By Jeremy Reimer | Last updated October 21, 2007 11:30 PM

Finalizing the design

One hugely positive benefit about being owned by a large computer company was that the Amiga team no longer (for the moment, anyway) had to worry about money. The team was moved 10 miles to a spacious, rented facility in Los Gatos, California. They could afford to hire more engineers, and the software development team went from having 10 people sharing a single Sage workstation to everyone having their own SUN on their desk.

The influx of resources made the release of the Amiga computer possible, but it was still a race against time to get the computer finished before the competition took away the market.

While the hardware was mostly done, pending a few adjustments by Jay Miner and his team, the software (as is usually the case in high-tech development) was falling behind schedule. The microkernel, known as Exec, was mostly complete, thanks to the brilliant work by Carl Sassenrath, and the GUI was coming together as well, building on RJ Mical's solid framework (for a short time, his new Commodore business card read "Director of Intuition").

However, there was a third layer necessary to complete the picture. Exec, like modern microkernels, handled basic memory and task management, but there was still a need for another component to handle mundane tasks such as the file system and other operating system duties.

The CAOS debacle

Originally, that third layer was known as CAOS, which stood for the Commodore Amiga Operating System. Exec programmer Carl Sassenrath wrote up the design spec for CAOS, which had all sorts of neat features such as an advanced file system and resource tracking. The latter was a method of keeping track of such things as file control blocks, I/O blocks, message ports, libraries, memory usage, shared data, and overlays, and freeing them up if a program quit unexpectedly. As the Amiga software engineers were already behind schedule, they had contracted out parts of CAOS development to a third party. Still, as is often the case in software, the development hit some unforeseen roadblocks.

According to Commodore engineer Andy Finkel, the management team "decided that it wouldn't be possible to complete [CAOS] and still launch the Amiga on time, especially since the software guys had already given up weekends at home. And going home. And sleeping."

Lack of time wasn't the only problem. The third-party development house learned that Amiga, Inc., had been bought out by Commodore, and they suddenly demanded significantly more money than had originally been agreed upon. "Commodore tried to negotiate with them in good faith, but the whole thing fell apart in the end," recalled RJ Mical, who was upset by the whole event. "It was a jerk-butt thing that they did there."

TripOS to the rescue

When the CAOS deal fell apart, the Amiga team suddenly needed a replacement operating system. Relief came in the form of TripOS, written by Dr. Tim King at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s and 80s, and later ported to the PDP-11. Dr. King formed a small company called MetaComCo to quickly rewrite TripOS for the Amiga, where it became known as AmigaDOS.

AmigaDOS handled many of the same tasks as CAOS, but it was an inferior replacement. "Their code was university-quality code," said Mical, "where optimized performance was not important, but where theoretical purity was important." The operating system also lacked resource tracking, which hurt the overall stability of the system. This oversight had repercussions that remain to this day: the very latest PowerPC-compiled version of AmigaOS will still sometimes fail to free up all resources when a program crashes.

Interestingly, TripOS (and thus AmigaOS) was written in the BCPL language, a predecessor to C. Later versions of the operating system would replace this with a combination of C and Assembler.

With the kernel, OS, and GUI ready, and with last-minute adjustments to the custom chips, all that remained was designing a case for the system, which had been dubbed the Amiga 1000. Jay Miner felt it would be appropriate to have the signature from all 53 Amiga team members—both Amiga, Inc. employees and Commodore engineers who later joined the project—to be preserved on the inside of the computer's case. Both Joe Pillow and Jay's dog Mitchy got to sign the case in their own unique way.

Dave Morse, who was still nominally in charge of Commodore Amiga, added his own idea for the case: a raised "garage" on the bottom that users could slide their keyboards into when not in use.

There was only one potential stumbling block preventing the release of the Amiga 1000: the decision about how much RAM to put in the system. Cost-conscious Commodore wanted to ship with only 256KB. Knowing that the operating system and GUI needed more memory, Jay insisted on shipping with 512KB. The two sides were unable to come to an agreement, so a compromise was reached: the Amiga would ship with 256KB but come with an easily-accessible expansion cage on the front of the case that could accommodate more memory. Jay would later say that he had to "put his job on the line" just to get Commodore to put the expansion port in.

Now that all the pieces were in place, Commodore decided to announce the Amiga to the world. For the first time in the company's history, management decided to pull out all the stops. The Amiga announcement would be the most lavish and expensive new product showcase in the history of personal computers.

The announcement

Commodore rented the Lincoln Center and hired a full orchestra for the Amiga announcement ceremony, which was videotaped for posterity. All Commodore employees were given tuxedoes to wear for the event: RJ Mical one-upped the rest by finding a pair of white gloves to complete his ensemble. The band played a jaunty little number with tubas and xylophones as a brilliant laser display revealed the Amiga name in its new font.

The master of ceremonies was Commodore marketing vice president Bob Truckenbrode, but he soon gave way to the real star of the show: the head of software engineering, Bob Pariseau. With his long hair elegantly tied back in a ponytail, Pariseau directed the demonstration like a maestro conducting a symphony. With each wave of his hand, he would signal his counterpart, sitting at a real Amiga 1000, to demonstrate each new feature.

"At Amiga, the user controls how he uses his time, not the computer," Pariseau said, as his assistant showed the flexibility of the then-new graphical user interface. He then brought up a graphical word processor called TextCraft to show how a GUI could be applied to everyday work: the word processor featured menus, toolbar buttons, and an on-screen ruler for setting margins and tab stops. Pedestrian stuff for 1995, but astounding for a decade earlier!

Then he moved on to showing off the Amiga's graphics capabilities, showing all 4,096 colors at once on the same screen, followed by a close-up photo of a baboon's face in 640 by 400 resolution: an image that many people might remember gazing at in VGA monitor advertisements from the early 1990s.

From static images, he moved on to the Amiga's strong suit: animation. The custom chips included hardware commands to flood fill arbitrary areas: those who remember using flood fill in Photoshop on older computers will remember how slow it was when it had to rely on the CPU. The Amiga's hardware-accelerated version filled up multiple rotating and intersecting triangles with different colors as they spun across the screen, all at a constant 30 frames per second. Another animation demo, Robot City, showed the Amiga's built-in sprite and collision detection features, allowing large animated characters to move over complex backgrounds and interact with each other.

None of the demos were taking over the entire computer to do their magic. Each full-screen demo could be smoothly slid down to reveal other running applications beneath.

The concept of multitasking was virtually unknown for personal computer users in 1985, and Bob went through several examples of how this feature could be used not just for entertainment but for business applications as well. A bar chart and pie chart were built simultaneously from the same numerical data, and the user could quickly switch from one window to another to see the results in either format.

Moving on from graphics to sound, Bob demonstrated the four-channel synthesized sound hardware by using the keyboard as a virtual piano playing various different sampled instruments. "With all four channels going simultaneously, the 68000 [CPU] is idle," Pariseau commented, something that would not be true for many years in other computers until sampled waveform sound cards became available for PCs. A close-up of the Amiga operator at the keyboard showed his fingers shaking slightly—there was a lot riding on these demos, and the software was brand new and still largely untested. Yet the Amiga performed masterfully in its first time on stage, without crashing once.

The next demonstration was of computer-generated speech: the Amiga spoke in a male voice, a female voice, a fast and a slow voice, and all were pitch-modulated to sound more like a real person; the last voice was spoken in a monotone, "just like a real computer." This line got a good laugh from the audience.

Even back in 1985, the market was already showing signs of standardizing on the IBM PC platform, and Bob acknowledged this fact in his speech. "You know, it's hard," he said, "it's hard to be innovative in an industry that has been dominated by one technology for so long. We at Commodore Amiga knew that to do this [introduce a new platform] we had to be at least an order of magnitude better than anything anyone had ever seen.

"We've done that," he continued, "and then we decided: why stop there? Why not include that older technology in what we had already done?" Thus was set the stage for the very first IBM PC emulator on the Amiga, called Amiga Transformer. The program was started up, then a PC-DOS installation disk was placed into an attached 5.25 inch floppy drive, and this was replaced with a Lotus 1-2-3 disk. "Standard, vanilla, IBM DOS," Bob said with a sigh, and the crowd laughed again. Compared to the exciting graphics and sound demos of a few minutes earlier, it was a bit of a letdown seeing the industry standard spreadsheet take over the screen.

To lighten the mood, Bob finished off with a replay of the original Boing Ball demo that was first shown at CES only a year earlier. "We've lived our dream," he said, "and seen it come to life. Now it's your turn. What will you do with the Amiga Computer?"

Andy and Debbie

Two unlikely celebrities were then invited on stage to show what creative folks might do with their Amigas. Deborah Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, walked on stage along with counterculture art icon Andy Warhol, who took a quick appreciative glance at her red dress as they sat down. "Are you ready to paint me now?" Debbie asked, her voice slightly nervous.

Andy sat down in front of the Amiga 1000, looking at it like it was some kind of alien technology from another world. "What other computers have you worked with?" asked resident Amiga artist Jack Hager. "I haven't worked on anything," Andy replied truthfully. "I've been waiting for this one." A nearby video camera was attached to a digitizer, and from this setup a monochrome snapshot of Debbie's face appeared on the Amiga screen, ready for Andy to add a splash of color.

It is a cardinal rule in doing computer demos in public that you never let anyone else take control of the machine, lest they do something off-script that winds up crashing the computer. The paint program (ProPaint) being used was a very early alpha, and the software engineers knew that it had bugs in it. One of the known bugs was that the flood fill algorithm—the paint program didn't use the hardware fills that were demonstrated earlier—would usually crash the program every second time it was used. Yet there was Andy clicking here, there, and everywhere with the flood fill. Somehow, the demo gods were smiling on Amiga that day, and the program didn't crash. "This is kind of pretty," Andy said, admiring his work. "I think I'll keep that."

The show ended with a short video—powered by the Amiga—of a wireframe ballerina, who then turned into a solid-shaded figure, and finally a fully rotoscoped animated image. A real ballerina then came out on stage and danced in sync with her animated counterpart.

Reactions to the show

While the crowd attending the show went away extremely impressed with what they had seen, the reaction from the rest of the world was mixed. Articles about the demo were published in magazines such as Popular Computing, Fortune, Byte, and Compute. The Fortune article both praised and dismissed the Amiga at the same time: "While initial reviews praised the technical capabilities of the Amiga, a shell-shocked PC industry has learned to resist the seductive glitter of advanced technology for its own sake."

Think about that last line for a few moments. Can any computer user today honestly say that color, animation, multichannel sound, and multitasking are merely seductive glitter that exists only for its own sake? Like Doug Engelbart's revolutionary demonstration of the first mouse-driven graphical user interface back in 1968, many of the ideas shown in the Amiga unveiling were a little too far ahead of their time, at least for some people.

Nevertheless, Commodore had some great buzz leading up to the introduction of the Amiga 1000. The machine had great hardware and software. It had features that no other computer could even hope to emulate. Freelance writer Louis Wallace described it thusly: "To give you an idea of its capabilities, imagine taking all that is good about the Macintosh, combine it with the power of the IBM PC-AT, improve it, and then cut the price by 75 percent." This last part was a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much: the final price of the Amiga 1000 was set at $1,295 for the 256KB version and $1,495 for the 512KB one. This compared favorably to the Macintosh, which had only 128KB and sold for $2,495.

Commodore looked like it had everything going for it. The new Amiga computer was years ahead of the competition, and many people in the company—including Jay Miner—felt that they had a real chance to significantly impact the industry. Sitting in the crowd during the Amiga's unveiling was Thomas Rattigan, an enthusiastic executive who had come from Pepsi and was being groomed for the position of CEO at Commodore. He had big plans for the Amiga. The original designers had achieved their dream by creating the Amiga from nothing, but now bigger dreams were being imagined for the little computer.

Unbeknownst to him, however, larger forces were at work that would turn these dreams into nightmares.