Dr. Ryan Czerwinski of Merlancia
Industries explains the origin of the Amiga Boing ball and
checkmark
For the Boing Ball:
The Boing Ball dates back to 1984, before Commodore owned the
Amiga. It was a graphics/sound demonstration that showed a
Red/White ball rotating, while bouncing off walls (on a purple and
white grid, IIRC). it made a "boing" sound, the sound of a bouncing
ball, when it hit the walls.
The original Boing demo was a trademark of the original pre-CBM
success-sell to Atari, and when Commodore purchased Amiga Corp,
they were originally going to go full ahead with the little
Boingball logo as the logoplate for all Amiga machines ... until
some moron in CBM marketing decided to go with a multicolour logo,
to represent how many colours the Amiga could display, in contrast
to Apple's multicolour (at the time) logo. (Actually, Apple was
going to go with a mono logo in 1982, but held off until 1997 or
1998, which may shock a few of you.)
Commodore went with the checkmark logo purely for the reasons to
market the Amiga's colour capabilities. The Boing logo (Red/white
ball on grid) was much nicer and cleaner, and easier to reproduce
as well...even in 1985.
Internally, the Amiga engineering team continued to use the
Boingball as a logo. Just look at the Boing jackets from 1987.
Prime example of why the Boing logo is nicer.
As for the number of squares on the ball, the original ball had
64 (8x8 grid), or 128 if you were to take into account both sides
of the ball. More recent Boingballs have less squares. The
Boingball is also always at the exact same angle of skew.
As for the checkmark:
In 1985, it made sense to market the Amiga's colour palette. Now
it is too cheesy, and *too* colourful. Look at most major company
logos..you don't exceed four or five colours. Three colours is
typical. (The Amiga logo is three - black, red, and white.)
As for the Amiga italic text logo:
Blah. It was too plain then. A purely Commodore innovation over
the Amiga "worm/laserline" logo that existed before it. I never
liked it, too bloody plain. In a day where innovative logo design
is more important than product anything else, Amiga has it pretty
set.
Source: '
ugly balls of boing', Amiga Network News
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Last Update: 14/6/2002
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