Thomas Rattigan, short-lived Commodore CEO | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Rattigan, short-lived Commodore CEO

dfarq.homeip.net

70 pointsrbanffy24 comments

Although Rattigan was only at Commodore for a year, his creation of the Amiga 500 and 2000 extended the life of Commodore by many years with sales of the Amiga 500 making up more than half of all Amigas sold.

AmigaOS was too complicated for hobby programming though.

Huh? Amiga probably had a higher proportion of hobby programmers than any other platform at the time.

Coding GUI apps was a nightmare.

Sure but at least it shipped with an OS that had a GUI and multitasking in an era when the vast majority of personal computers had neither. Let's not forget how early this was. Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented. Everyone was still figuring out what a GUI OS should be. It wasn't until years later when Unix-based workstation OSes migrated down to consumer desktops that things started stabilizing. Before that we were pioneers roughing it on the frontier.

I had an Amiga 1000 and did hobby programming on it starting in 85. At the time everything friends and I wrote only used the OS to open a custom screen because all the fun was experimenting with graphics. Most of the apps for the first couple years either used the CLI or just put up a window with a few drop downs and otherwise rendered their own UX inside it.

I think I would have been better off with a PC, Turbo Pascal, and no GUI programming to distract me from more interesting hobby coding.

> Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented

You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for the next decade. The one thing it didn’t have was multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder.

The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather than what ended up being AmigaOS.

Writing GUI apps on using base OS interfaces on anything was a nightmare. Still is.

What made it nicer was having IDEs with GUI designers. Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.

> Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was not meant to write native-looking applications.

Huh?

There have been Smalltalk language implementations based on MS Win controls (as-if they were MS VB programs).

http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html

Also Digitalk Smalltalk for MS Win and OS/2. Also IBM Smalltalk.

There have been Smalltalk language implementations that emulated native widget Look & Feel (various MS Win, OS/2, Motif/CDE, MacOS). Obviously putting a lot of effort into providing "native-looking" applications.

Common-place to copy a Smalltalk app from a Mac to a MS Win PC and switch the emulation from MacOS to MSWin.

I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my recollection was that even by the time of the introduction of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000) Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms of users by the mid-to-late 80s.

It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab).

Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal.

It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly) lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from birth to death.

Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI

The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but comparatively few in numbers.

Users often also had to become hobby programmers because the market was so small and they had to write their own programs to implement software that was unavailable on the platform- this was the case with me.

In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story.

I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes) had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.

> EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that platform.

Actually, there is one company still around called Tune Tracker Systems[0]. They make radio-automation software, starting out on BeOS and are now on Haiku.

[0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com

3-7 million is somewhat proportional to the # of TI 99/4a (my first computer) which sold 2.5Million or so, but many of those were probably on the fire sale, and at least some of them probably went to backup parts for people that already had it. While the 99/4a is remembered somewhat fondly by those who had it (speech synthesizer, expansion modules for p-code, forth and others), it wasn't a system that had a huge amount of development done for it, and died a pretty quick death.

"In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story."

Not really I was in the army back then stationed in Germany and had a buddy that was clinically insane over his Amiga's. Yes I agree the graphics was forking amazing at least a decade maybe two ahead of it's time but you couldn't play Warlord or Wizardry on it so he used my beige PC clone running Dr. Doss

They had the same problem in Europe not enough sales but the owners was bat-shit crazy and wrote a lot of crazy little programs to make them semi-functional.

Amiga died When Commodore bought it for the Lorraine/Sage IV code base.

AMOS filled that gap.

Irving Gould really did Rattigan dirty for no good reason. Big egos really can bring a company down.

Steve Jobs also had a massive ego, but somehow managed to use it to bolster Apple in their hour of need.

Yup. If you had to point to the singular "bad guy" at Commodore, it was Irving. I interviewed with him when I was interviewing to be the CTO and recognized pretty quickly that he was the kind of executive that didn't like people who worked for him to be more competent than he was. Had a great discussion with a 4 star general who was friends with my Dad about people like that.

That sounds genuinely fascinating. Can you post more about your experience meeting Gould?

Pretty standard stuff, a bit about my background, what I thought of Commodore and the people I had met so far, If I could change one thing at Commodore what would it be (I responded with my belief that the Amiga was the future of Commodore and some stuff about "workstation for the masses", I was at Sun at the time). What was memorable to me wasn't so much what he asked or we talked about as it was about his body language when I expressed approval or how impressed I was by things others on his staff had done. You would expect "pride" but I got "irritation?" I had very little experience dealing with people like that and it was confusing. Later research and observations led me to believe he was irritated by people that excelled.

This is quite a neat story. Thanks for sharing!

I also heard that Bobby Kotick of Activision infamy was planning to buy Commodore back in the early 90s, only to be rebuffed by Irving and Co.

Although I'm not a personal fan of Bobby, I'm sure his leadership would have been a sorry sight better than the dumpster fire at Commodore back then.

I just attended the Vintage Computer Festival in NJ last weekend. There was a talk at the end with a bunch of former Commodore employees (Commodore was based near Philadelphia). One of the speakers (old british guy) told a story about Mehdi Ali (https://tinyurl.com/9uubz3ba), how a software developer from Psygnosis gave him advice on how the Amiga could be better. He took it as being critical of him, and got extremely angry. This is something I've noticed before, is that the personality of the leader somehow propagates to the personality of everyone under them, defining the culture of the company.

That might be true, but creating the Amiga 500 and 2000 was also a no-brainer: the original Amiga (later retconned to A1000) had a detachable keyboard (= expensive), but limited expansion capabilities, so launching two new models, a cheaper all-in-one design and a more expensive version with detachable keyboard and a larger case with more expansion capabilities was pretty obviously the way to go.

What all the Commodore CEOs unfortunately failed to do was invest adequately into R&D to keep the Amiga competitive. Instead, they treated the existing lineup as a cash cow for far too long. The new models which hit the market from 1990 onwards were too little too late and couldn't fend off the eventual insolvency...

Interesting. Being good at their job can be your downfall in the corp world! He'd have been better as a private equity tycoon who would have had proper control.

> The corporate drama has led to some speculation that Irving Gould was running Commodore as a stock scam, but I think that’s an oversimplification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor probably applies here as well...

You know, I decided which Catholic high school to attend after I put my fingers on the keyboards of their brand-new C64 machines. [The other Catholic school only had PET systems at the time.]

I learned how to type there, and the rest was history. I owned a VIC20 already, and Dad purchased peripherals such as the 1541 and the 1701.

It wasn’t until 3-4 years ago when I began to study history, Irish history in particular, and recognized that the model numbers weren’t chosen arbitrarily or accidentally, but indeed they correlated perfectly to the most ignominious dates in the history of the UK, when anti-Catholic laws were passed and the Irish were stomped into submission.

It makes weird sense in retrospect. I mean, nobody ever taught Irish history in school because we are Americans now, and the whole Reformation thing is water under the bridge. And the superior general has a distinctly posh RP accent.

Much like the “bitten apple” and its rainbow colors and the $666 price tag, these signs and symbols were hidden in plain sight, as harbingers and warning signs of future troubles. We were all working for the construction crew on a modern Tower of Babel. Literally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com