Re:Commander Keen source code released
by vidarh on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @07:54AM
(#8329515)
Commodore was severely dysfunctional as long as it existed. I recommend the book Commodore: A Company on the Edge (there are two editions - the new edition was meant to be split into two volumes, but only the first volume covering the "8-bit years" have been published). Given that Tramiel brought a lot of that dysfunction with him to Atari it is not much of a surprise that they ran into problems too.
Lack of proper R&D investment was a recurring theme at Commodore from the beginning, but there were tons of problems. Not least towards the end - well after Tramiel - there was Bill Sydnes: Commodore actually hired the guy behind the PCjr - sometimes described as the worst flop ever. So they hired him, and he did his best to live up to his reputation from the PCjr.
The worst part was that he proceeded to make decisions based on ludicrous ideas that "everyone" in the Amiga market could have told him were idiotic (trying to shift more of Commodore's business to the PC division; release a new flagship Amiga model with IDE in the Amiga market? I still remember the total shock and disbelief everyone I knew had when the A4000 was finally unveiled, too late, at too high a cost). The worst part of course being that in doing so he also cancelled or demanded changes to a number of projects that were much better. E.g. there was the A3000+ which would have been a far better machine than the A4000 with the same CPU models, and was far cheaper, and was almost ready by the time Sydnes cancelled it (there exists a number of prototype models, and they still work), and had SCSI. And added a DSP.
But even with proper management there was the Motorola problem - their inability to boost the performance of the 68040 far enough, fast enough. It's not clear Commodore would have had the resources to pull through a PPC transition the way Apple did.
Lack of proper R&D investment was a recurring theme at Commodore from the beginning, but there were tons of problems. Not least towards the end - well after Tramiel - there was Bill Sydnes: Commodore actually hired the guy behind the PCjr - sometimes described as the worst flop ever. So they hired him, and he did his best to live up to his reputation from the PCjr.
The worst part was that he proceeded to make decisions based on ludicrous ideas that "everyone" in the Amiga market could have told him were idiotic (trying to shift more of Commodore's business to the PC division; release a new flagship Amiga model with IDE in the Amiga market? I still remember the total shock and disbelief everyone I knew had when the A4000 was finally unveiled, too late, at too high a cost). The worst part of course being that in doing so he also cancelled or demanded changes to a number of projects that were much better. E.g. there was the A3000+ which would have been a far better machine than the A4000 with the same CPU models, and was far cheaper, and was almost ready by the time Sydnes cancelled it (there exists a number of prototype models, and they still work), and had SCSI. And added a DSP.
But even with proper management there was the Motorola problem - their inability to boost the performance of the 68040 far enough, fast enough. It's not clear Commodore would have had the resources to pull through a PPC transition the way Apple did.