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What if Atari and Commodore merged?


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What if after the original line of ST's (520,1040) and Amiga's (1000, 500, 2000) failed to really capture a significant portion of the market Atari and Commodore put their differences aside and merged. It's not too far fetched the companies had almost identical counterparts in their product lines (for the most part) and would a company with the combined resources of both still be alive today?

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What if after the original line of ST's (520,1040) and Amiga's (1000, 500, 2000) failed to really capture a significant portion of the market Atari and Commodore put their differences aside and merged. It's not too far fetched the companies had almost identical counterparts in their product lines (for the most part) and would a company with the combined resources of both still be alive today?

 

No... no matter what they;d done there was no stopping the PC juggernaut.

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What if after the original line of ST's (520,1040) and Amiga's (1000, 500, 2000) failed to really capture a significant portion of the market Atari and Commodore put their differences aside and merged. It's not too far fetched the companies had almost identical counterparts in their product lines (for the most part) and would a company with the combined resources of both still be alive today?

 

No... no matter what they;d done there was no stopping the PC juggernaut.

 

 

No stopping it yes, but look at how well the Macintosh and Apple in general is doing. Perhaps if Atari and C= had concentrated on making product that would sell and getting the word out instead of competing with each other and Apple they would still be around.

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No stopping it yes, but look at how well the Macintosh and Apple in general is doing. Perhaps if Atari and C= had concentrated on making product that would sell and getting the word out instead of competing with each other and Apple they would still be around.

 

I've heard some people say nice things about the Amiga's OS, but to me (I never owned one) it looked like it had some fundamental problems that severely limited its suitability for a general-purpose 'real-work' machine. These included abysmal floppy drive performance and a memory-manager that didn't track who allocated what. Memory could easily become fragmented, and programs that terminated unexpectedly would keep their memory allocations until the next reboot.

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I am with Atari Owl, the moment PC emulators appeared for the home computers it was the moment that the game had been lost. When a platform gets a foothold in business settings it's very hard to get it out. Look at Windows.

Edited by Christos
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What if...Atari and Commodore put their differences aside and merged.

 

They'd call themselves Commotari :D Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

I think they would have had a few options:

 

1. Move over to PC production.

2. Licence the Amiga/ST hardware to other companies in the same way that the MSX standard was.

3. Pay Microsoft to write a version of Windows for the Amiga/ST.

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What if...Atari and Commodore put their differences aside and merged.

 

They'd call themselves Commotari :D Sorry, couldn't resist.

 

I think they would have had a few options:

 

1. Move over to PC production.

2. Licence the Amiga/ST hardware to other companies in the same way that the MSX standard was.

3. Pay Microsoft to write a version of Windows for the Amiga/ST.

 

 

Atari and Commodore, both tried to secure their own share in the booming PC market. That was in those times, when a new PC model got a 4 pages review in the magazines. The day, hundres of thousand of clones from Asia flooded the market, this game was lost.

 

I truly believe, that Windows won the war because of developing in the better gaming platform. The day, PC games looked and sounded better than the homecomputers plus opening new gaming possibilities due to more memory, storage, etc., many people turned their heads and eventually changed platforms.

 

I remember, how I felt buying my first PC finally in 1996, coming from my beloved Amiga 500 and 1200: now having a professional gaming machine, opening up a world of games not having for Amiga, due to hardware limitations.

 

At the same time, Atari and C could have survived longer, if it wasnt for millions of $$$ being wasted in the latter years for stupid projects instead of strenghtening their core markets.

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I truly believe, that Windows won the war because of developing in the better gaming platform. The day, PC games looked and sounded better than the homecomputers plus opening new gaming possibilities due to more memory, storage, etc., many people turned their heads and eventually changed platforms.

 

Amen. I still remember when I switched from my trusty megaSTe to a 386dx40.... I saw the Star Wars X-Wing Fighter game, and was blown away. Bought my PC and that was that. Even today, games still drive the PC industry. Do we really need quad-core cpus and 640 MEG video cards to write emails?

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abysmal floppy drive performance and a memory-manager that didn't track who allocated what. Memory could easily become fragmented, and programs that terminated unexpectedly would keep their memory allocations until the next reboot.

 

The Amigas drive wasn't that slower in default access mode, for actual file loading.

 

But, it was a good deal slower while "browsing" partly due to the file structure (which was supposedly much more robust than the FAT structure used by CPM/MS-DOS) and the fact that .INFO files were used to store the icon data.

 

As such, displaying a files window on the desktop could be a fairly involved process as opposed to the ST which merely had to read a few directory sectors.

 

Programs terminating abnormally leaving RAM allocated is a problem which still exists in any multi-tasking OS.

 

Fragmentation? Well, of course - since the base Amigas only used the lower end 68K CPUs which didn't support virtual memory.

 

Given the limited resources available (880K floppy, 512K RAM), Workbench was a pretty well executed OS - it had pre-emptive multitasking years before the Mac or PC did.

 

 

So far as merger goes? It would have killed the Atari name. In all likelyhood Atari would have been relegated to handheld and consoles only.

Edited by Rybags
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I agree that merging would not stop PC domination. Maybe just would delayed it little.

But whole idea seems totally impossible considering that Tramiel was practically fired from Commodore.

On the other side, same man, Shiraz Shiwyi (if I remember well how to write it) designed C64 and Atari ST.

On the third side, Atari ordered and should launch Amiga actually (probably with different name), but Commodore bought whole project, putting some money on table - at least I read it so long time ago, when it was actual.

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I believe the best name for an Atari/Commodore merger would have been...

 

_ATACOM!_

 

... I actually thought about calling an Atari/Commodore BBS that name. :)

 

I've followed Macintosh all this time. Never able to beat the PC juggernaut either, yet it gathered a strong following. It can even emulate a PC, read PC discs, and yet, people still buy Macintosh computers.

 

The same could be said for the Atari ST and Amiga I believe. Or a merger machine.

 

I believe that many people loved the ST and Amiga for desktop publishing. I believe there are many midi musicians that still swear by the ST, and many kept using the ST till it fell apart from use basically.

 

Both the Atari ST and Amiga HAD and HAS a following. The problem with Atari in my book was they could not produce enough of their computers (case in point, Datastytch in Fort Worth, TX that swore they would have continued using Atari TT030 computers but could not get enough fast enough) or get developments out quick enough (the Falcon was nice, but by 1992 I believe the Macintosh computers, which had been mostly in the monocrome world, were displaying 256 color at least easily).

 

Amiga computers is roughly the same story.

 

Combined, the story would have been about the same. But depends on which way the merger went. Commodore into Atari, or the other way.

 

If Commodore, we might have seen Atacom computers till the mid to late nineties. Commodore was about as bad as Atari when it came to reliably running business.

 

If Atari, the Atacom computers might have ran till the midninties I'm thinking, but then their drive to make a game system would have driven them back as sales started going more to IBM based computers and Apples. At which point, would we have seen a more powerful Atari and Commodore influenced "Jaguar"? I think between pissed off Atacom users having their computer discontinued, and a powerful pull of Nintendo, Sega, and Sony game systems in the market that game system would have been LESS successful than the Jaguar.

 

The only variable to this might be subcontracting the building of Atacom computers. Granted Atari subcontracted IBM to make Jaguars, and there was the Hades, Milan, DirectTT, and Medussa ST/TT/Falcon clones out there, but I am talking about something much larger scale... like the clones that came out for the IBM based computers. Macintosh had their own clones for a while till they put a stop to it. (Was that the.. Unimac? Seems like the name was something like that) But in truth, that Macintosh clone company might have saved their market share during the crucial time of clone computers. Something the Amiga and ST, or even the Atacom ;) didn't have.

 

Yeh I think what pulled the IBM computer ahead of all others in the end was an inspidly simple architecture (which was crap in the early years in my opinion) with no real special chip or OS set that companies with large production lines just cloned the hell out of.

 

Someday I will take a terd and pass it off as a brick for building materials, and since terds are so easily manufactured and more readily available than bricks, will soon pull ahead of all other brick companies and become the industry standard. (my analogy of the windows universe.)

Edited by doctorclu
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I don't think an Atari/Commodore could of hoped to compete with PC's or consoles but they could of created their own niche. The ST's already were used in the music world and Amiga was popular in the desktop video scene before non-linear video. In the end Commodore floundered around with the too little too late AGA Amiga's and Atari put all it's eggs in the Jaguar basket, but neither company really had the resources to release a competitive product in either the computer market or video game market but if both platforms were merged and a super ST/AMIGA hybrid was made perhaps there would still be something left today.

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Programs terminating abnormally leaving RAM allocated is a problem which still exists in any multi-tasking OS.

 

Decent operating systems know which processes have allocated which memory blocks, and can thus automatically free up memory blocks when a process terminates. For various reasons things may not always work perfectly, but most aren't as bad as the Amiga.

 

Fragmentation? Well, of course - since the base Amigas only used the lower end 68K CPUs which didn't support virtual memory.

 

The Macintosh had better memory management than the Amiga. Applications which wanted to allocated memory outside their local heap needed to request handles. Memory handles had to be locked to access their contents, but when they weren't locked they could be relocated as needed. As long as programs were reasonably disciplined in their use of handles, fragmentation could be largely avoided.

 

Given the limited resources available (880K floppy, 512K RAM), Workbench was a pretty well executed OS - it had pre-emptive multitasking years before the Mac or PC did.

 

When did Desqview come out for the PC?

 

While there are times when preemptive multitasking can be good, it also brings with it a number of complications. In embedded systems, I generally prefer cooperative multitaskers. They require some discipline to ensure tasks don't get starved of CPU time, but they're far less likely to suffer from certain types of timing-related bugs.

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  • 6 years later...

What if after the original line of ST's (520,1040) and Amiga's (1000, 500, 2000) failed to really capture a significant portion of the market Atari and Commodore put their differences aside and merged. It's not too far fetched the companies had almost identical counterparts in their product lines (for the most part) and would a company with the combined resources of both still be alive today?

 

Better question: What if they merged once Commodore got the Amiga from the Atari, and Atari had never made the ST?

 

"AT-COM" would have had:

 

2) An Amiga/ST with:

 

a) MIDI ports = music sequencing market penetration greater than the ST

b) page white display = DTP market penetration greater than the ST

c) games = combined Amiga/ST market penetration greater than the Amiga

d) Video editing market penetration greater than the Amiga

e) GFA Basic / STOS would have seen much wider distribution

f) The Amiga's Multitasking OS with a classy GEM interface. Wow.

g) Wordperfect for the ST would have had much larger penetration.

 

... and that's just for starters. Tramiel's business acumen and cutthroat killer-instinct would have taken the two much further than they went separately.

 

The ST was sky-rocketing in sales growth UNTIL the Amiga 500 came out. Had AT-COM formed, it would have enjoyed the combined growth both companies enjoyed until at least 1990.

 

Instead of both Atari and Commodore exiting the computer market in 1993, AT-COM would have gone further.

 

As far as Apple? Maybe not. But further than 1993? Definitely.

 

It always pays to get along. Commodore and Atari should NEVER have been fighting each other for the dollars of the budget enthusiast market.

 

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7Y necrobump .... way to go .... may as well voice my opinion too.

 

Just because you can combine say cranberries and apples it does not mean people would flock to buy crapples.

 

Also the statement about "It always pays to get along." is just wrong in a competitive market.

 

"Going along" creates de facto shared monopolies that stifle innovation, inflate prices and in the end harm the consumer, it's been proven over and over again.

 

There are no for profit benign companies, they all need to maximize their profit or shareholders would go somewhere else, in a monopoly regime said maximization is simply a matter to rise price and lower costs, no innovation whatsoever or need for high quality either.

 

Just for fun read the case of Trabant cars in East Grermany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

Edited by phoenixdownita
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Better question: What if they merged once Commodore got the Amiga from the Atari, and Atari had never made the ST?

 

"AT-COM" would have had:

 

2) An Amiga/ST with:

 

a) MIDI ports = music sequencing market penetration greater than the ST

b) page white display = DTP market penetration greater than the ST

c) games = combined Amiga/ST market penetration greater than the Amiga

d) Video editing market penetration greater than the Amiga

e) GFA Basic / STOS would have seen much wider distribution

f) The Amiga's Multitasking OS with a classy GEM interface. Wow.

g) Wordperfect for the ST would have had much larger penetration.

 

... and that's just for starters. Tramiel's business acumen and cutthroat killer-instinct would have taken the two much further than they went separately.

 

The ST was sky-rocketing in sales growth UNTIL the Amiga 500 came out. Had AT-COM formed, it would have enjoyed the combined growth both companies enjoyed until at least 1990.

 

Instead of both Atari and Commodore exiting the computer market in 1993, AT-COM would have gone further.

 

As far as Apple? Maybe not. But further than 1993? Definitely.

 

It always pays to get along. Commodore and Atari should NEVER have been fighting each other for the dollars of the budget enthusiast market.

 

How about if warner had stuck with it, Kept Amiga (Real name Atari 1850XLD) , or other more powerful things they were working on,including consoles and crushed Commodore then went on to attack and defeat Apple. There is a scenario I would have like to see!

Also ,when Amiga 500 came out Atari had allocated most ST production for the European market, we just could not get them, that was very bad timing, St would not have slowed nearly as much if we had some supply, really pissed us off as an Atari dealer, we also had commodore (and reluctantly sold PC clones) but was a distant #2 until the supply switch was turned of by Atari...

Edited by atarian63
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Also, all the ST/Amiga games would have had the combined sales of the ST/Amiga, and more of them would have been crafted for the Amiga's chipset.

 

I think the best point I made was (perhaps it was shot down):

 

Atari and Commodore split the "low end" budget enthusiast gamer techie market, when they should have taken it for themselves, and let Apple and IBM duke it out for the "high end".

 

Oh well. I'm now typing this on an 8 year old laptop that's far better than any Atari ST or Amiga ever was.

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