I always have bad flashbacks about this subject. I was working for a C= dealer in PA, just up the road from West Chester, when we got the news. The owner comes in, having just heard, stares at all of us, and says, "Well that's the end of an era!" And I asked him what he meant. He said, "There's no longer any computers that you can simply hook up to a TV to use. Now, a monitor MUST go out the door with every computer." Amiga was the last 'TV computer'. Of course today, with HDMI, 'TV computers' are back, but only just so. Monitors are so cheap today that no one even thinks about buying one (especially true since most computers sold today are laptops!) The technician from the store and I went to the West Chester bankruptcy sale, and many of the old C= devs and hardware people were there. I got some pictures too, but need to look for them. Very sad times indeed, because not only were all the dealers out, but all the support companies too, many of which had just started to make a profit on the Video Toaster and on vertical solutions like Scala. It took a long, LONG time before the PC could compete in that space.

After watching your vids I pulled my A1200 out of storage pit in a 4Gb Cf card and 3.1 ROMs it lives agian, and my 6 year old loves some of the games to. Love your vids

According to Bloomberg, Mehdi Ali "...served as the President of Commodore International, where Mr. Ali accomplished a major operational turnaround". I suppose driving a company to bankruptcy could be described as a "major operational turnaround".

In the 80's (aboout 1984-ish) after I left school I got a job in a factory on Orton Southgate, Peterborough U.K. There I worked on a quality control line testing Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga A500's. The A500's were in a Batman package. We had to install the workbench disk and run stuff from the 'Extras' disk... the clock, the bouncing ball and the music with the lines drawing on the screen... All the good Amigas were reboxed and sent out to the shops. Some times a good Amiga was re-boxed and chucked over the fence at the back of the factory and some one would pick it up and take it home at the end of the day. Yes, I got my first Amiga in 1984! lol.

As West Chester was only 25 miles from my home, I went to the final auction. As a result, I got to meet a few Commodore luminaries and take some pictures. It was a very sad day and I remember seeing all the different stages of grief in many. Overall, the feeling was disgust with the management - who seemed to have their golden parachutes in order and could care less about what was being destroyed. I worked for a C= dealer (trained by Newtek on the Video Toaster), at that time and we had to make the transition to PCs rather quickly after the bankruptcy. It was truly the end of an era, and the beginning of a new career direction for me personally, as I got into networking on Linux and Windows. I have many fond memories of those days. It was a time where technology seemed like magic. We Amiga users were spoiled by graphics and smooth multitasking - which would take a while to get sorted on the PC.

The Amiga was already dead by 1994 if truth be told. It was a fantastic machine for its time - my favourite ever - but the tech was essentially ten years old by the mid-90s and had barely been updated. The Amiga was five years ahead of its time at its release, but it stood still while the clunky PC finally got its act together with potent graphics and sound cards. I still stuck with my Amiga until 1995, but I was well aware of the fact that it was by that time way behind the curve. Also, the Amiga was essentially the greatest 2D home computer of all time. It could do 3D, but its chipset was designed for 2D trickery. And by 1994 everything was switching over to 3D. It was all about throwing polys at the screen, and the Amiga had little to offer on that front. But, oh man, in the 80s, the Amiga was SO far ahead of the competition. A wonderful machine.

0:51 Same here, the A500 got me hooked on computing, programming and set my career path. I've a lot to be grateful for thanks to Dave and co; my life certainly would be very different if it wasn't for the Amiga.

WOW, 20 years. Well I still have the A500+ and my A1200, So I hope to see another 20 years for Amiga fans

I love your videos man, this stuff is so interesting. Good work, keep making them. :)

It really makes you want to cry. Fantastic info as always Dan. Thanks for sharing.

Just letting you guys know, The second Commodore book by this author is going to be made using IndieGoGo some time in the middle of this june, so make sure to keep an eye out.

The lawsuit was about the VCD codec used in the CD32, not the blinking cursor. The reason C= could not sell the CD32 in the US, was that the US company who owned the copyright got the courts to prevent C= from marketing it until the court case was resolved. It was, of course never, resolved. C=, knowing they could not afford to pay damages if they lost the case, then declared bankruptcy.

I have owned a Commodore 16 and then moved onto the Mighty "Amiga", i remember when Commodore went bust, very sad times, but i have recently been hooked back in time to Commodore Amiga. Thanks a lot for this video, i knew a lot already but also learnt a lot of you too, thank you so much for the memory's, long live the Memory's of Commodore and Amiga Corporation.

Thanks for the wrap-up - seeing this vid come up in my subscription feed certainly was a big pang of bittersweet memories. Being on the other side of the world in Australia, I remember it taking quite a while to read the news, as by that time, the tech press here was geared towards PC/Macs, and to read anything about Commodore stuff was usually via UK import (and took months to arrive). So in some regards, it wasn't surprised to see that it ultimately happened, but horrendously saddened by the fact it did happen - certainly felt like the end of an era, when home computing was a little more diverse, as a result of more vendors out there…

Very nice Dan. Such a nice memory has left to all of us, true fans..

Dan, I stumbled across your videos after buying a Pi to run some retro games on. Wow, I've been watching your vids back to back and you've taken me back down memory lane! Cheers! I too lusted after the Amiga 4000 as a teenager! Thanks!

Have been really enjoying your videos. I was thinking about the Amiga after reading an interview by Alan Kay. It was interesting thinking about his ideas about children and computers vs ubiquitous 'mobile' computing today. As Kay points out, children today aren't fully fledged users - with iOS he says "They’re just television watchers of different kinds." When I think about the stuff I tried on my Amiga, he's right. As he points out, most people don't know about 'shake to undo' on an iPad, but I remember doing animation and plugging in a digitiser. My memories of the Amiga (also like you after the Plus 4!) was that it just seemed to make sense. It was robust and seemed to have all this latent power behind it. In the 2000s I picked up an A4000, which I later sold off to fund a Powerbook (had no space for it at the time). For a while my Mac became my new 'Amiga' and OSX had some heady years, but I've never found the kind of openness and invitation to do challenging stuff that I found with my Amiga. Perhaps it was was the dream that with a bit more ram and improved graphics, the platform would be 'mind blowing' - something like magic and definitely everything Windows 95 was not. Today we have machines with incredible power, but their software doesn't unlock it so intuitively to the end user. If anything they seems to squander it. The Amiga will be one of those 'if onlys' of history - its approach (custom chips) is now everywhere but maybe we've lost the experimental aspect that I found really creative and exciting.

I remember i heard from one of my friends at the time, the Amiga was really big back in the day in Norway. The day before we talked about how awesome the rendered video in Inferno on the CD32 was LOL. It was a sad day really, but i still kept my 1200 even when i got my PC 486 DX4 100mhz later that year. When i think of it, some of my best memories are on the Commodore machines. C64 was the first gaming machine i owned, in 88 i got the 500 and last (sadly) the 1200 in 93. Commodore still holds a special place in my heart :)

Great video; cheers :) loving your passion for the platform.

I worked at a printing company in Malvern, Pa. and we used to print adverts for Amiga peripherals. We had two real major innovative tech companies in the King of Prussia/Malvern/West Chester area: Commodore and Ensoniq. I had the original Ensoniq Mirage and the follow-up sampler, the EPS. Always wanted an Amiga, but the company was done by the time I could afford to buy one. A buddy of mine did pick up a really nice Amiga 4000 for like $50 when one of the other big local companies, Electronics Boutique, had a warehouse sale. He saw it before I did. :)

I spent it listening to Dave Haynie talk about the last days at VCF (video is on KZfaq). The "Behind the scenes" war stories of what happened at Commodore are pretty crazy. One must wonder how they managed to survive as long as they did!

Nice video, thanks :) I got my first Amiga about 4 years ago and still use it nearly everyday!

Love your videos! This one was sad.. I too remember hearing over here in the U.S. that Commodore was dying... I then remember reading a small paragraph in the newspaper that Commodore was gone, most likely on the 30th.... I never owned an Amiga... I really wanted one... but never bought one... I used my Commodore 64 until 1994 and I was saving for an Amiga.... when Commodore died, I ended up buying a crappy Windows PC.... and I hated it......I officially stayed with Windows as my primary platform until 1999 when I switched to Mac. Through all of this, my trusty Commodore 64 sits on my desk... as it has since the early 80's!

An excellent video! A great and most interesting tribute to a great company. Thanks! I wonder though if the hombre chips would make it into a computer or only be used for the CD64.

Excellent video, thanks. All so sad.

Really interesting video. I got my A1200 for Christmas 1993 and remember reading about Commodore going bust in CU Amiga. I didn't think it would really affect me, and there seemed to be thousands of games I had still to play anyway. A year later my TV modulator went *pop* and Escom put me on a waiting list for spare parts. We never heard anything else from them - called them a couple of years later and they told me my machine had been lost in a fire at their warehouse....hmmm....

Fantastic video, as usual from you :-)

Fantastic video Dan well done, very informative ... RIP Amiga .

I confess to busting Martin's Commodore when I used to go round to see them on Saturdays. He discovered the poke commands that you could do while a game was loading. But to get a game to freeze while loading to let you do a POKE it appeared you had to touch the expansion port pins at the back in a certain way if I remember right. Do it wrong and you short or blow the board. He did it fine, when he went out and left me alone with it, I did it wrong :) I hung around for a bit to make it not seem obvious I'd just borked it. Then left. Got the call later "Was the Commodore working when you left". Erm, yes.

Me and many others ended up buying Amiga's so we could copy games with each other... +6 Amiga sales -6 SNES sales

Nice video, thanks for that. I was working for part of IBM by 94, but had good friends in HP and they were well aware that Commodore was about to go tits up. They'd heard how funding for he Hombre project had got cut back because Ali had blown about $250,000-$500,000 on taking the executives on a Bahamas trip for Commodore's AGM and this wasn't a rare thing. In fact the guy treated Commodore like his own personal bank account. I had a Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Amiga 1500 (UK only) and finally a tricked out Amiga 1200. Then I skipped to PC's and easily got more bang for my buck and cheaper expansion as well. :( Poor Commodore. Just failed to innovate and found itself being outplayed in it's own market.

Very informative and interesting video. Thank you!

I was in 6th form 87-89. People in my area used to hire function rooms in pubs and the like and organise 'swap meets'. Basically you took your Amiga, CRT monitor etc, plus a load of Games and blank discs, and trade with whomever was there. You'd get 20 - 40 people of all ages, turn up and trade, play games, demo projects etc. I used to take along a homemade RS232 (remember them!) cable and play multi player games like stunt car racer. I guess these were the forerunners of LAN parties.

Great video, brings back fond memories. I'm still frustrated how computers today can't reproduce some of the basic functionality of the Amiga -- like universal message passing between completely different applications. I remember writing AREXX scripts on the Amiga to "combine" different applications to perform special unique tasks that individual programs could not do on their own -- it would be the equivalent today of speaking to your computer and asking it to post a transaction -- which would start your accounting program, posts the transaction, automatically generate a report that imports it into Excel, emails the resulting spreadsheet to your accountant, sets up a reminder in your calendar and crosses off the payment in your todo list, and then posts the transaction to your banking website, all by writing your own simple commands. Computers today STILL cannot do that, which would require you to do all the above steps manually, with NO interaction between any of the software. I can only imagine how the world would be today if that kind of inter-connected messaging implementation existed in modern operation systems. When I read about the AAA chipset coming in various Amiga mags in the early 1990s (and what Dave Haynie later described in the Deathbed Vigil VHS tape), I was excited how far advanced it was compared to what was available, and how exciting the future looked.

Time to dig out and watch my copy of "The Deathbed Vigil" again!

Imagine if Amiga survived and led the way of computing (atleast in Europe or the UK) in the 90s instead of Microsoft. Heck, atleast we wouldn't have Windows 8 ;)

This was uploaded on my birthday!

I remember calling from Norway every day, to the answering machine Commodore had set up. Phone bill was a surprise for my boss lol I ended up working 25 years in Radio after that. Thanks Amiga.

Where did you get that t-shirt? I also started with a Commodore 16+4. I had so many games .. Football Manager, Soccer Boss, League Challenge, POD etc. But it was the games in the white cases that I got with it that I remember most ... Icicle Works, Number Builder, Fire Ant etc. Seeing my mates new Amiga 500 at christmas 1990 changed my life. 3 months later I got a Commodore 64 and then at christmas 91 an Atari STE. My parents could not afford an Amiga. I got my first Amiga in 1993, just 4 months before it all ended. I still use my Amiga today. Great video as always Dan.

Great video, remember the Amiga days so well. Still have my original A500 and A1200 towered version. So many great times and great games.

Thanks a lot for refreshing my memory in this very sad event! I was IT student at the time it happened i was working late on a it project when i suddenly got uploaded news from the usenet. Terrible news Commodore is no more. The day after with my amiga friends we were having discussion Who will buy the tech? Samsung. Hp, ibm or others.... Sadly no one succeed in revving the best platform ever!

Excellent Video, very interesting.

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

Great Video Dan, I remember it very well, I had an Amiga 600 and then very quickly a 1200 after, fitted the 1200 with a blizzard board and had so much fun with it, I used it for everything, went to the computer show at Wembley and picked up a vidi Amiga and xcopy dongle too. It was in fact playing doom on the PC at work when it first came out that was the final straw for me, the Amiga just couldn't do it (3D) very well, however whilst I turned my back on the platform I didnt turn my back on the machine, it lived in my loft for 19 years or so, its now back in my computer room and working great, me and my 4yr old son play all the old games (skidmarks being my favourite oh and BIP the flying game) The hard disc in the 1200 had died as had the floppy but I got a new floppy and a flash drive, the blizzard board had gone (been sold) years ago (more fool me) so last year I bought another accelerator from amigakit. Its such a shame that this company failed, however there was not one other computer that I have had since that I have enjoyed as much, this is why I never sold the Amiga. Keep posting the videos they are great!

The XOR patent was one of those that should never have been granted. It's so obvious that anyone (myself included) could come up with it independently just by considering the problem. Every time you want to blink the cursor, you XOR (toggle) the "reverse" bit of the character on the screen - how else would you do it? Unfortunately, it was granted in the early days of software patents when the clerks knew little-to-nothing about coding.

Tinkering with the C64 that my father brought home in 1984 started the interested in computers that would turn into my career working full time as a programmer. These past years the interest in the C64 came back with collecting hardware and games - but I also brushed up my coding skills for it and have coded a game called Rocket Smash that will be released on the RGCD label on cartridge once I finish the last few bits.

good video, brings back fond memories

Disagree with the Piracy comment... It was bad management at Commodore and lack of forward vision, they took too long to develop the next generation...

My first computer was a commodore plus 4, then the commodore 128 and then Amiga 500. This one I consider the best and most advanced computer ever created (according it's time of course) but the marketing was awful. At least here in Mexico. It was sold like pure gaming machine... but it was a powerful and creating machine... video, music, video effects with video toaster... it could make video effects only much more expensive machines could do (like the paintbox). I feel so nostalgic with commodore... still have a 64 and two A500. Thanks to commodore and it's affordable computers, now I am in computer business, networks and programming. Thanks for your excellent videos.

Excellent video, Thank you

brilliant video thanks

It was a very sad day for me, it was the day that the fun went out of computing, like Dan said, those guys put their hearts and souls into it, and it felt like it. The Amiga was the last computer with soul.

I used to have an Amiga 1200, and then a 4000 when I was in high school - and in America they were far more rare - I don't remember anyone else at school who had one for example. It was really hard to find anyone who took them seriously, but I plodded on making all kinds of neat projects that you just couldn't build on the Mac II's and Win 3.1 machines. I think part of their demise is they had a really hard time keeping pace as PC's evolved far more rapidly - eventually it felt like my Amiga wasn't the best game/developer machine anymore. Because Commodore dealt mainly with custom chips it was essentially like one company vs. 15-20 pc companies all working on their own little off the shelf components.

I'm a bit older than you but man that hit me in the feels as the kids say

As a child I had heard about the Commodore 64, but I had never had one, I honestly can't recall ever hearing anything about the Amiga Computers, but I did hear about the CD-32, strange, I know, but then again I grew up in the USA where Amiga systems weren't as popular as Atari Computer Systems, not to mention that I happened to live in Salt Lake City, home of the University of Utah, and in particular it's legendary Computer Science Program, of which Nolan Bushnell was an Alumni of. I wish I could find an Amiga to mess around with, but they are exceptionally difficult to obtain in these parts!

What happened in recent years is just as interesting: Commodore split into several companies to exploit what was left. Software division and rights to the amiga kickstart roms where sold to Cloanto but the guy who owns it also sells it together with unauthorized software so it's not 100% legal... while the rights to the brand went to Commodore International Corp (It was first held by Amiga Inc and Tulip Computers, Tulip renamed to Commodore Licensing B.V shortly after) and that split again into Commodore Licensing B.V and C=Holdings the former being a parent of C=Holdings. Then ASIARIM falsified statements that it had secured rights from C=Holdings through an aquisition and stalled several hearings and proceedings by constantly adding new evidence to the record. After 2 years of deliberations ASIARIM was fined 1 million dollars for infringement as they had profited from selling certain products with the Commodore brand in Asia. Meanwhile Commodore Licensing B.V filed for bancruptcy 2 years prior (to the hearings and the 1 million award) and it is unclear if Polabe Holding NV (former C=Holding) is still in operation or in fact the company behind Commodore International Corp (and how they survived bancruptcy liquidation of Commodore Licensing B.V through illegal property transfer) however as holding company it seems to be using the brand name for corporate legal entrapment. Meanwhile some italian company made a Commodore smartphone (no kidding) and was ordered in court to pay royalties and stop using the name. Although charges in both the EU and US hearings were brought up from the rightful owners of the Commodore IP and where in fact whatever had remained of Tulip Computers from Netherland both cases list different company names in the court documents. Also the german C64 parts producer Individual Computers GmbH claims to have secured the rights to sell Commodore branded hardware since 2016.

My kids have put their ipads down and started playing my old Amiga games (all original and boxed). You don't need fancy graphics. Game play is more important.

Hi guys, I'm full a sadness about 'Commodore'! Isn't there a parallel universe that makes Commodore and his flagship Amiga a great success? I'm always in the wrong park when it comes to hardware. Just look a what the Novint Falcon could do in term of Haptics. Awesome!! I'm also a shareholder of Lightwave Logic and I do hope they don't run out of money before they can really change the way we transfer data today. Think holograms. If I only could predict the future! ;-) Anyway great video!

Thanks for this

Only just picked up on this, but great interview.

My first Amiga was a 500, then a 500 +, when my dad bought a 3000 Both incredbile machines, even though as a kid all I did was play games and use Dpaint occasionally. I left the Amiga scene in the mid 90's but I'm happy to say I made a comeback last November, I bought an A1200 and I expanded it and it's really nice :D I've been in love with the Amiga since about 88-89, and trying to explain it to my pc and mac friends is damn near impossible :D

My dad bought me an A500 for my 7th birthday, just as the new school year in a new town started. Went a long way to helping me make friends who only had the NES in their houses.

My A500+ still works. :) The SCSI HDD finally died a few years ago, and the mouse gave up the ghost just before that, but the old gal still boots. I haven't found many modern computers that were built that tough. :)

Well done video---such a shame in terms of how many divergent hardware and computing outfits the world lost in the course of the 80's and 90's to the point of there being little else beyond the biggest of the big heading in similar directions.

I'm thankful of the memories the Amiga 500 > 600 gave me, The system had a good run and I still enjoy the systems to this day :)

I still use my Amiga A600 today which I purchased in April 1994, the same month Commodore went bust. At the time it felt like the company would be purchased, it dragged out and it was in the end a long drawn out disappointment, I like my Raspberry Pi and sometimes daydream that they would sell a credit card sized Amiga motherboard for £30 like the Pi...

Very interesting, thanks.

My introduction to computing was on a Commodore 64, many happy memories playing games like Boulder Dash, Creatures 2, Summer Games, Rick Dangerous (the list goes on). I would spend hours programming in BASIC, usually from code printed in magazines. I heard about the bankruptcy in one of the UK C64 magazines (can't remember which one, Commodore Format I think), very sad news. This company made a huge contribution to the technology industry, I can only imagine what type of products they would be producing if they were still around today. If only they could have made a recovery like Apple did in the late '90's. 10 PRINT "COMMODORE, THE LEGEND LIVES ON" 20 GOTO 10 RUN

Same with me, the C64 and Amiga got me into making stuff with Audio and Video. Here is something I made with a 3D package. Rotating + Texture Animation Test.

Well the only good thing for me was I got to upgrade from my Amiga 500 to a A1200 when Dixon's sold off their stock at £199. Prefered the Keyboard on my A500 though - I think it used Cherry key switches?

At the time I was aware that it was mostly ex Atari engineers who developed the Amiga, and that it was Commodore engineers who developed the Atari ST. So this was interesting reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International#Tramiel_quits.3B_the_Amiga_vs._ST_battle

Commodore had the bad habit of dumping support for the old every time something new came out. I had the Vic 20, C= 64, C=128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 2500 HD before I left and went to Apple.

Good video fella, apart from the t shirt (thought you had a 80s Chelsea shirt on lol)!!!!

In the time frame we are talking about, very little would have changed in an alternate history, other than putting Commodore on life support for another few years before the same fate happened. Nobody could stop the tsunami that would follow with the PC market explosion after '93. Nobody could compete against that. Not even Apple and they ran things a million times better than Commodore ever would. Honestly, if you were a time traveler and wanted to see Commodore become successful, you'd have to travel back to the mid 80s to make any effective change by countering the PC market. Remember that in 1984, the C64 had more marketshare than any other machine out there, the PC included. That's where you'd need to start to ensure the erosion didn't occur as swift as it did.

IMHO 2 main things contributed to the Commodore bankrupt: - Sell A1200 without HD inside (the hard disk was the unique device that can fully show the full potential of the a1200, i.e.: use workbench 3.1 and games with AGA) - try to enter into the console world with the amigacd32

Great video! Commodore should have avoided the c16/plu4. The c128 was a mess. The biggest problem is that Commodore wasn't aggressive enough marketing the Amiga against the MAC/PC. They needed to create a dealer network to help kill the "game machine" image of Commodore.They needed to embrace the major business software shops to get the Amiga a serious office machine. Possibly being more aggressive with updates to Amiga. The CD32 was too big a distraction. It was going to be difficult even with good management. One more mainstream OS choice would need to more innovation for all systems.

I wonder where all the people ended up that were working on technical projects at Commodore. I know where some of them ended up, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them ended up at Sony, working on the original Playstation. It would be interesting indeed to find out, if that's at all possible.

I remember I got my C64 in April 1994. Little did I know it was about to go bankrupt. I'd played the C64 for many many years up to that point already, but never owned one. Still have it.

(psss.!) Here's to Commodore! Thanks 4 the vid, watched it all and enjoyed alot. Actually tomorrow I have my b-party main feature:A600 gaming! Greetz!

I wonder how the blinking cursor case would have been laid out. Like if the argument would be made that it didn't effect the sale, or if every sale needed a certain royalty or otherwise.

Great video. It was a damn shame but from your info the Amiga was set to change away from the "standard" build. Would of been great to see a cd64-if the launch and marketing campaign were spot on (of course without greedy and corrupt CEOs/boards etc)we could of been living in a very different console landscape today..ya never know :) thanks for the video.

great vid, sad times.

Dan Wood: Sorry, CBM West Chester had no showers. Coming into the men's loo (WC) in the AM I would see puddles of muddy water on the tile floor from time to time. I found it disturbing some time later to be told that George took sponge baths during the wee hours of the night.My understanding was that George lived in Lancaster,PA which was a commute of about 60km. He would only do this commute by bike on weekends. Weekdays he would eat,drink, & sleep at West Chester. Unfortunately for him CBM turned off the HVAC at about 6PM or so at let things coast alone until morning. That meant during the summer the overnight hours could get rather steamy. One night I was working past midnight and had a question for George. So I walked down the corridor and turned into the aisle that adjoined George's office. As I approached and was about to turn left into his office I saw George sleeping on the floor buck naked. As you would expect I carefully backed out the way I came in, careful not to wake him and decided my question would wait until a later time. Man that was a close one! In any case thanx for an interesting presentation.

Thank you for this video. Just last weekend played Giana Sisters with C64 and . Like others, i would have to say that, world would be very different place right now without bankruptcy of Commodore. Some fans have build modern replicas of platform, maybe there is somekind of bisnes opportunity with plug-in-amiga and very very very old games.

Indeed Jack wanted a military name for his company and he chose Commodore after breaking in front of an opel commodore! As for the "piracy killed the amiga" is totally bullshit. Same happens today on every platform. In my opinion the cause was wrong decisions and not a real upgrade. All models after A1000 were a banch of bug fixes and nothing else. What do you expect from a machine with half a 020 in 92 and the same blitter as A1000!?!?! What should they do? maybe giving amigas for free in big companies, bakns, stock exchange and free software transition to amiga platform. Last, they should let Miner to do what ever he wanted with the customs designs... but you can't win if all your money go in your pocket, Nice video as always mate :-)

The C= 64 was the very first computer/ gaming machine I ever touched as a child.

Good video but you missed out the Gateway purchase of Amiga before Escom. Unfortunately they bought for patents. My company and Index information ltd had a deal to sell PCI Amiga 68040 plugin processing cards but they pulled the plug. This was to have a general high end PC running Macintosh and Amiga software all using high performance at the time and using my companies Siamese RTG system. Oh well, such is life.

Nice vid the mate

Here's some interesting fact. In the Netherlands, the Commodore brand has been bought by Tulip Computers after Escom AG went bankrupt (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_Computers) in 1997 and kept it until it went down in 2008 (!).

Really none of fails are about how much software was pirated, but about management (as you mentioned later). Not just general management but the challenge every company faces which is "now that they've bought this, what next to keep them buying?" Personally as a teenager and young adult during last days of Commodore and Atari I never got a copied program that I would have paid full price for in the first place. You could say bankruptcy came from people no longer buying, regardless of reasons they stopped. I never really started supporting them actually--bought my own first computer (Atari 800 XL) $40 USD from a going-out-of-business sale. Got used C64 from a young friend who's dad was upset he didn't make use of it. I think they needed the modern way of managing hype; how companies now pretend there are great new things worth more but really just selling everyone a new PC when they already had a few. That helps me because I always get great deals from those who think their old one is worthless because they bought a newer one.

Commodore [*]. Commodore will be always in my memory...

I first read about it in an Amiga magazine. I remember thinking, there are too many Amiga users, for it to make much difference, as someone would buy the rights to the Amiga. I realised in 1995, it just wasn't going to happen and software was drying up. In 1996 I started to look elsewhere and realised the only way forward was a PC or Playstation for gaming. TBH once Windows 95 and the PS came out, it was game over for other home computers. I might have got another Commodore after the A1200, but I doubt it would have been a match for a Windows 95 PC anyway.

Thanks for your viewpoint Dan, made for interesting listening. Looking back, here in Europe where the Amiga was far more successful I think we as Amiga owners along with the magazines were looking through rose tinted spectacles thinking Amiga would live on. In the USA I am sure the news was less surprising.

Great vids Dan....your loyalty to the Amiga brand is amazing. It is a real shame commodore goofed so much - The Amiga Architecture is superior to that of PCs and could have been so much mor - including probably a mobile phone OS. I blame Gould the most as he was not interested in Commodore or computers. Tramiel may have been controversial and a control freak but he had the interests of the company at heart and and was interested in producing a good machine. I suppose wanting to bring in his sons was not popular. However Gould should have sold commodore earlier to a company able to continue with the ability to carry things further

hi . do you have dctv pal floppy disk images ? thanks

Former Commodore engineers have given the reason for their decision back toward the end not to use PowerPC. They did not have the benefit of hindsight and were concerned at that time that Motorola would not be able to incorporate the compatibility with the 680x0 into the PowerPC in time. If you take away that, then any RISC processor was as good as any other for the purposes of a next generation Amiga since the 68060 was already the end of the road for the 680x0 architecture. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and Motorola did incorporate it in time. Would that have made Commodore change gears mid stream and switch over to PowerPC? Would two companies using it in general purpose computers have increased the longevity of the processor for that use as well as increase the pace of development to prevent it falling behind the Intel processors so quickly which made even Apple eventually give up on them?

Very interesting video, it's such a real shame they went under.

Thanks Dan for this video. I have often wondered why the Amiga declined, and this video has really helped me to understand it - within 30 minutes! My primary motivation to save up the money for an A500 was the ease of obtaining pirated games, so I completely agree that piracy helped to sell the hardware! There's an interesting discussion of game business models in the CU Amiga magazine which can be read here: archive.org/stream/cuamiga-magazine-044/CUAmiga_044_Oct_1993#page/n31/mode/1up What puzzles me is why games developers/publishers didn't try selling Amiga games in a cartridge format to combat piracy, because to my knowledge it was possible to do that. Also, before the CD32 was released, games publishers claimed that less piracy would result in lower prices. But when CD games, which were much harder to pirate at the time, began to appear for the Amiga, there were more expensive than floppy disk games. As you mentioned at the start of the video, the Amiga was much more than a games machine, so it's a pity that Commodore appeared to be depending so much on the games market. And there were so few really great games released for it anyway. As a marketer myself, I think it would be great to work on marketing a product like the Amiga to the creative community.

As great as the Amiga is, Commodore would eventually have found a way to cock it all up anyway, I doubt they would have lasted much longer in the face of the Playstation/Saturn on the gaming front and the PC was taking over due to cheap off the shelf parts. The only way the Amiga would have carried on would have been to make the jump to x86 hardware and become an OS developer but then that wouldn't be an Amiga really would it?

After the 1200/4000 they should have recognised that AGA wasn't going to cut it for any future products, and moved towards VGA for the 4000T (perhaps with a different model number). Following that, they would probably (and should) have joined the AIM alliance and made PowerPC computers, later still with an implementation of BeOS, given that Apple dumped the deal with Be Inc. in 1996 and Gassée may have been more receptive to a deal after the company started to run out of money.