Harrison
23rd February 2007, 22:37
I've just been reading some in-depth history of Commodore from the early 80's up to just before the Amiga. They had been developing a lot of different projects at the time including the C64, offshoots from it, and more advanced PET models.
Then before Commodore acquired the Lorraine project (which later went on to become the Amiga 1000), they were developing the CBM 900, their first real exploration into the realm of Unix based business servers. When Commodore acquired Amiga/Hi-Torro they completely ditched the CBM 900 project and basically ended their Unix server development.
This got me thinking. If Commodore hadn't bought Hi-Torro and gone on to develop the Amiga into what it became, where would Commodore be today? Would they have survived?
They were developing their own 16-bit home computer before the Amiga that was a true successor to the C64, so they would have released a similar computer, and they may have continued with their server development and gone more into business servers and high end computing.
It would be very sad to think that the Amiga may not have existing, knowing what we know now, but you have to sit and think about how different and exciting it might have been had things gone the other way and Atari had purchased the rights to Lorraine! The Atari ST would not have existed, instead an Atari version of the Amiga would have appeared, and Commodore would have released their 16-bit platform that had already been in development.
Then before Commodore acquired the Lorraine project (which later went on to become the Amiga 1000), they were developing the CBM 900, their first real exploration into the realm of Unix based business servers. When Commodore acquired Amiga/Hi-Torro they completely ditched the CBM 900 project and basically ended their Unix server development.
This got me thinking. If Commodore hadn't bought Hi-Torro and gone on to develop the Amiga into what it became, where would Commodore be today? Would they have survived?
They were developing their own 16-bit home computer before the Amiga that was a true successor to the C64, so they would have released a similar computer, and they may have continued with their server development and gone more into business servers and high end computing.
It would be very sad to think that the Amiga may not have existing, knowing what we know now, but you have to sit and think about how different and exciting it might have been had things gone the other way and Atari had purchased the rights to Lorraine! The Atari ST would not have existed, instead an Atari version of the Amiga would have appeared, and Commodore would have released their 16-bit platform that had already been in development.