we all know that in order to establish a successful brand you need the right people to manage your company. Well, Amiga is about to get some. in this part, I will talk about how Amiga gained a footing in the computer market thanks to the man named Thomas Rattigan.
The savior is here
this didn't go amiss from the press who noted that after establishing their brand at that very show, it was akin to Russia resigning from the soviet bloc. Thomas Rattigan, former CEO of pepsiCo International was installed as CEO in February 1986, replacing Marshall smith, and immediately began a much-needed plan to redirect the companies operations and make the most of their frankly, groundbreaking technology.
by now the Amiga was selling approximately 10.000 machines/month. A figure the Atari ST was beating, along with dealer signups and software support, leading to further software port from the ST which just makes the Amiga look like a high-cost version of the st. Rattigan's plan was to first cancel well overdue lines such as PET, VIC-20, and plus/4 and then create 2 versions of the Amiga hardware. the first would be the high-end desktop aimed at the creative markets. the second would be the cost-reduced version designed to replace the commodore 64 and 128 models.
finally, a clear path was beginning to be laid. whilst these plans were being laid, Jay's original team in Los Gatos was clearly still disgruntled by the handling of their precious technology. to this end, whilst working with workbench 1.1, an un-named engineer tucked an easter egg into the OS that would appear when certain combinations of keys were pressed.
RJ mical find it out and although find it amusing, he asked the engineer to change it. However, it was merely encrypted and the first batch of the European Amiga flashed the message on the screen for 1/60th of a second if you held down the 8 key and inserted a disk at the same time. Apparently someone with a keen eye spotted this and recorded the output with a VCR, which even with shoddy 1980s freeze-frame ability, allowed it to be shown to Amiga executives, who quickly pulled thousands of machines from the UK shelves. Given that it was unlikely to ever be found by users, pulling the machines and suffering a 3 month sales delay whilst new ROMs were fitted seems a costly and strange measure to take.
But then it wouldn't be the first we encountered in the Amiga saga. Shortly after, Commodore decided to move the Los Gatos team closer to HQ in west Chester, Pennslyvania, whilst making several layoffs in the process, due to cost cutting. some of the remaining team did as bade, however, Jay miner had enough and decided to exit the endeavor and as an official employee, and instead work as an external consultant for the company from his home town. To further reduce commodore's overheads, staff and other internal projects were discarded.
this includes projects like the Commodore 65, the commodore 900 Unix workstation and even commodore's office branding and supplies which had helped establish the company in its infancy. Rattigan then set about his own plans. Proposals for the high-end machine were first given to Commodore's german subsidiary, Who had previously responsible for launching the Commodore IBM compatible range.
that's all for part 8. part 9 can be found here