cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (12/15/89)
In article <32343@auc.UUCP> rar@auc.UUCP (Rodney Ricks) writes: >Maybe Commodore pissed Borland off by getting their "official" Pascal from >MetaCompCo. If so (and if they didn't HAVE to do it to get the DOS), I think >that they made a BIG mistake. Is it really that tough to see what happened? I guess maybe because I live in the N. Cal Bay Area that it seemed so obvious to me what happenned with the Amiga and Borland. Look at it this way, it's 1984/85 and the Mac is still a novelty and Commodore who has the single largest installed base (the C64) is going to come out with a 16 bit computer that will cost less and do more than the Mac + or an 8088 PC clone. Jerry Pournelle is still writing on a CP/M-80 machine and wishing Write was available for "Lucy" his PC. Everyone who saw the Amiga at the Developers Conference in Monterey or at the SigGraph Demo or at the New York announcement said to themselves, "Gee, this box is going to kick the hell out of the low end computer business." Borland, and in particular Phillipe Kahn, note the potential and give some lip service to how they will put Turbo PASCAL, the best development environment for the PC onto the Amiga. Great, but what happened. Several things, on the technology side of things v24 and 1.0 and even 1.1 were not what anyone would call robust versions of the OS. The multitasking confused things and made the learning curve steep, and after the announcement Commodore began to show serious signs of financial instability. In order to "cure" this instability Commodore fires their technical staff. What, as a developer does that say to you? Well it says that this silly company is not long for the world, they somehow believe this buggy OS is adequate, they don't have any money to advertise the damn machine much less help us out on the learning curve. Now depending on your status you do one of two things : 1) You have a profitable software business supporting the Mac and PC. Then you just say, "Oh well, it would have been fun." And never look back. This is the Borland way. 2) You have bought the vision but you have a real job and so you concentrate on eating and make the Amiga an interesting sideline. 3) You decide to go for it and invest all of your time and energy making wonderful software for the Amiga. The #3 people saved us but died doing so, some of the #2 people are actually coming back now that the Amiga has "stabilized" and the #1 people are off believing that Commodore actually did go out of business like they predicted they would. A lot of people got seriously burned when the Amiga came out. They aren't about to jump back in because Commodore has bought some air time. Given a year of steady sales and good advertising, they might invest. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you. "If it didn't have bones in it, it wouldn't be crunchy now would it?!"
filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin) (12/17/89)
In reply to article <129266@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> by Chuck McManis:
Chuck, you are on the right track, but this is closer to what actually
happened:
Borland and Commodore had an agreement (formal? I don't know) that Turbo
Pascal would be the 'official Pascal language of the Amiga'; this might
actually have been the 'official language of the Amiga' -- that's what I
heard, but find it a bit incredible. Borland was also given to
understand that the Amiga would be priced in the $500 range, plus
peripherals.
When Commodore was nearly ready to release the Amiga, Turbo Pascal was
not yet ready to go. MetaComCo had already shown their ability to port
quickly to the Amiga by turning TriPOS into AmigaDOS. Commodore asked
them also to port their Pascal compiler.
The Amiga was released, and MetaComCo Pascal was as 'official' a Pascal
compiler as it had -- I don't remember whether Commodore themselves
marketed it, but it came from a company the wrote part of the OS, which
made it seem official.
This, not surprisingly, annoyed Borland. What annoyed them -- or, more
precisely, Philippe Kahn, Borland's president -- even more was the price
of the machine. Borland had made its name by selling great software at
great prices. Philippe was very strong on that philosophy and was
bitterly disappointed when Commodore released the Amiga at $1295 for the
CPU. He felt that the resulting software market would be far smaller
and less worth pursuing.
Finally, I believe the Mac version of Turbo Pascal, which had been
expected to do very well, was bombing out around that time.
So between the loss of 'official' status (caused by both parties, but
mostly by Borland's slowness in development), the unexpected price
increase (and smaller expected market) on the machine, and the
unexpectedly poor showing of Borland's other Turbo Pascal port, the
project was shelved.
Some of the factors Chuck lists -- Commodore's firing of the Amiga
development staff, financial instability, etc., could have been factors
except that they didn't happen until after the machine's release, while
the end of the Turbo Pascal project came before or only slightly after.
Another, the instability of v24/v27/1.0 OSes, probably had a lot to do
with it, in the sense of slowing development. I suspect that, had
Borland had a finished product by the time the Amiga shipped, they would
have marketed it even in the face of the machine's higher price and
CBM's financial woes. 'official' status would not have been a problem
since it would have gotten it.
Bela Lubkin * * // filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us CI$: 73047,1112 (slow)
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