inexperience with the programmer, the pair inadvertently left out the last byte in the ROM. "This turned out to be a rather confusing source of bugs in the final masked ROM," says Welland. It proved to be costly, since the whole batch of chips could not be used.
During the initial pilot production run, Porter set up an assembly line at West Chester to work out the manufacturing process. With stopwatch in hand, he honed the process until Amiga 500s came off the line in rapid succession.
He also carried the process over to the manufacture of PCBs. "One of the things that I did really well with the Amiga 500 board is I figured out the speed of all the equipment in the factory in Hong Kong," he says. "I needed to know how long it's going to take for the machines to stuff the boards with all the components and I made sure that the component mixture was not going to be a bottleneck on the number of machines that they had."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Commodore: The Final Years"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Variant Press.
Excerpted by permission of Variant Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents v
Introduction vii
Chapter 1 Amiga 500 to the Rescue 1
Chapter 2 Marketing Miracle 11
Chapter 3 A2000-CR and Unix 23
Chapter 4 Quest for High Resolution 31
Chapter 5 Management Moves 47
Chapter 6 C65 57
Chapter 7 Amiga Unix 69
Chapter 8 Evolving the Amiga 79
Chapter 9 Game Machines 93
Chapter 10 Ups and Downs 107
Chapter 11 Amiga 3000 at Last 117
Chapter 12 C65 Becomes Official 127
Chapter 13 Mehdi Ali the Second 141
Chapter 14 The Other Chipsets 157
Chapter 15 The Baby 171
Chapter 16 C65 Grows 185
Chapter 17 New Marketing 199
Chapter 18 Amiga 3000 207
Chapter 19 A Radical New Direction 221
Chapter 20 C65: No Direction 235
Chapter 21 Mehdi's Takeover 247
Chapter 22 The Plus Computers 261
Chapter 23 Fiasco 271
Chapter 24 Amiga 300 287
Chapter 25 CDTV Unleashed 295
Chapter 26 The Final Takeover 309
Chapter 27 Killing Projects 319
Chapter 28 The Fate of the C65 329
Chapter 29 The Sydnes Era 339
Chapter 30 Amiga 600 353
Chapter 31 Sales & Marketing Makeover 367
Chapter 32 Changing of the Bozos 381
Chapter 33 Amiga 4000 391
Chapter 34 Rooting Out the Rot 403
Chapter 35 Amigo 417
Chapter 36 Amiga 1200 429
Chapter 37 Management by Fire Extinguisher 441
Chapter 38 CD32 457
Chapter 39 The Last Hurrah 473
Chapter 40 The Fall of Commodore 491
Special Thanks 505
Index 510