[HN Gopher] Thomas Rattigan, short-lived Commodore CEO
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Thomas Rattigan, short-lived Commodore CEO
Author : rbanffy
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-04-03 12:34 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| timbit42 wrote:
| Although Rattigan was only at Commodore for a year, his creation
| of the Amiga 500 and 2000 extended the life of Commodore by many
| years with sales of the Amiga 500 making up more than half of all
| Amigas sold.
| amichail wrote:
| AmigaOS was too complicated for hobby programming though.
| nradov wrote:
| Huh? Amiga probably had a higher proportion of hobby
| programmers than any other platform at the time.
| amichail wrote:
| Coding GUI apps was a nightmare.
| mrandish wrote:
| Sure but at least it shipped with an OS that had a GUI
| and multitasking in an era when the vast majority of
| personal computers had neither. Let's not forget how
| early this was. Any personal computer that shipped with a
| GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet
| fully realized or completely documented. Everyone was
| still figuring out what a GUI OS should be. It wasn't
| until years later when Unix-based workstation OSes
| migrated down to consumer desktops that things started
| stabilizing. Before that we were pioneers roughing it on
| the frontier.
|
| I had an Amiga 1000 and did hobby programming on it
| starting in 85. At the time everything friends and I
| wrote only used the OS to open a custom screen because
| all the fun was experimenting with graphics. Most of the
| apps for the first couple years either used the CLI or
| just put up a window with a few drop downs and otherwise
| rendered their own UX inside it.
| amichail wrote:
| I think I would have been better off with a PC, Turbo
| Pascal, and no GUI programming to distract me from more
| interesting hobby coding.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the
| time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized
| or completely documented
|
| You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was
| introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for
| the next decade. The one thing it didn't have was
| multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder.
|
| The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based
| on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather
| than what ended up being AmigaOS.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Writing GUI apps on using base OS interfaces on anything
| was a nightmare. Still is.
|
| What made it nicer was having IDEs with GUI designers.
| Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and was
| not meant to write native-looking applications.
| igouy wrote:
| > Smalltalk existed, but it was a world unto itself and
| was not meant to write native-looking applications.
|
| Huh?
|
| There have been Smalltalk language implementations based
| on MS Win controls (as-if they were MS VB programs).
|
| http://www.object-arts.com/dolphin7.html
|
| Also Digitalk Smalltalk for MS Win and OS/2. Also IBM
| Smalltalk. ~
|
| There have been Smalltalk language implementations that
| _emulated_ native widget Look & Feel (various MS Win,
| OS/2, Motif/CDE, MacOS). Obviously putting a lot of
| effort into providing "native-looking" applications.
|
| Common-place to copy a Smalltalk app from a Mac to a MS
| Win PC and switch the emulation from MacOS to MSWin.
| os2warpman wrote:
| I became an Amiga user starting in the mid-1980s and my
| recollection was that even by the time of the introduction
| of the 500 and 2000 (my Amiga 2000 is still sitting
| downstairs in the basement on a shelf next to my 1000)
| Amiga was already well behind the PC and Macintosh in terms
| of users by the mid-to-late 80s.
|
| It was a hobby programmer's platform because it had become
| a hobby. Like the Saab of computers (I also owned a Saab).
|
| Somewhere to play games and write demos in the evening
| after having spent all day at work in MPW or Turbo Pascal.
|
| It is impossible to know, due to obfuscation and (honestly)
| lying, how many Amigas were ever sold but it was somewhere
| between 3-7 million in total for all models worldwide from
| birth to death.
|
| Ahoy tried to figure it out- Nobody Knows How Many Amigas
| Commodore Sold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI
|
| The Amiga's adoring fans were/are extremely vocal, but
| comparatively few in numbers.
|
| Users often also had to become hobby programmers because
| the market was so small and they had to write their own
| programs to implement software that was unavailable on the
| platform- this was the case with me.
|
| In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was
| probably a different story.
|
| I imagine BeOS (Damn, I'm a winner in picking niche OSes)
| had the highest ever percentage of hobby programmers
| because EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that
| platform.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > EVERYBODY other than GoBe was a hobbyist on that
| platform.
|
| Actually, there is one company still around called Tune
| Tracker Systems[0]. They make radio-automation software,
| starting out on BeOS and are now on Haiku.
|
| [0] https://www.tunetrackersystems.com
| compsciphd wrote:
| 3-7 million is somewhat proportional to the # of TI 99/4a
| (my first computer) which sold 2.5Million or so, but many
| of those were probably on the fire sale, and at least
| some of them probably went to backup parts for people
| that already had it. While the 99/4a is remembered
| somewhat fondly by those who had it (speech synthesizer,
| expansion modules for p-code, forth and others), it
| wasn't a system that had a huge amount of development
| done for it, and died a pretty quick death.
| appstorelottery wrote:
| AMOS filled that gap.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Irving Gould really did Rattigan dirty for no good reason. Big
| egos really can bring a company down.
|
| Steve Jobs also had a massive ego, but somehow managed to use
| it to bolster Apple in their hour of need.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yup. If you had to point to the singular "bad guy" at
| Commodore, it was Irving. I interviewed with him when I was
| interviewing to be the CTO and recognized pretty quickly that
| he was the kind of executive that didn't like people who
| worked for him to be more competent than he was. Had a great
| discussion with a 4 star general who was friends with my Dad
| about people like that.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| That sounds genuinely fascinating. Can you post more about
| your experience meeting Gould?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Pretty standard stuff, a bit about my background, what I
| thought of Commodore and the people I had met so far, If
| I could change one thing at Commodore what would it be (I
| responded with my belief that the Amiga was the future of
| Commodore and some stuff about "workstation for the
| masses", I was at Sun at the time). What was memorable to
| me wasn't so much what he asked or we talked about as it
| was about his body language when I expressed approval or
| how impressed I was by things others on his staff had
| done. You would expect "pride" but I got "irritation?" I
| had very little experience dealing with people like that
| and it was confusing. Later research and observations led
| me to believe he was irritated by people that excelled.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| This is quite a neat story. Thanks for sharing!
|
| I also heard that Bobby Kotick of Activision infamy was
| planning to buy Commodore back in the early 90s, only to
| be rebuffed by Irving and Co.
|
| Although I'm not a personal fan of Bobby, I'm sure his
| leadership would have been a sorry sight better than the
| dumpster fire at Commodore back then.
| rob74 wrote:
| That might be true, but creating the Amiga 500 and 2000 was
| also a no-brainer: the original Amiga (later retconned to
| A1000) had a detachable keyboard (= expensive), but limited
| expansion capabilities, so launching two new models, a cheaper
| all-in-one design and a more expensive version with detachable
| keyboard and a larger case with more expansion capabilities was
| pretty obviously the way to go.
|
| What all the Commodore CEOs unfortunately failed to do was
| invest adequately into R&D to keep the Amiga competitive.
| Instead, they treated the existing lineup as a cash cow for far
| too long. The new models which hit the market from 1990 onwards
| were too little too late and couldn't fend off the eventual
| insolvency...
| foobahify wrote:
| Interesting. Being good at their job can be your downfall in the
| corp world! He'd have been better as a private equity tycoon who
| would have had proper control.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| You know, I decided which Catholic high school to attend after I
| put my fingers on the keyboards of their brand-new C64 machines.
| [The other Catholic school only had PET systems at the time.]
|
| I learned how to type there, and the rest was history. I owned a
| VIC20 already, and Dad purchased peripherals such as the 1541 and
| the 1701.
|
| It wasn't until 3-4 years ago when I began to study history,
| Irish history in particular, and recognized that the model
| numbers weren't chosen arbitrarily or accidentally, but indeed
| they correlated perfectly to the most ignominious dates in the
| history of the UK, when anti-Catholic laws were passed and the
| Irish were stomped into submission.
|
| It makes weird sense in retrospect. I mean, nobody ever taught
| Irish history in school because we are Americans now, and the
| whole Reformation thing is water under the bridge. And the
| superior general has a distinctly posh RP accent.
|
| Much like the "bitten apple" and its rainbow colors and the $666
| price tag, these signs and symbols were hidden in plain sight, as
| harbingers and warning signs of future troubles. We were all
| working for the construction crew on a modern Tower of Babel.
| Literally.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _The corporate drama has led to some speculation that Irving
| Gould was running Commodore as a stock scam, but I think that's
| an oversimplification._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor probably applies
| here as well...
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(page generated 2025-04-07 23:02 UTC)