[HN Gopher] Gail Wellington, former Commodore executive, has died
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Gail Wellington, former Commodore executive, has died
Author : erickhill
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-05-17 21:27 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.legacy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.legacy.com)
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| @dang - black bar time?
| sgt wrote:
| yes
| asdefghyk wrote:
| I read the linked page and googled here name. I found a very
| detailed and intesting page ( to me ) at
|
| Commodore International Historical Society Link below )
|
| Gail Wellington: far more than just a herder of CATS and ...
| https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f...
|
| Looks to be an excellent page, excellent information about
| Commodore computer history too.
| rasz wrote:
| >The CDTV was a brilliant product for its time.
|
| It was a 1985 computer selling $300 retail in 1991 packaged
| with $300 retail CD-ROM. Commodore got the crazy idea to try
| and sell this "the whole is less than the sum of its parts" at
| $1000 because black case and remote control! Nobody got fooled.
| Zero effort went into trying to cost optimize it, or even make
| it a desirable product. It was as ridiculous as Philips mega
| flop CD-I shipping similarly bad internals at same price point.
| Findecanor wrote:
| I think there was at least one iteration of the CDTV with
| somewhat lower-cost internals though.
| gbraad wrote:
| Never seen a CDTV-CR in real. I have an original with
| keyboard, mouse, diskdrive and remote. I did like the
| device. Somehow the CD playback sounded better than my Sony
| CD player, but very clunky with the caddy and somewhat
| unintuitive interface.
| rasz wrote:
| I think that was after Gail Wellington was fired, and didnt
| exit prototype stage.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Unfortunately I concur with this assessment. Commodore was
| too busy phoning it in towards the end and effectively
| wasting the talents of Gail, as well as others in
| engineering, like Dave Haynie.
| detourdog wrote:
| Obviously they lost focus if they laid Gail off.
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| I feel like they just wanted to coast on the previous
| success, and not having to put more capital in to bring the
| platform back up to the lead.
| icedchai wrote:
| Sad. I was an Amiga user from roughly 1989 through 1994.
| Commodore barely updated the Amiga platform for most of its
| life. The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| One of my biggest regrets in my "journey" with computers is
| walking away from Commodore when Amiga was released. I felt
| it was superior to anything else I had seen, and I knew the
| Commodore 64 inside-out, but I just felt like PCs were for
| grown ups, and I needed to grow up. I needed to skate to
| where the puck was going, and that wasn't Commodore. I
| guess I was right, but I still regret it because all the
| dudes I knew that stuck with Commodore, with the new Amiga
| platform - well, they all seemed to be having more fun. I
| learned macros for Lotus 1-2-3, which was more practical (I
| made $$$ as a teenager teaching stiffs about macros), but
| my Amiga friends were making cool drum beats and sample-
| based music and remixes on their Amigas - totally
| impractical, but also fun as shit back then. So yeah, they
| were all having fun with their Amigas, while I became Alex
| P. Keaton.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I stayed with Commodore, but with my 128, since I
| couldn't afford an Amiga. I envied my PC friends their
| VGA graphics, but yeah, the Commodores were a lot of fun.
| And I learned to program on it, which none of my friends
| were doing with their PCs. Once they went to PC, it
| seemed like they just used them to run software, and
| weren't interested in tinkering.
| neom wrote:
| For me anyways: Amiga was learn what a computer can do,
| PC was learn how a computer works. PC was also my path to
| linux and linux changed my circumstances in life
| drastically. I get what the comment above you is saying,
| but I don't think the Amiga was more fun at the end of
| the day, PC ended up being much more challenging as a
| power user (therefore fun).
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| > The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.
|
| And AGA was a mixed bag. The extra bitplanes were really
| welcome, but not having chunky (1 byte per pixel) mode when
| all the 3d coming out really required it, and having to do
| an expensive operation to go from chunky to planar, did
| really hurt efficiency.
|
| It was a great addition that extended the existing idea of
| bitplanes, which was a really good one in lots of ways
| though.
| icedchai wrote:
| The problem with AGA is it arrived when 386 clones with
| SVGA were becoming incredibly affordable. If it had
| arrived in early 1990 instead of late 1992, the Amiga
| might've had more of a chance.
|
| Basically, Commodore should've skipped ECS entirely. ECS
| was essentially useless to most consumers.
| toyg wrote:
| But still, 3 years later, the Playstation did the same thing
| and it was a fantastic success.
|
| CDTV was simply a bit early (hence the price) and a bit
| confused about what it wanted to be. It cost like a
| development machine but it was a fundamentally end-user one;
| it provided continuity for Amiga developers but only a hard
| reset for Amiga users. It also debuted in harsh economic
| times.
| tomhow wrote:
| Further info:
|
| https://cdtvland.com/2025/05/16/in-memory-of-gail-wellington...
|
| https://commodore.international/2021/11/21/gail-wellington-f...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBP257fGu8Q
| api wrote:
| Had a number of things gone differently Commodore might have been
| Apple. Both the C64 and the Amiga were way ahead of their time
| both in terms of raw performance and, for the C64,
| price/performance at least when it first came out. I learned to
| program on a C64 and still fondly remember it as an amazing
| gateway machine into computing. Was great for games too, better
| than most consoles of the day.
|
| Unfortunately the 64, like all those 8-bit machines, was a
| technical dead end, and by the time the Amiga got momentum PC
| clones were eating the entire industry. PC clones killed
| everything but Apple, which barely clung to life through the 90s,
| and some Unix workstations in the high end market. It just wasn't
| possible to compete with the price cuts and CPU performance gains
| that came with volume and scaling.
|
| (I remember in the early 90s a lot of doubts about whether x86
| could be made as fast as Sparc or Alpha or other things, but
| Intel and later AMD did it... especially when it came to
| price/performance.)
|
| In retrospect Amiga might have competed there had it gone higher
| end and been a Unix-like OS underneath.
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(page generated 2025-05-20 23:00 UTC)