ChuckT wrote:
I never heard that about the lawsuits except for Jack suing over the buyback of pre-Amiga material. I read almost all of the computer magazines back then for news and it wasn't public knowledge and the magazines were pro-Commodore. The only other lawsuit I know if is MOS being sued by Motorola over the 6501 being pin compatible with something else.
The lawsuit against WDC was pretty quiet and the only reason I knew anything about it was because my employer had designed a locomotive event recorder around the 6502, which was in the late 1970s. A second design effort was started around 1982, if I correctly recall, using the 65C02 (for technical reasons that I won't go into in this post). That project was pushed to the back burner when the lawsuit was mentioned in the technical press at the time. I suspect management didn't want to expend engineering time on a product for which a microprocessor could not be obtained.
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Jack produced computers from two different computer companies and gave everyone big competition. Had Jack stayed at Commodore, maybe Commodore could have enjoyed some of that success but they were competing against all of these 6502 computers because MOS sold it to everyone.
The Commodore 64, which came into being in 1982, and was produced into the early 1990s, was a runaway best-seller, despite the competition from other 65xx-powered machines. Tramiel was ousted in January 1984, which was before C-64 sales reached their apex.
It should be noted that while CSG chips were theoretically available to any computer manufacturer who wanted them, the internal transfer cost between CSG and the rest of Commodore was well below the price that other manufacturers could get. Hence they started at a disadvantage, which had more than a little to do with the C-64's success.
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Irving Gould is probably a name that I wish I never heard because Commodore went bankrupt and you know the rest of that story; Irving Gould didn't make another computer.
More blame for Commodore's failure should be heaped upon Mehdi Ali than Gould, as it was the former who supposedly knew the computer business. Gould was a financier.
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Had I known that Amiga would have went bankrupt, I would have bought 6502 kits and Eprom burners back then and I would have bought an IBM compatible instead.
By the late 1980s, many were predicting the Amiga's demise at the hand of the x86 architecture. Part of the blame rested with Commodore for poorly marketing the Amiga, and some blame belonged to Motorola for poorly promoting the 68K architecture, which was technically superior to Intel's offerings at the time. In the world of computers, technical excellence seldom is the source of success. If it were, today we'd all be running Linux on Macs with PowerPC MPUs and SCSI subsystems.
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WDC and Apple are the only ones that stayed in business because they were the only real computer people and everyone else didn't stay in business because they didn't compete at the chip level by pouring billions of dollars into chip research by making them faster.
Apple spent comparatively little money on chip design. WDC, being a chip design company, naturally spent money to develop a product, but it was nowhere near billions—Bill Mensch didn't have that kind of working capital. Mensch was shrewd in reworking an already proven design (NMOS 6502) to correct errata and extend the instruction set without a major capital outlay. He exhibited good business sense in promoting the 65C02 to Apple, and in having the foresight to realize that intellectual property would have long-term value, whereas chip foundries would come and go. I may get some argument on this, but I'm reasonably certain that WDC was the first fabless semiconductor house.
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The Wall Street Journal kept predicting Commodore's bankruptcy.
As did many other pundits of the time. The day that Tramiel left Commodore was the day the long, slow slide started.
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