Original subtitles

(slow ambient music)

(slow dramatic music)

- I too sensed that it was actual revolution.

(dramatic music)

Being given this tool that had

literal infinite possibilities.

- We had people who just kept believing

and, I mean, there's still people who just keep believing.

- This was the most phenomenal personal computer

that was available in the marketplace.

(metal balls clanking)

- No one had the kind of power and performance

that the Amiga computer had in 1985, no one.

- We were a small company,

this rag tag team taking on IBM and Apple

and we were going to change the world.

We were taking on the big guys.

(soft ambient music)

- You actually could do things that previously

were either the province of science fiction

or were something that only a company could possibly fund.

- A computer from the future.

- We were from the future.

This was it.

- They still develop software for it.

They still develop hardware for it.

So it's not fully dead either.

It's still alive, it's still going.

(soft ambient music)

- We're now ready to introduce the AmigaOne X1000.

- And here comes this thing that just demolishes

what we think a home computer can do.

It just completely changed everything.

(rock music)

- How would I describe it?

- I think it's fantastic.

- Awesome.

- It's gonna skyrocket.

- Only Amiga makes it possible.

♫ Only Amiga

♫ Makes it possible

♫ Only Amiga

♫ Makes it happen

(upbeat music)

(electronic music)

- The Amiga was launched July 23rd, 1985

at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

- It was rolled out in a deluxe fashion

with a budget that was just breathtaking.

- Everything that they did was done to the nines.

- Some Hollywood event or something like that.

It was so awesome.

The roll out of our baby.

- The Amiga was my baby.

I had engineering tasks before that,

I've had products after that,

no, Amiga was it.

- Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

What you are about to witness

is the result of an effort of research and engineering

that began in 1982

and which to date has consumed over 100 man years

of engineering talent,

the Amiga computer.

The Amiga computer is a true multitasking computer.

On the right, a sorting application with variable fonts,

graphics in the middle,

and word processing at the bottom.

Equally exciting is the sound generating capability

of the machine.

My favorite is the power chord.

(electronic rock riff)

- It was an amazing cult like event.

- They had Deborah Harry,

they had Andy Warhol.

- Oh my god, Andy Warhol.

- Are you ready to paint me?

- [Andy] Yeah.

- Ladies and gentlemen, I am here tonight

to help assist Andy do his first computer portrait

using the Amiga computer.

- All this effort with the scrambling people

putting together all these bits and pieces,

hoping with bubble gum and bailing wire

that it'll hold together for the launch,

for the demo at the launch.

- What computers have you worked on before?

- Oh, I haven't worked on anything.

I waited for this one.

(audience laughing) - Really?

- Deborah Harry is posing for a picture

that Andy Warhol is gonna do

and Andy Warhol is using

this fake little graphic craft thing

that I put together for this demo

and he's dinking with this and he's dinking with that

and Jack Haeger, one of our two artists,

is standing next to Andy Warhol

and here's Warhol, and Jack is trying to guide him,

"Okay, use this brush, use that."

because Jack knows, not only what works

but Jack also knows what's gonna crash,

like whatever you do, don't touch the flood fill

because the flood fill is gonna crash for sure.

(audience laughter)

- Oh, that looks very good.

- So now we'll do the hair.

So, we're gonna go up to color.

- And Warhol without any control,

he's clicking, he's drawing, he's clicking

and Jack's like, "Uh, uh, this and that."

And Warhol goes and grabs for the flood fill

and Jack's like, "Well, you don't want to."

And Warhol grabs the flood fill

and he clicks on the flood fill

and Jack's like, "Ooohh."

And the flood fill just worked.

It was like this awesome wonderful amazing thing

and you could've heard us gasp out in the audience

when he touched that button but it worked.

- You go, like, okay, this is just not gonna be

a home computer like I thought

or, even more accurately, how are you tricking me?

It was just really?

- The boing demo had a bouncing ball

that moved in front of a grid that was in the background.

- In living color on multiple screens,

follow the bouncing ball.

(audience applause)

- So, for me, the Commodore Amiga

will always be that damn bouncing ball

and I've never seen a sprite that big.

Aaah, you just see that bouncing ball

and that's pretty much it.

- Gah, what a day that was.

The Amiga launch was one of the high points of my life.

- We've lived our dream and seen it come to life.

Now it's your turn.

What will you do with the Amiga computer?

- I've been thinking

about the market lately.

- To understand where we kind of were with home computers

by the mid 80s when the Commodore Amiga came out,

now about that time the big names

are essentially Atari, IBM, Apple, Commodore.

- Apple IIcs were hot then.

IBM PCs were still pretty clunky and big

and monochrome green screens.

Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet.

Excel and Word weren't even invented yet.

- At the time of the home computers in the early 1980s,

there was certainly a much stronger brand sense.

Atari and Commodore have been kind of

riding their 8-bit computers for a while.

Apple has introduced the Macintosh,

pretty cool but it's a little expensive.

That's about where we are.

We've got about four or five big name companies going on.

They've all got to bring to the table the next generation.

They all knew this.

They all knew they had to step it up.

Steve Jobs was shuffled off on this project

to make what became the Macintosh.

They were like, "Okay, go ahead and try."

And he did.

- And even though the original Macintosh

was lower resolution than the Amiga

and it was only black and white versus the Amiga color,

they started that path and started getting the public

used to thinking that IBM Solution

was not the only way to do it

and that you could do something better.

- Atari comes out with the ST line,

which is meant to be their next generation of computers.

So okay,

Commodore goes out and gets the Amiga team.

- And we felt that we had the box that was the real answer

that the marketplace wanted.

We even scoffed at Apple for what they were trying to do

because even though they were trying to be different

and trying to get people to think in a different way,

they still were living in this sort of limited world

where it was black and white

and the operating system was extremely clumsy to use

for doing games and entertainment.

It was good for doing a lot of computery stuff

but we felt that the Amiga was what consumers really wanted.

- Back in those days, the computers that were there

weren't very good game playing machines.

You think back to what computing was in those days.

You look at it today, none of us

would accept a product like that.

Computers were designed primarily as business machines.

- We created the Amiga ostensibly to be a game system.

We all believed it would be a very good game system

but the engineers of the company always knew

that it was destined to be something more.

A machine that was powerful enough

to do the sort of home office stuff that you needed

but the Amiga at the same time

was just a kick butt game system.

We ended up hoping that that would be the thing

that would pull the Amiga all the way forward

and have it achieve the success

that we thought it should have.

- You basically have Jay Miner,

computer designer extraordinaire,

and his team of engineers,

who are all top notch.

They had done work on the Atari 2600

and then they were moving on to the next level

and coming up with a computer.

- Well, it was in 1982,

a friend of mine that I used to work with at Atari

came to me and said, "Hey, Jay, let's start a new company.

I'm tired of this one."

And I said, "Well, fine.

I'll do the chips for it

and I'll be the vice president

if I can do the chips my way."

- At the beginning, what Amiga was making

was this little board that you sat on

and there was a surfing game that went with it.

And that was the cover story.

Underneath, we were building this new computer

with chips and things.

- I had left a very good job in Minneapolis

and had made the commitment

to come and work with Dave on this.

I walk into the building down in Santa Clara

and I look at 5,000 square feet

and I look around and I'm going,

"Dave, what in the hell are we gonna do

with all this space?"

And he said, "Don't you worry about that."

He says, "We're gonna need all this space."

- I came across Amiga while I was working

at a different company

and with incredible ego and arrogance,

I walked into the president's office,

explained to him how great I would be

and how much I could help him

and he threw me out.

That was David Morse,

probably the best man I've ever known.

I felt really stupid about what I'd done

and called him the next day and said,

"Oh please, oh please, I really want to work on your stuff.

Let me come back and try again."

He said, "Okay, go to the lab guy."

And I went to the lab guy and said,

"I'm here.

Let me do anything.

What do you need?"

And I became the janitor at Amiga.

- It was a start up.

There was a lot of work to do.

People just grabbed jobs that needed to get done

and did those jobs

and we worked hard and long.

- One day, I'm cleaning up around Glenn Keller's desk.

He was one of the design engineers at Amiga.

- My main role in the Amiga's development

was designer of the audio chip.

It was my first chip I had ever worked on.

- I'm looking over his shoulder at what he's doing

and I'm suggesting, "Oh, that's interesting

but what if blah, blah, blah."

He looks at me like, "Well, okay, janitor,

you're an engineer?"

"Yeah, I'm an engineer."

"What in the world are you doing cleaning up the floors?",

he says.

So in two years, I had then made it up to system architect

for the Amiga computer.

(dramatic music)

Amiga had gone through many of the funding issues

that other companies go through.

As things get close, more money needs to be spent,

stuff goes wrong.

If you run out of money, the company dies.

If you try to get more money,

you wind up selling everything.

It's really awful.

And someone else takes control,

they don't have the spirit,

they don't have the life,

you get the wrong machine.

We're running out of money.

- Those were desperate days where we were afraid

the business was gonna have to close.

We couldn't believe it was happening.

We had this amazing piece of technology that we created,

this awesome new computer system

it seemed unreal

that we could be this close to so much glory

and fall short because we just didn't have the funds

but we didn't, we didn't have the money.

When we were almost out of dough

and the company was in such a delicate territory,

Jay was the guy that went out

and took out a second mortgage on his home

and used that money to infuse the company with more cash

so that we could keep going,

so that we could keep operating

and we had exhausted all of our other options

and realized that if the company was gonna stay afloat

that we would have to sell it to someone.

(dramatic music)

- So, we had made some deals with Atari.

- They came and made a deal

for half a million dollars.

We get an offer from Tramiel, who is pissed

that when he was at Commodore he wanted to get us,

couldn't, left Commodore, went to Atari,

wanted to get us, couldn't.

They were making the Atari ST.

Many people don't understand

why putting something in Tramiel's hands is a bad idea.

Jack lived through the bad times of the war

in the German prison camps.

Came out of that with the following philosophy,

business is war.

If you're not crushing your opponent,

you're doing it wrong.

The correct thing to do is squeeze them till they're dead.

Take anything you can.

The details of the deal included that at a particular time,

when we needed to pay it back,

if we paid it back, fine.

Then Amiga stays ours, no problem.

If we can't pay it back,

they get the rights to the Amiga.

(dramatic music)

- And as time went on, it looked like

we were gonna run out of money,

they were gonna pick up all the intellectual property

and run with it.

- We were gonna have to give Jack Tramiel of Atari,

the Amiga.

Unacceptable, not okay.

Dave Morse felt that that was unacceptable, not okay.

He started negotiations with Commodore proper.

- At the last minute, suddenly, Commodore came in

and bought us out with a much better deal.

- And it got us a gigantic price out of Commodore,

more than would've happened before.

Commodore gives a half million dollars cash on the spot

and on the day that we have to give the secrets to Tramiel

Dave Morse hands them a check

for half a million dollars instead.

Jack is furious.

Jack's really angry about this.

We are delighted.

(applause)

(upbeat music)

- It wasn't just a computer that you wanted to work on.

It was a computer you stared at

'cause you were like, "I can't believe this is happening

right here in front of me."

- There wasn't a machine that could touch us.

This had multitasking,

no one was doing multitasking.

It had video graphics,

no one was doing multimedia video graphics like the Amiga.

The Macintoshes were black and white.

IBMs were green screens.

No one had the kind of power and performance

that the Amiga computer had in 1985, no one.

- The computer from the future.

- We were from the future, this was it.

- When I was in college, I played some audio from the Amiga.

(electronic music)

The person I played it for,

I remember him saying, "No, this is not computer music."

He just refused to admit that a home computer

made this sound.

That's one of the things about the Amiga,

that sense of miracle, of wonder, that came with it.

- This was the do it yourself period.

Post punk, everybody started a band

but we started an animation studio.

For the first time in history,

we could be a production studio,

making strips, making music, making animations,

producing it, getting it out on tape

and delivering it at the broadcast station.

We were in control of that.

So it was super do it yourself.

- And in Europe, the Amiga 500 was very successful there.

We sold over a million Amiga 500s a year for awhile.

- Then was a launch also here in Germany, a revolution.

Everybody loves it, everybody likes it

and it was a success here.

- There was a lot of room for that crazed individual

to say, "You know what this machine needs?

This machine needs a piece of hardware

that we can plug in and we'll have cameras

and light filters and it's gonna do this spectacular thing."

There was room then for one person to say,

"I'm gonna do that thing,"

and we've got a product on the shelf

that people are buying.

- I haven't seen the same kind of just opportunity

for weirdness and enthusiasm and unbridled energy

since then.

- We wanted to change the world.

We wanted to make the best computer.

To make a computer better,

it has to be better for the consumer.

It has to not be just more complicated.

It has to be easier to use, less work,

and do more for you and all that kind of stuff.

- The first year that the Amiga was out,

the Amiga outperformed the Apple Macintosh.

It outperformed it in sales,

it outperformed it in user satisfaction.

- And here comes this thing that just demolishes

what we think a home computer can do.

It just completely changed everything.

(soft rock music)

(dramatic music)

- This was the first time where people

could create the kind of media

that they were watching on television.

So if you wanted to do anything

that was multimedia oriented,

you were doing it on an Amiga.

- A lot of different people

did a lot of different things.

Some people were doing 3D modeling on it.

If you go to the movies these days,

you're probably gonna see some CGI.

That was giving people a tool they had never had before.

- Video capabilities.

Video capabilities beyond compare.

- I had Deluxe Video,

which I think came out in 1986,

which is kind of amazing when you think about

a video production program on your home computer in 1986.

- Graphics, there was a program

that came out pretty early called Deluxe Paint

that allowed you to draw onscreen

but because you could see a whole lot more colors

than on a PC,

there was a whole generation of artists

who found a use for computers

they never would have had before.

- The Amiga was an instrument

and like a good instrument,

if it's a piano or a flute or a violin,

you use the instrument to express yourself

and the Amiga was like what the guitar was for Jimi Hendrix.

- We knew how to play it

and we could even play the Amiga like this.

- I made lots of paintings with gradients in Digi-Paint.

Digi-Paint was my favorite.

I know most people were Deluxe Paint II,

Deluxe Paint III aficionados

but I was a Digi-Paint girl.

- Amiga was marketed

as a computer for creative people.

(doorbell rings)

- Aren't you astronauts?

- Buzz Aldrin.

- Gordon Cooper.

- Scott Carpenter.

- We'd like to compare notes with Stevie

on the new space station.

- Hello?

- Hi, Tommy Lasorda for Stevie.

- Hey, what's up?

- [Tommy] Just a question about moving Randolph

to the number two position.

- [Stevie] Yeah, second and this will work.

It's perfect.

- [Pointer Sister] Hi.

- Hi.

- We're the Pointer Sisters.

Stevie's expecting us.

- Well come in.

- We need help with our new album.

- Burt Bacharach.

- Little Richard.

- [TV Announcer] The Amiga,

color, sound, graphics, power,

at a price to make it truly

the computer for the creative mind.

What can the Amiga do?

Well what do you want it to do?

(doorbell rings)

- Huh, Mr. O'Neill.

Stevie is upstairs but it's kind of crowded.

Would you like some fried chicken while you're waiting?

- [TV Announcer] Amiga from Commodore.

The computer for the creative mind.

- Then, everything changes with the Toaster.

This plug-in card turned your Amiga

into such a powerful video creation system

that you could run an honest-to-goodness

professional organization on them.

- [TV Announcer] There's never been anything like it.

- [TV Announcer] The world's first video work station.

- [TV Announcer] That's what it is.

Putting the power of video in the hands of the people.

People like you and me.

- The Video Toaster was created

to be an all-in-one desktop production studio.

We shipped it in 1990 and the Amiga computer

is what made it possible.

- Video communication just was not available

to the average guy.

The Video Toaster changed all that.

- It really leveled the playing field,

that all of a sudden your stuff

could look as pro as something on broadcast television

because it was in fact creating work in the same quality.

(upbeat music)

- And back in the day before the Video Toaster,

you really had to be a member of the priesthood

to have access to the kinds of tools that you could use.

You had to be working at a TV station

or working for a big production house

and we were talking about hundreds of thousands

or even millions of dollars.

- And that thing, at that point, you were like,

The Amiga is a audio visual editing computer.

- It was astonishing.

And what was funny is that when I became a teacher,

and I would show other teachers

in other departments this tool

and say, "You know, instead of buying this titling machine

for $5,000, why don't you buy one of these Toasters

for the same money and instead of having six fonts,

you could have 600 and add more

and have all this other stuff?"

And the thing I was faced with

was that well, you know computers are nice

but they're not gonna be a real important part

of TV and film.

- There's a lot of material to look at

and not much time to do it in.

So pull up your VCR and your Toaster

and let's get started.

- You know, NewTek back in the day had a tiger by the tail

with the Video Toaster.

Nobody really expected the Video Toaster

to be that successful except probably NewTek.

- [TV Announcer] NewTek.

(energetic music)

- Now look at what they've brainstormed.

The Video Toaster.

- (Laughing) Yeah.

Hi, my name is Penn Jillette.

This is my partner Teller.

We're Penn and Teller and we're here to talk about taste.

We're making this video all by ourselves

in a loft in Topeka, Kansas using cheap home equipment

and a new item, NewTek's Video Toaster.

This little snazzy gizmo puts all the power in your hands.

But if you don't exercise taste,

you're gonna end up with a video full of solarization,

mosaics,

receding tiles and everything else under the sun.

In short, you're gonna have a finished product

that looks like a bad rock video.

(rock music)

- After we shipped it, it was just kind of an explosion.

I realized that with personal computer technology

at some point, it would be fast enough

to do all those things.

We set out to revolutionize video

and I think we did it.

I knew it was a good thing but we were all shocked

when we started shipping the Toaster,

how many people wanted it.

(rock music)

- The following that you have for Apple these days

is the kind of religious zealots

that we had following the Amiga.

They were absolutely convinced

that this was the next platform

and everyone was super psyched.

- The wild-eyed, the excited, the crazed,

gotta create inventive things,

gotta do fun stuff,

gotta go out and change the world stuff.

- 'Cause you weren't just a person who bought an Amiga.

You kind of bought into Amiga

and that became your life

and I have to admit I was on board with that.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Bohuš Blahut.

You might recognize me from the Catalyzer series

of tutorial videos put out by Legacy Maker.

- [Kristen] Whenever I could name drop the Amiga,

like, oh, I use an Amiga

or I'm still using an Amiga, I would.

- 'Cause if you've ever met an Amiga fan,

he's gonna tell you all about the Amiga

and how everybody else got it wrong.

- Amiga users make Macintosh users look like IBM users.

- It's like you are the secret keeper of this great secret

and you don't understand how no one else has found out

and you kind of want to spread it

but more than anything you just want to tell people,

"Look, I've got this knowledge."

- I actually moved from my dream job

bartending on Waikiki Beach to move to Silicon Valley

so I could find a job working with the Amiga.

- If you were a creative guy,

if you were a computer geek,

this was it,

this was nirvana.

- Everything was new and open

and people were just trying to do really cool stuff.

And a lot of them didn't even care,

they weren't trying to make money off it

they were just saying,

"Hey, look at this neat hack I came up with."

And they'd send out the source code.

Then you'd get it and say,

"Look, hey, I can change it and do this."

- You know, you didn't get a lot of people

that were striving to become millionaires.

You got a lot of people that were striving

to find a way to express themselves

or to create tools that would allow other people

to express themselves in new and fascinating ways.

- When I was working on Amiga hardware,

I also wrote Amiga software just for fun.

- It's sort of like a Elks Club of computer users.

Once you're inside, there is a special kind of camaraderie.

If I was to find somebody who was die hard Amiga user

just on the street, we'd talk for half hour or an hour

about the Amiga.

I know we would

because if you're into it,

it's the greatest thing in the world

when you find somebody else who's into it.

(group chatters) (upbeat music)

(dramatic music)

- There had been a lot of fears

and Commodore had had a bad year,

probably the worst year ever

for Christmas of 1993.

The machines that people wanted were not available

and the ones that were out were not selling.

We were nervous and we knew something bad

was probably gonna happen before too long.

- Most companies that are in

the consumer electronics marketplace,

they do their trial balloons at CES,

which is Consumer Electronics Show in January,

they take orders in June

for whatever is gonna be the hot thing that Christmas.

If you screw up Christmas,

in the consumer electronics industry, you are dead.

Most people only get like one shot at that before they die.

We actually had two shots at that.

- There was a couple years where the CEO and chairman

were making more money at Commodore

than the CEO of IBM,

the CEO of Apple,

and we weren't doing anywhere near the business.

No matter what Commodore had done,

we wouldn't have been able to keep that going forever.

- A lot of us had a feeling

that something was wrong at Commodore.

- We knew the PC and Windows had taken over the market.

We knew there wouldn't be an Amiga 5000.

- When the news arrived that they were going bankrupt,

I mean it was the worst case scenario.

- It was devastating.

It was devastating for us because our whole business was

at that time was based on the success of the Video Toaster

and the success of the Video Toaster was based on the Amiga.

Then, we were just mired in the horror of it.

I was in shock and I really couldn't figure out

how we were gonna survive it.

- My wife says it's kind of like

I was in a divorce for a while

because I was in all these stages of denial.

Was it something that I did?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

- There's not one single thing I could've done

to change the outcome

and I reviewed that over and over again

because technical people love the idea

that there's a technical fix to something.

But the problems with Commodore were not technical.

They were managerial and there's nothing we could've done.

- We were trying desperately

as engineers in the company

to try and find somebody that would acquire us, buy us.

But unfortunately, none of that was to be had.

- (heavy sigh)

I never did really understand

why the Amiga wasn't more successful.

We often blamed the marketing people

and I think there was a lot of room there

to blame the marketing people.

- Marketing is like a big jigsaw puzzle.

It's a whole bunch of pieces

you got to put together the right way,

otherwise the picture doesn't look very good.

- They did some wacky things.

If you have never seen the first launch commercial

for the Amiga computer, you ought to go see it

if you'd like a laugh.

There's a monitor on a pedestal

and the light is glowing

and the baby is born

and it's glowing in the light of the amazing monitor,

glowing Amiga.

What the hell was that?

Most people were left like, "What did that mean?"

And sadly that first commercial set the trend

for what marketing would prove to be like

for that machine over the first several years.

- Dollar for dollar nothing can even come close

to the Amiga 3000.

By, the way, how are we coming

on the Liquid Scrubbo presentations?

- I beg your pardon?

- You know, oh, I guess I didn't introduce myself.

I'm Bob Lewis, the new VP of Marketing.

- They wanted to sell to business.

That was a little tough 'cause it looked so awesome.

It's very hard for what essentially seems

like a combination of a jukebox and a music video channel

to claim that it's really good for business.

Atari had the same problem.

- In the United States, instead of putting the Amiga 500

into Toys'R'Us or Kmart or Sears,

we put it into professional computer stores

because we brought in folks from Apple

that knew how to take a Macintosh at the time

and sell that for about $2,500.

So they were thinking,

"Hey, we know how to sell high end computers."

I didn't design a high end computer.

This is a $500 game machine.

Please put it in Toys'R'Us.

I can still remember the Apple guy

putting his arm around my shoulder saying,

"Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, had this discussion with Steve.

I'm having it with you.

Don't worry, I'll take care of your baby."

Rolling my eyes there.

- The PR department of Commodore talking about Amiga

was all about the art.

They were like, "We are the artists' computer."

I mean, this is a company that hired Andy Warhol

to draw on an Amiga in front of a crowd of people

to show you how awesome it was

and how it was perfect and they had B.B. King

talking about how he was gonna use an Amiga

to make music from now on.

And so, they were like,

"Let's get established artists we can afford

and have them stand next to Amiga

so you can be as cool as that artist."

And IBM, which had given up itself to clones,

ended up winning that game

because here you go, boring,

dependable,

made by a bunch of people,

we'll be here next year.

And they ground everybody else down.

(sad music)

- I think that Amiga could have had a different future

if they would have focused on what they were good at.

This machine, this do it yourself machine

for the graphical artist

and I'm sure that new things would have come out of that.

They tried to be a PC.

You should never try to be something that you are not.

- But even if sales in the U.S. were zero,

Commodore still would have lived

because the other 90% of the revenue

was from the rest of the world

that did figure out that this was the next generation.

- With the right software support,

I don't see any reason why we couldn't have garnered

a much larger market share and maintained it.

- I have very little love

for Commodore as an organization.

It's like finding out a guy

who constantly shot himself in the foot

finally got it amputated.

- If you don't market it right,

if you waste all your money on air freight

and mistiming and things like this,

not much you can do.

- I never saw a Commodore that had a central leader

or anyone who felt like a leader.

At Apple, everyone knew Jobs was in charge.

At Commodore, it really wasn't clear who was in charge.

- The waste, the mismanagement,

the terrible decisions that just ruined things,

it's endemic,

the patient's terminal,

it's living in spite of them.

- The product actually never failed.

The people around it,

the companies around it,

those were the people that failed.

If it would have had a Steve Jobs running it

instead of a Tom Rattigan.

- It was about brand loyalty.

It was about marketing.

And those are the things that Commodore did badly.

I think that they didn't know how to market it.

How do you market a multimedia machine

before multimedia exists?

It would've revolutionized things earlier,

quite a bit earlier.

I guess that that's ultimately the tragedy of the Amiga.

(soft ambient music)

- Being part of the Amiga community and an insider,

I kept following what was going on.

Two weeks from now there's gonna be some great announcement

about somebody coming along to buy the Amiga assets

and that went on for years.

- Intellectual property was basically sold

to a PC company out of Germany called Escom.

- And Escom was the second largest PC company in Europe.

They contacted both myself and Andy Finkel

and invited us over to talk with them

about what they wanted to do

with the future of the Amiga technology.

- One of the personalities that most defined

the period of great uncertainty was Petro Tyschtschenko.

Petro was a former Commodore Germany executive

who was brought in by Escom as one of the directors

of their Amiga Technologies division.

- They resurrected the Amiga 1200 line

and they resurrected the Amiga 4000T line.

- And the people were really happy, right?

Because we have no break.

There was a shortage of course of A1200s

during the bankruptcy but then suddenly A1200

could be delivered, right?

This was great for everybody

and for the dealers as well.

So the community was satisfied,

the dealers were satisfied,

the business was running

and it was great time.

- And Petro was in so many ways exactly what Amiga users

had been asking for.

He cared about Amiga users.

Finally they want to be our friends,

they want to listen to us,

they want to sit down to dinner with us.

Petro was Santa Claus.

He would hand out Amiga branded pens

and pins and mouse pads.

He had a dance band that would come and perform

at Amiga shows.

(upbeat music)

Petro was great and for a little while things looked good.

- They later went out of business

'cause they didn't manage their inventory too well

in the PC marketplace and it basically fizzled on the vine.

- There was a bunch of hot potato stuff going on.

- In Spring of 1997, Gateway acquires the Amiga assets

from the leftover shell of Escom.

- Gateway didn't really care about the Amiga.

Ultimately, they just didn't do anything

with the operating system

and they ended up licensing it

to this tiny little group of people out in Washington state.

The Amiga people kept holding out hope

for year after year after year that something better

was gonna come along from a real company.

They kept lowering their expectations.

It's like the woman who wants to marry.

When she's 20 she's looking at the movie star

but by the time she's 50 the guy with the bald hair

and the potbelly looks pretty good.

- I kept thinking, "The Amiga's gonna rise again

and it's gonna be the real Amiga.

It's gonna be the 68000 platform

or the PowerPC 603 platform

and it's gonna have this organic connection

to the Amiga of old.

- There have been a variety of attempts

to bring Amiga-like hardware back.

- The many heirs to the Amiga legacy.

- And they have pretty much all failed.

- Even after Commodore was gone, they clung to it.

It was a way of life I think for a lot of people.

- That says Petro Tyschtschenko, Northwest Amiga Group, no?

Life Member.

- Instead of going, I suppose,

like most people my age would have been,

to a modern computer like an IBM clone of some kind,

I saved up all my money,

went to softhut.com in 2000,

and purchased a brand new in box, new old stock

Amiga 1200HD Magic Pack.

When software developers really started falling

off the way side and when games

really stopped being developed

it was about, how can I keep this going?

What hacks can I use to solve this problem?

I was also like, "Look, look this thing.

It can still do things in 2004, in 2005."

It wasn't until 2005 that the Amiga 1200

stopped being my main computer.

- When I started there's no way I thought I'd be involved

in producing new hardware for the Amiga in 2010.

We're now ready to introduce the AmigaOne X1000.

The X1000 was developed by Amigans for Amigans.

All of the software guys involved

have been Amiga users and Amiga developers

for the last 20 years.

- There are people who say that,

"Oh, for the Amiga to be truly great, it should die."

And that everyone will think of it as a classic

but I've never felt that way.

I keep thinking it should keep on progressing,

keep going further.

- [Trevor] We're running AmigaOS 4.

You pick it up and start using it,

you feel like you're using an Amiga operating system.

We have beta testers from 22 countries around the world.

- You're fighting such an integrated industry now

that I don't know if there's any room

for a third computer company

but they keep trying because man,

if you're the third computer company

and you're actually a success,

you are making bank.

So they do it.

- If I was to be totally honest,

the AmigaOne X1000 is not a commercial venture.

It's the love of my life.

I've put a lot of money, time and effort into this project

which I will not get back.

- What people want is the same aesthetic

and engineering quality and freedom

to bring the best of what silicon and metal have to offer

to the computer industry.

That's what they want.

- I'm really, really proud with the hardware we produced.

I just hope that the Amiga community will enjoy it

as much as I'm going to when I get mine.

Let's keep this party going, as we say on the board.

- Because we use computers so much,

our identity becomes connected

with the computer system we use.

You become a Windows person,

you become a Mac person,

you become an Amiga person,

you become an Atari XL person,

a Linux person.

IBM is this big market player,

is this big we sell to corporations,

we run the super computers of the world.

Oh, you play games, you're an Amiga user.

You're a Macintosh user, you think you're creative.

You're part of that.

You become part of that idea.

- The more you find that this thing, whatever it is,

is the thing that pushes your buttons,

the more likely you are to stick through it

through thick and thin

and we had people who just kept believing

and there are still people who just keep believing.

- The feeling with the Amiga is that the human being

is in the middle and the Amiga is around.

If the PC, the PC is in the middle,

and you have to do what the PC is telling you.

- We were trying to take on Microsoft and IBM

but we didn't actually see ourselves as competitors

with that machine because we saw that machine

as a machine that wore the suit and tie

whereas our machine would be the one

that wore the colorful ascot and the beanie

and would be the machine

that people were really comfortable using,

not the one that they would have

to dress up and go to work to use.

- People don't so much have computers as a hobby anymore.

When I got started I had a Commodore PET

and a VIC-20 and a Commodore 64.

I had the whole lineup, right?

And this was kind of, I was tinkering,

it was a hobby for me.

I don't know that people really consider a computer a hobby.

It's more of an appliance.

It's a way to do other stuff.

It's a way to read email and surf the web

and all this other kind of stuff.

- I don't care what PC it is.

If it's a little faster I'll change a few boards in mine.

A regular person would probably go out and buy a new one

but you've got no emotional attachment whatsoever

to that computer.

It's just a tool.

I've got a bunch of hammers.

I use this hammer for this

and that hammer for that

and I have some really good hammers.

I've got one I've owned for 30 years

and it's a great hammer

but if I lost it it wouldn't be the end of the world.

It wasn't just a tool.

It was part of something bigger.

- We were so young and naive and innocent.

It really felt like we could change the world,

we could make a better place for us all to live.

- [Kristen] I think there's this feeling

of like something that was lost,

something that you can't get back.

(chiptune music)

- My name's cTrix.

I'm from Australia and I write music on a Commodore Amiga.

(chiptune music)

Blipfest is a festival here in New York City

and it's been going now for a fair number of years

and it's basically a showcase

of a whole lot of chip artists from around the globe.

Chiptune music is the art

of taking a games console or a computer console

from the days when they made their own sound,

the blips and the bloops,

before you had just a full CD quality soundtrack

and you take those old machines

and try to write music for them.

Within that restriction is the beauty

of trying to make a track

and get it within the constraints

and I guess that's one of the reasons

why I love the machine.

It sounds amazing for its age and its vintage.

For a machine that was from 1984

that has the capability that it has,

it's just absolutely incredible.

(chiptune music)

- Matthew Simmonds otherwise known as 4mat

and I'm a chip musician.

The Amiga computer was one of the first times

that cheap multitrack sampling was available to masses

because once the Amiga 500 came out,

it was like 300 quid and every kid

who wanted to make DJ mixes or sort of hip hop tracks

could just go out and get an Amiga

for their Christmas present.

So without the Amiga I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now.

- My current alias is Stagediver.

(chiptune music)

Tonight I'm using two Amiga 1200s.

One of them has been modified heavily.

The entire project is Amiga based.

The Amiga has this sort of personality.

You turn it on and you become a part of it.

It demands your attention.

You tell it what to do.

It does it very well.

And all under two megabytes.

When I first discovered the Amiga,

I really realized that I can use these computers

that I saw in school in a way that I wanted

and made these awful noises to piss of my parents

and really it's hard nowadays to piss off your parents.

(screaming)

- It's hard to even say what an Amiga is today.

- We've all got our own ideas

and we're all going different directions

and it's very difficult.

Someone said it's like corralling a group of cats,

I don't know.

- Is there like a spirit in the OS

that we could keep following?

Or is it supporting old games and old apps?

Is that it?

I don't know.

- They still develop software for it.

They still develop hardware for it.

So it's not fully dead either.

It's still alive.

It's still going.

- Is it supporting the kind of people

that still like the Amiga?

Maybe.

- And to me it's just about love.

- It's the camaraderie.

I like talking to the people.

What is it?

Networking with the people face-to-face.

Last year, within the last few months,

three or four new user groups have popped up

in the Pacific Northwest area.

- It's about the community, the people you meet,

the friendships that you create

with Amiga users all over the world.

- Still to this day, two, three times a month,

I'll get a piece of email, a letter from someone,

thanking me for the Amiga computer

and he or she became a graphic artist

or got into video production

or got into game programming because of the Amiga

and that they were inspired by the capabilities

and they were caught up in the passion.

- There's people still using Amigas now

and there's people even buying new hardware

that runs new Amiga operating system.

- Like everything else, you have a whole bunch of software

that perhaps wasn't worth the paper it was packaged in

but you have so many others that you play them now,

you'll put them up on the screen

and you'll be like, "Wow."

And somebody will say,

"Wow, you really captured that classic look."

And you go, "No, that is the classic look."

- But man those were special days.

Those were such magical days.

And that... I hope I get to enjoy again and again and again.

- We know it can be done.

We know that we can create a computer

that blows people away.

So let's do it again.

(upbeat music)