Linked by Eugenia Loli on Mon 12th Jan 2004 05:21 UTC, submitted by Simon Strandgaard
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While we're at the subject of OS designers being rushed...
The Amiga hardware and its OS was developed by Amiga Inc., not Commodore. Commodore had the money when Amiga Inc. ran short of it, bought out the company before Atari did, and crippled the Amiga right from the start. That's what I meant with foster parents that were either careless, clueless, or both. (Later, EsCOM, Gateway, and Amino Inc. joined that hall of shame.)
Jay Miner pictured the first Amiga as being a full-sized metal desktop case, with lots of room for expansions, and at least 512 kByte, better 1 MByte RAM. The HAM mode (hold-and-modify, in effect a hardware compression / bandwidth saving technology) was designed to suit a HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) color model quite beautifully, which would have made the graphics capabilities of the Amiga even more astounding.
Commodore shipped the A1000 with a measly 256 kByte RAM available after booting, in a crappy undersized plastic box, and with a RGB color model that made HAM next to useless.
The original AmigaDOS, dubbed CAOS (Commodore-Amiga Operating System), didn't make it in time for the ambitious release deadline for the Amiga, so they crammed TRIPOS in there, a third-party DOS that wasn't even ABI compatible since it was written in BCPL - making the dos.library a strange beast to handle even in its latest incarnation, OS 3.9, over 15 years later.
From there, it went rapidly downhill, and I still consider it a loss for the computer industry at large.