This is one of my favorite sites too and I often check in more than once a day. I hope the small number of visitors here allows TSB to avoid this UK law even applying at all to it.

Such a lovely early example of what would come to be known as "The Innovator's Dilemma". It's an almost unavoidable pattern that would repeat many times in the tech industry - and still does to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

It's interesting Watson was worried CDC achieved this in spite of only having 17 people on the team, not realizing it was because they only had 17 people on the team. Of course, it helped that one of those people was Seymour Cray.

Back in 1982 I bought a third party sculpted keyboard for my Coco 1. IIRC the keyboard was made by ALPS and someone soldered the right cable and connector onto it and sold them through an ad in a magazine. It was similar in style and feel to an Atari 800 keyboard and so, so much better than the Coco 1's chiclet keyboard!

While the Coco's original keyboard left a lot to be desired, it wasn't even that bad compared to some other low-cost home computers like the Atari 400, Timex Sinclair ZX80/81, Mattel Aquarius, Magnavox Odyssey 2 and many others. I have all of those machines now in my vintage collection and always encourage visitors looking at them to give typing on them a try. :-)

The Coco was my first computer and I think that keyboard was the first mod I ever did to it (the first of probably a dozen mods and add-ons I did in that Coco 1). To this day I still enjoy a good keyboard and have a variety of custom split mechs.

This is a fun write-up that I enjoyed reading. It also provides useful information about current A1000 upgrade options that I didn't know about. Much appreciated.

With that said, I'd like to quibble a bit with calling the A1000 "The First Perfect Computer." First, let me clarify that I find "First Perfect Computer" too broad a term to debate as needs for business and consumers differ so greatly. So I'll narrow it down to "First Perfect Home Computer", defined as: Excelling at games, graphics, sound, music and productivity.

I owned an A1000 which I dearly loved. In fact, I lusted over every page of issue #1 of AmigaWorld magazine for months until the first A1000s were available to mere mortals. And when it finally launched I managed to get one despite it costing far more than I could afford at the time. It was my main computer over the years until the A2000 shipped.

So, yes. The A1000 is unquestionably a legend and it was far ahead of its time. It was also the first, "The OG", Amiga. A unique honor nothing can replace. BUT... as great as it was, the machine felt rushed out the door. The lack of a finished OS ROM requiring the expensive WCS internal mod board and requiring an extensive floppy load and swap on each boot was awkward. The front 256K RAM expansion board also felt messy since there wasn't much the computer could really do without it. Also, the lack of a slot for an internal second drive felt like a big miss for a computer clearly designed to sit under your monitor. It was powerful but pricey at launch (the WCS having pushed the MSRP above $995 to $1295). In the first months there was very little software beyond Commodore's own Graphicraft, Musicraft and a few others, which were still labeled "beta". The Boing Ball and RoboCity demos were wildly impressive but grew old quickly. Finally, although we didn't know it at the time, the A1000's limit of 512K chip RAM was a lurking limitation destined to wall A1000s off from compatibility with the future of the product family.

What would I propose as an alternative for "The First Perfect Home Computer?" I think the Amiga 1200 is a strong contender, although it didn't ship until 1992. Had it shipped in 1989 or 90, it would have been a world beater. Even late as it was, it was still impressively powerful while also feeling mature and complete. The 020 CPU provided full 32-bit glory, it came with sufficient memory to be immediately useful, room for an internal hard drive and a conveniently accessible bottom port for flexible internal RAM, CPU, etc expansions. The price at launch was also more reasonable for consumers to afford compared to its current competition, especially considering it's completeness. Even though by the time the A1200 was announced I already had a hugely expanded A2000 with 50Mhz 030 accelerator, fast RAM, 16-bit sound card and a Video Toaster - I got an A1200 too. Mostly because when I first saw the announcement I thought, "Wow, Commodore finally nailed a perfect Amiga for everyone." Right features, right packaging, complete, expandable and for a good price. And I never even used that A1200 as a daily driver because my other Amiga's were already so fully loaded (though I did put a hard drive and ram expansion in it).

While all of this is, of course, based on subjective and contextual judgements, that's how I see it. The A1000 will always hold a special status as the first and as an historic breakthrough but it's shortcomings, rushed nature and incompleteness became clear within just a couple years. Whereas the A1200 has aged very well as the world's moved on. It still feels like an especially well-realized, complete and compelling form of a certain kind of vision for what a home computer could be.

Interestingly, due to the eminent rise of the 'actually usable by anyone Windows PC' with Windows 3.1, the A1200 might also be regarded as "The LAST Perfect Home Computer" as well! I say this because during the mid-90s the low-cost PC juggernaut basically turned all consumer computing into a cross-over utility like a car. There was no such thing as a "work car" or "home car." It was just a car and you used it for whatever you needed wherever you were. While computers continued to grow ever more useful and powerful, they also became commonplace and lost that sense of having a unique personality. After the early 90s, having a uniquely powerful and capable computer of your very own at home would never again feel special in quite the same way.

It's amazing some obsessive retro enthusiast has gone to the effort to assemble such a huge archive of old legal documents. So... nice job.

Having been deeply involved in the Amiga community from 1985 to 1995 and knowing lots of people at Commodore as well as many of the largest Amiga developers and even attending most of the Amiga trade shows around the world starting with the first Amiga Expo in NY - it's safe to say I really liked the Amiga and still revere it's historical legacy. It was an incredible platform that was ahead of its time. I have so many fond memories of good times with good people.

However, having said that. I have to add that it's beyond bizarre grown adults are still squabbling in court over legal rights to the Amiga IP and trademarks more than 30 years after the Amiga died. I guess one could argue that maybe the Amiga IP and trademarks still had some potential value that could have been extracted before the year 2000, but certainly after 2000 none of it has any serious value. To be clear, I'm a business person with decades of experience as a senior executive in the non-Amiga technology industry, including at Fortune 500 tech companies whose products most people reading this probably use every week. So when I say "no serious value", I mean the maximum value of all these rights combined - when rounded to the nearest million dollars - is zero. And that includes my best guess of the combined value of all future revenue, from Amiga Forever, to accelerator cards, to FPGA emulators, to nostalgia-ware T-shirts. At best, all of it doesn't add up to more than a garage Etsy or EBay-sized part-time business. And year by year, it's getting even smaller.

What are these people even thinking? They are wasting time and money paying lawyers to fight over essentially worthless scraps. It's insane. I acknowledge that maybe it's just one crazy person (or group) causing all this pointless bickering but, eventually, even the sane people bear some responsibility for continuing to respond to it. Yes, the Amiga was great. Yes, it would be nice to support the retro community and open source the code for posterity. But, at some point, you need to concede it's just not possible, give up and move on to do things more useful than fighting with crazy people. It's sad but life is short. You tried. Thanks. Now save yourself from any more of this silliness.

Thanks for creating this fantastic resource. Much appreciated!!!

Wow! This being released is wonderful and unexpected. I first heard about these tapes being found six weeks ago yet the NSA being unable to release them due to not having a suitable working 1-inch VTR machine (via this article: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/jul/10/grace-hop...)

That article was re-posted here on Two Stop Bits (Link: https://twostopbits.com/item?id=3788) and elsewhere but didn't seem to get much attention and I feared the worst, since 1-inch magnetic video tape degrades with time. Very frustrating since such vintage VTRs do exist in working order in the hands of museums, video preservationists and collectors. Now six weeks later we get the best possible news! Hopefully, that article and the re-postings helped spread the word and someone in control of access to the tape got connected to someone with the gear.

And what an amazing piece of history to have preserved. I'm only ten minutes into the first tape but she's obviously a treasure - clear thinking, great communication and a sharp wit. Even captured here later in life you can clearly see why she was so successful and highly regarded by her peers (including some the most notable people in early computing history).

I really appreciate it when tech companies make an effort to preserve history and share it.

However, it's important to also share Nintendo has recently launched a major campaign of unprecedented legal attacks on the historical preservation, retro emulation and fan creation communities. While Nintendo has always been protective of its IP rights, this was largely limited to stopping piracy of current titles and protecting their trademarks from commercial infringement, both of which are appropriate and understandable.

However, the greatly expanded and all-encompassing scope of their recent legal actions now threatens aspects of non-profit historical preservation and adjacent fan activities unrelated to Nintendo's present day commercial interests. Previously, Nintendo's lawyers made at least some effort to distinguish between non-profit or fan hobby activities and piracy or commercial trademark abuse. Their senior management also seemed to appreciate the retro community is some their most active current customers and brand fans. Over the last year that restraint has vanished, making it all the more ironic Nintendo is now funding a new museum to celebrate its past while funding lawyers to threaten the non-profit historical preservation and non-commercial fan communities passionately keeping Nintendo's storied past alive for future generations.

While I'll always love Nintendo's rich historical legacy, until they again exercise reasonable restraint in their now-abusive legal tactics, I can no longer in good conscience support the company or its products.

Very much looking forward to this series. I'm especially interested in where IGS sits technically in relation to other early approaches to visual representation languages like NAPLPS, ReGIS, VT36, and various ANSI expansions, etc. Back when data transmission was glacially slow and memory astronomically expensive, transmitting visual information as the instructions to re-draw it locally was so clearly the right idea, I think almost every major 8-bit and 16-bit platform had disparate hobbyist efforts to implement some form of this. Of course, due to platform fragmentation virtually none gained enough adoption to leave any lasting legacy.

While largely forgotten today, these were the primordial ancestors of the more advanced implementations that would go on to change the world, from Postscript, X11 and Flash to OpenGL and, of course, HTML and CSS.

This was a thing with the Amiga 500 computer too. I worked at a company which had a corporate field deployment of over a thousand Amiga 500 systems and some of these computers would start crashing intermittently due to the A500's "Fat Agnus" becoming unseated in its square socket, especially during shipping and thermal expansion/contraction. The chip got its nickname because it was a square packaged upgrade version of the earlier rectangular Agnus chip in the Amiga 1000.

These 1,000+ Amiga 500s were leased as complete systems including a 13" monochrome composite video monitor and an Okidata 182 dot matrix printer. All these Amigas only ever ran a single, highly complex and extremely valuable custom software application which auto-booted from the internal 880k floppy, was never publicly released and has remained unknown to this day.

This program was protected from being pirated with hardware in the form of a custom-designed and manufactured 1MB RAM + Real-Time Clock expansion board pre-installed in the A500's "trap door" slot on the bottom. This unique board added the same functionality as the standard Commodore A501 board but was customized by swapping the real-time clock data lines around, which the software checked to confirm it was running on an officially leased A500. The software application was written in C by myself and two other devs and we also doubled as the support, service, training, installation and shipping staff for this fleet.

Since we shipped them to each field location and they tended to be in locations which weren't well thermally controlled after hours, we got a fair number of these errors. Since the vast majority of our users were older female office workers who'd never touched a computer before, any error would trigger a support call. It wasn't easy to convince these nice ladies on the phone to lift the computer 6 inches and then drop it! But it did always fix the problem. We called it a "technical drop" :-)

As a very early Amiga 1000 owner and enthusiast, I'm the one who primarily convinced this small company that the newly announced A500 was the best low-cost option to run field deployments of their niche application and, aside from this occasional error problem, the huge fleet of Amigas performed admirably for many years. Especially considering the machines were individually shipped to each field location and these tended to be pretty hostile environments like temporary mobile offices, sometimes powered only by gasoline-powered generators subject to constant surges and brown-outs (think construction trailers).

I'm proud my unorthodox recommendation ended up working out so well since, despite my obvious bias, the A500 really was the perfect fit for this unique application in early 1987. The software app itself was related to real estate financing, so it had to have a 10-key and the entire system had to fit on a small side desk used by constantly rotating staff in a crowded temporary office. It had to be self-booting, self-maintaining and dirt simple, since almost none of the users had ever touched any computer before. It also had to be reliable because they frequently got moved around in the field between desks and buildings entirely by these novice users. So being all-in-one really helped since every extra wire and component was another thing to lose and/or break. I learned the hard way that talking to a nice lady on the phone who'd never seen a computer in person through reconnecting this "newfangled contraption" which someone else had disconnected, moved and left on the floor in a random pile the day before, was a rapid education on how to communicate physical instructions clearly! I always just pictured them as my sweet elderly aunt which helped keep my cool :-). Finally, the system had to be super cheap because they got stolen fairly often (no security after hours in these isolated remote offices).

Although entirely unknown at the time or after (since there was no reason for this small company serving a narrow niche market to do any PR) this was, as far as I know, the largest ever corporate deployment of Amiga computers.

One interesting note: the application was written to only use the keyboard, mostly just the arrow and Enter keys plus a few function keys we labeled with custom color-coded stickers for navigation such as Go, Back, Menu and Print. Usually we never even supplied the Amiga mouse with the systems, however I was optimistic we could show the users how to operate the mouse so they could run other apps if they wanted to. I conceded defeat after trying to teach the first half dozen users I did installs for how to use the "Bonus Mouse". I thought some would eventually get it but the necessary eye-hand coordination completely eluded these nice ladies circa 1987.