Thomas Rattigan, short-lived Commodore CEO
23 comments
·April 3, 2025timbit42
TheAmazingRace
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
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
That sounds genuinely fascinating. Can you post more about your experience meeting Gould?
rob74
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...
amichail
AmigaOS was too complicated for hobby programming though.
nradov
Huh? Amiga probably had a higher proportion of hobby programmers than any other platform at the time.
os2warpman
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.
amichail
Coding GUI apps was a nightmare.
appstorelottery
AMOS filled that gap.
foobahify
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.
rob74
> 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...
null
AStonesThrow
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.
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.