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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