> Amiga was a startup that was I understand set to work around the lack of a product development pipeline in Commodore
Amiga Inc. was founded in 1982 by engineers leaving Atari, at a time when Atari was still all-in on the aging 2600, and did yet not have a replacement product in the pipeline. So you identified the right problem at the wrong company.
Amiga's initial goal was to create a chipset for a next-generation console. While they were working on that, they generated revenue by selling 2600 peripherals (like the Joyboard [1]), but eventually got funding from Atari and negotiated a contract to license their new architecture as the basis for future Atari products.
In '84, Jack Tramiel left Commodore and acquired Atari, which Warner had put up for sale following the crash of '83. Tramiel brought a bunch of Commodore engineers over to a newly reconstituted Atari, and they became the core of the ST team.
This severed Amiga's relationship with Atari, and simultaneously left Commodore without an engineering team to design their next-generation products. After a bunch of lawsuits and back-and-forth negotiations, Commodore managed to acquire Amiga, and the rest was history.
So it's pretty valid to say that the Amiga was designed by Atari engineers and the ST was designed by Commodore engineers.
What happened with Commodore/Amiga and Atari/ST is an amazing bit of history. It really happened, of course, but it seems like it could have been the plot for a show like "Halt and Catch Fire".
Also at a given point, they were actually trying to compete into the UNIX workstation market, as a couple of Amiga engineering folks were really into UNIX.
Thankfully that never materialized as such, otherwise AmigaOS wouldn't turned out as special as it was, rather yet another clone, SGI style.
I’m wondering how this worked out so well for Apple 15 years later (A/UX notwithstanding of course) - perhaps unix was simply not mature enough at that stage
Easy, Linux folks got a laptop/desktop that actually works out of the box, and they weren't really into Linux religion, rather whatever does POSIX would do.
A lesson taken by Microsoft years later, as Project Astoria ashes got repurposed as WSL.
A/UX failed due to management, and politics between IBM and Apple.
It worked out well for NeXT. But it took a long time, NeXTSTEP was released at the end of the 80s. So it took them more than a decade and reverse take-over of Apple, together with the much more affordable Apple hardware.
Amiga Inc. was founded in 1982 by engineers leaving Atari, at a time when Atari was still all-in on the aging 2600, and did yet not have a replacement product in the pipeline. So you identified the right problem at the wrong company.
Amiga's initial goal was to create a chipset for a next-generation console. While they were working on that, they generated revenue by selling 2600 peripherals (like the Joyboard [1]), but eventually got funding from Atari and negotiated a contract to license their new architecture as the basis for future Atari products.
In '84, Jack Tramiel left Commodore and acquired Atari, which Warner had put up for sale following the crash of '83. Tramiel brought a bunch of Commodore engineers over to a newly reconstituted Atari, and they became the core of the ST team.
This severed Amiga's relationship with Atari, and simultaneously left Commodore without an engineering team to design their next-generation products. After a bunch of lawsuits and back-and-forth negotiations, Commodore managed to acquire Amiga, and the rest was history.
So it's pretty valid to say that the Amiga was designed by Atari engineers and the ST was designed by Commodore engineers.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyboard