Gail Wellington, former Commodore executive, has died
19 comments
·May 17, 2025asdefghyk
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
>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.
icedchai
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
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.
flopsamjetsam
> 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.
toyg
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.
Findecanor
I think there was at least one iteration of the CDTV with somewhat lower-cost internals though.
gbraad
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
I think that was after Gail Wellington was fired, and didnt exit prototype stage.
TheAmazingRace
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.
flopsamjetsam
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.
detourdog
Obviously they lost focus if they laid Gail off.
api
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.
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