-The real Atari 8bit Computer Successor

[Drummerboy]

I can not remember where i saw something like the Amiga was the real successor of the Atari 8bit and not the Atari ST.

The thing was when Amiga Corporation - Jay Miner as the Leader, need money for the project and Commodore bought Amiga Corporation, the Amiga had the "Commodore" Last name, but in the Jay Miner mind was something like the Atari 800 successor designed by Jay.

Anyone hear something more about this, or could be just a urban myth?.

So if this is true, then the Atari ST is not the Atari 8Bit successor, and the Amiga is not the C=64 successor.

 

[Bryan]

You can find a lot of Amiga history online. Jay Miner and other Atari engineers were unhappy that Atari (under Warner) didn't want to invest in a 16-bit computer and they left. In the end, Commodore ended up with the Amiga and Jack Tramiel had engineers working on what would become the ST after he was kicked out of Commodore. So, yes, the Amiga largely came from ex-Atari people and Atari was under ex-Commodore management. It was a very bizarre turn of events.

 

This is a quick synposis:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Corporation

[Chilly Willy]

If you look at the hardware for both systems (the Atari 8-bitters and the Amiga), the lineage is clear. It's also the reason I replaced my Atari 400 with an Amiga 500 when I was ready to go 16 bit.

[Umberto]

If you look at the hardware for both systems (the Atari 8-bitters and the Amiga), the lineage is clear. It's also the reason I replaced my Atari 400 with an Amiga 500 when I was ready to go 16 bit.

I went with the ST simply because I was involved with the user group thing. I have no regrets, but if I had known the Jay Miner angle back then I may have went with an Amiga, In retrospect it was a more art orientated machine and better equipped for gaming. The ST was made with off the shelf components while the Amiga had a custom chip set, similar to the 800. I have been thinking about picking up a 500 and playing around with it.

[Rybags]

I knew of the Amiga nearly 2 years before release thanks to the Compute! article (CES?)

 

Before seeing either machine I knew the Amiga would be the better by a good margin. ST does have "custom" chips but nowhere near as advanced as Amiga. Shifter, Glue, memory controller were developed by Tramiels team. Sort of like Atari 8-bit, the graphics aren't entirely handled by the 1 chip but aside from that there's few similarities or inheritance apparent.

 

I bought an ST first, mainly because at the time there was more software around and I knew more ST than Amiga owners. Not to mention the price difference, until the 500 came along Atari had a definite price advantage even though the overall package was less.

[zaphodb777]

Yep, the Amiga was definitely the successor. I have messed around in the hardware on both machines, and there are even aspects of the Amiga that can be found all the way back in the 2600. One thing that is really obvious is the display list processing which Copper part of Agnus did, very very much like ANTIC. There are other simularities, but that's the big one that I found.

I feel that the Amiga was every bit an upgraded Atari 8-bit, and the ST was an upgraded C=64.

 

Zap

[kenjennings]

I knew of the Amiga nearly 2 years before release thanks to the Compute! article (CES?)

 

Yes, I was in line to buy one when it was still called Lorraine by the Amiga company. It was a recurring topic in the Atari (not Commodore) section of the multi-platform magazines. The Amiga company's Lorraine development was also covered by Creative Computing, Byte, and Analog.

[Rybags]

The lineage even extends to pixel AR and clock speeds. Amiga exactly 4x the speed of the Atari 8-bit although of course many computers based their speed on the NTSC colour-clocking.

 

ST is closer to C64 there, although I don't think it's an exact multiple but near enough to 8x.

[+Philsan]

 

I can not remember where i saw something like the Amiga was the real successor of the Atari 8bit and not the Atari ST.

The thing was when Amiga Corporation - Jay Miner as the Leader, need money for the project and Commodore bought Amiga Corporation, the Amiga had the "Commodore" Last name, but in the Jay Miner mind was something like the Atari 800 successor designed by Jay.

Anyone hear something more about this, or could be just a urban myth?.

So if this is true, then the Atari ST is not the Atari 8Bit successor, and the Amiga is not the C=64 successor.

 

 

I didn't know it at the time (I bought an Atari 800XL, then a C128, then an Amiga) but now many people knows.

A8 and Amiga hardware similarities are evident as well as the fact they share designers.

[atarian63]

It's true from a hardware standpoint.the goofy os on the other hand was all commodore

[kenjennings]

The preemptive multitasking OS was considerably better than, say a warmed over port of CP/M.

[Rybags]

The OSes in both cases were largely outsourced.

 

In many aspects, AmigaOS is like a forerunner to Linux. TOS/GEM... it is what it is, a GUI bolted on top of an old filing system.

Although both OSes gave a better appearance of integration than Windows did probably until Win98.

[Bryan]

I don't really consider the ST to be a continuation of anything. It's hardware is pretty basic and doesn't really resemble the C64. It's more like what a 68000 Apple II would be like.

[Tickled_Pink]

Regardless of these facts I'm personally glad I bought an ST at the time rather than an Amiga. I doubt I'd have learned as much about coding and would have had so much fun doing it if I'd gone for an Amiga.

[ClausB]

I had read Amiga was better but bought an ST because it was cheaper, just as I had bought a 400 instead of an Apple and a TI programmable calculator instead of an HP. By this time I had turned my computing hobby into a profession and had a PC AT at work. So I sold the ST while it was still worth something, kept my A8s for recreation, and developed my new hobby of aviation.

 

I don't regret dumping the ST but do regret not getting into the Amiga.

[Innovative Leisure]

It's true from a hardware standpoint.the goofy os on the other hand was all commodore

No. The OS was largely programmed by the Amiga team (Carl Sassenrath, RJ Mical, Bob Pariseau, etc.). AmigaDOS was done by Metacomco.

 

On the hardware side, I think it was Commodore who decided to remove the NTSC circuitry from the Denise (Daphne) chip.

 

Edited March 16, 2014 by Innovative Leisure

[ricortes]

At the time and to this day, the jump from 6502 to 68000 was enough that no one considered either a successor.

 

They all resulted in technological dead ends. It wasn't that the technology wasn't there, it was because for some reason it wasn't implemented. By that I mean we should be working on 3.2 GHz 651024's or 688000's.

 

I can see some of the problems, for instance the 65xx series need fast RAM and the way things went, slower RAM but a lot more of it ended up winning the day. Still, all the Intel boxes of the day solved the problem by have cache RAM on the mother board with lot of cheap accessible dynamic RAM available. I don't know what happened to Motorola, but I remember at the time their processors cost as much as complete computers. Even the Mac had to give up the ghost.

 

Intel, arguably with a less capable processor design to start with, won the day by evolving better.

 

Same basic argument applies to ARM processors. Very 65xx/68xx like with a late start still won the day. They are in just about every consumer electronic device from MP3 players to cell phones.

 

There really was no successor to the 8 bit when you consider they used a high performance, inexpensive, processor of the day. The 65xx series fell on its face with respect to performance and the 68xxx series was always too expensive. The basic design philosophy of high performance/low cost is still around, witness all the Android/ARM/Pi stuff, just that it is not a direct descendant. To a large extent, they all run under bloated OS which disqualifies them from being successors to anything.

[Mclaneinc]

As I've never been a fan boy I go where the goings good, for me it was the Amiga, I played with an ST for one day and hated it, the Amiga felt natural and to me was an enhanced 8bit, obviously being designed by the 8 bit folk helped a lot but at the time I wasn't 100% aware of that and just liked the machine. Update to a A1200, add a HD and some ram and install directory opus and you had a wonderful beast.

 

Still miss the real thing but Winuae gives me an emulated buzz.

[pixelmischief]

I had no idea of corporate leadership or design teams at the time I made the move from 8bit to 16bit. I was an "Atari Man", so to speak, so I stayed with the brand that had served me well to that point and bought a 1040ST. I remember a distinct feeling of "disconnect" moving to the platform. Where the XL/XE "inspired" me, the ST was just something I "used". I chalked it up to simply being older, and less..."inspirable". I wonder now if I would have better transferred my passion from 8bit to 16bit by going with an Amiga, instead.

[+slx]

I had no idea of corporate leadership or design teams at the time I made the move from 8bit to 16bit. I was an "Atari Man", so to speak, so I stayed with the brand that had served me well to that point and bought a 1040ST. I remember a distinct feeling of "disconnect" moving to the platform. Where the XL/XE "inspired" me, the ST was just something I "used". I chalked it up to simply being older, and less..."inspirable". I wonder now if I would have better transferred my passion from 8bit to 16bit by going with an Amiga, instead.

I'd second that. When I moved from the 800XL to a Mega ST I also left school for university, had a girlfriend and generally less time for computers. So the ST got used mostly for word processing. On top of those factors I also blamed the "no programming language included" (got Omikron Basic after a couple of months waiting) and the learning curve required for programming in a windowed environment for my leaving Atari programming (I did program Clipper in MS-DOS but that felt more like Atari BASIC than the ST did.)

 

I did not realize the Atari-Amiga connection back in 1986 when I got an ST. Apart from being "Atari-minded" the ST seemed more practical with the OS in ROM and the great "supersharp/paperwhite" monochrome monitor helped as well. I did stay with Atari until late 1996 when Word/Excel compatibility and the need to go online in a practical way made me change to Windows 95 (a Mac being too expensive somewhere in between and Apple looking too close to extinction in 1996).

 

When I found out about the Amiga's Atari ancestry recently, I also wondered if I would have felt more familiar with it.

[roland p]

As I've never been a fan boy I go where the goings good, for me it was the Amiga, I played with an ST for one day and hated it, the Amiga felt natural and to me was an enhanced 8bit, obviously being designed by the 8 bit folk helped a lot but at the time I wasn't 100% aware of that and just liked the machine. Update to a A1200, add a HD and some ram and install directory opus and you had a wonderful beast.

 

Now that you mention the A1200... Somehow I feel like the Atari Falcon is a more worthy sucessor to the Amiga 500 than the 1200. The 1200 only had the upgraded AGA chipset. (ok, also the ide interface, I read somewhere Jay Miner would have liked to see scsi instead). The Falcon had 16-bit sound, 800x600, scsi2 and a nice DSP. Ok, I never had a Falcon so I can't really say it was good or bad (it had a 16-bit databus...).

[Bryan]

As I've never been a fan boy I go where the goings good, for me it was the Amiga, I played with an ST for one day and hated it, the Amiga felt natural and to me was an enhanced 8bit, obviously being designed by the 8 bit folk helped a lot but at the time I wasn't 100% aware of that and just liked the machine. Update to a A1200, add a HD and some ram and install directory opus and you had a wonderful beast.

 

 

I was a fanboy. I desperately wanted Atari to conquer the world with the ST. But by the time I'd dumped all my money into a Falcon030 system only to see it languish without support I was completely disgusted with Atari. I had also come to know several Atari community insiders who told me stories that made me think the T's didn't really think much of their customers or supporting developers. For me, Atari pretty much ended with Warner selling out and Atari Corp. was Commodore Mk II.

 

I poo-poo'ed the Amiga over and over, but if I could do it over I'd buy one instead and I probably would have gotten into the PC sooner.

[thorfdbg]

So if this is true, then the Atari ST is not the Atari 8Bit successor, and the Amiga is not the C=64 successor.

 

 

It most certainly is, and this is not an urban myth. Both systems are designed by the same team, and you can tell from the chip design. I first had a 800XL, and then considered to move on to a 16 bit system after a couple of years. I checked both the ST line and the Amiga, but the ST was a rather boring "off the shelve" design with lots of standard components and nothing special. The Amiga was a technically convincing and stunning system that really moved techology forward, so I opted for the Amiga. The system was as much fun as the Atari.

 

Just CBM managed not to sell it to the right people. Hobbyists are not the right market if you want success, and so IBM and its cludgy PC made it, just by the brand name, and just by coincidence as IBM was trying to get a foot into the Apple II market and produce something very cheap to address the needs of consumers. Thus, the more advanced system died.

[Fletch]

I too stayed the company line and went with the ST. Had a 520, a 1040stf (still own that one), a couple of STe's and a Falcon. (I recently reacquired a Falcon having sold mine off many moons ago)

I owned an Amiga 500 as well and hated the GUI. I think it ran Workbench 1.3. Not my cup of tea.

I realized that the Amiga was more powerful than my STs, but GEM was just really user friendly.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Fletch

[+remowilliams]

If I had the money I would have bought an Amiga back in the day, they were just crazy expensive. The ST got me to the wonderful 16 bit world with just about every dollar I could get together.

 

 

 

I was a fanboy. I desperately wanted Atari to conquer the world with the ST. But by the time I'd dumped all my money into a Falcon030 system only to see it languish without support I was completely disgusted with Atari

 

Ah there's where the time to know when to jump ship was super important...

 

If I somehow had pulled together the money for a Falcon bitd (which would have been probably impossible) I would have been so outraged that I likely would have flown out to Atari and personally driven a cement mixer right through the front window.