THE 16- BIT ERA: BRING THE MULTIMEDIA
A golden era of choice, rapid development, and modern capabilities
THE 16-BIT COMPUTERS would be dominated by one man and one CPU. The CPU was the Motorola 68000, known in the business as the 68K—a multimedia powerhouse whose potential had not yet been tapped. The man was head of Commodore, Jack Tramiel.
Tramiel was an aggressive man with even more aggressive business ideals—Commodore was sick of Jack, and Jack was sick of Commodore. Atari was old, bloated, and bleeding money, and parent company Warner wanted rid of it. Key Atari engineers wanted to make a new machine based on the 68K, but Atari wasn’t interested, so they left to create their own company, Amiga. Tramiel also left Commodore to go his own way, and bought Atari’s consumer division.
Tramiel now had an established brand under which to sell new products, bringing his own team of engineers with him from Commodore to work on the new 16-bit machine: the Atari ST. This left Commodore without engineers for its next-generation
computer. Amiga needed money and Commodore needed a new computer, so Commodore bought Amiga outright. Thus the stage was set for the next great computer rivalry.
POST MORTEM Although the 16-bit Atari ST and Amiga put themselves in the same category as IBM’s 286 line, they were more like the 32-bit 386 and 486 machines of the day. With software that was released on both IBM-compatibles and the 68K machines, it was more likely that the PC versions would be designed for a 386 or 486.
Interestingly, these computers would split largely into two markets: the IBM-compatibles for North America, and the 68K machines in Europe. It’s tricky to find sales figures for the ST, but the Amiga only sold around 700,000 in the US, and around 75 percent of Atari’s sales came from Europe. Most software titles are therefore European—France loved the ST, and the Amiga was king in Germany and Britain.
Over the years, Atari released better machines to rival the Amiga, and the Amiga continued to change and evolve over its life; full 32-bit models were popular in the ’90s, and there was a failed attempt at the console market with the CD-32.
As the ’ 90s progressed, IBM-compatibles were becoming cheaper, and neither company could compete. Commodore filed for bankruptcy in 1994. Atari made some 32-bit machines in the early ’90s, but stopped making computers in 1993 in favor of the Jaguar console. This failed spectacularly, and ultimately sank the company at the time.
Believe it or not, you can still buy Amiga clones, and AmigaOS is still going, running on PowerPC architecture. There’s also MorphOS, and AmiKIT will run an AmigaOS simulation over your existing desktop with a classic software collection Then there’s AROS, an open-source AmigaOS that runs on modern hardware (such as the x86 and Pi) and the Amiga itself, if you can find one.