Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!fluke!kurt
From: kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amigas in the big picture.
Keywords: reliability quality speed graphics sound compare
Message-ID: <9873@fluke.COM>
Date: 24 Jul 89 21:48:01 GMT
References: <38517@sgi.SGI.COM>
Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
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I scratch my head and wonder where Mr. Levine was during the history of the
Amiga.  Certainly not around the computer market.

When the Amiga was introduced, as he said, there was the Apple II and Mac
family, and IBM PC, XT, and the very new AT line.  Although he doesn't
mention it, there was also the Commodore 64 line, which must be noticed for
the milions of machines sold in four years.

As Mr Levine points out, the norm was 16 color EGA and nothing between the
CPU and the CRT phosphor but a wire.  The entire Apple line, in fact, made a
fetish of minimalist hardware.  Sound on the PC was a square wave whose
frequency you could even adjust.  On the Mac, a DAC, giving the possibility
of the most complex sound you wanted to code, with again nothing but software
between the CPU and the speaker.

If you wanted more, you could buy custom video boards with dot resolution up
to 1,024 x 768, and multicolor too.  You could (and still can) buy multi-
channel DAC boards for the PC if you were serious about sound synthesis.
More CPU horsepower?  Maybe a little.  There was a 68000 board that connected
to the PC bus.  A National 16032 board too.  Oh, and don't forget the T400 (?)
transputer board with OCCAM.  But these got into bucks.

Into this environment comes the Amiga.  Blitter for video, coprocessors
for video and audio, four DACs and stereo.  Something like 25 DMA channels
tightly woven together to obtain the maximum throughput under most kinds of
software load.  And oh yes, multitasking.  Useless little feature.  One final
feature; you could have the whole system for under $2K.  For the same bucks
you could have an IBMPC with 640K, one drive, and CGA but no monitor.  An AT,
with roughly equivalent CPU horsepower was way off in the clouds at about
$6K.  For many people, they might as well have wished for a Cray X-MP, since
the difference between $24M and $6K the same size as the difference between $6K
and what they could afford.

Times have changed and nowadays you can have an AT with hard disk and EGA
but no monitor for about $2K.  The Amiga 2500 with 68020 is a bit more.
You can have a PC for $600, or an Amiga 500 which walks away from it in
every department.  Amiga peripherals are price-competitive with PC add-ons,
although you have to pick from among only 10 vendors instead of 100.  Same
with software.  Amiga software is as good and as bad as PC software.  The
difference is that AmigaDOS waves bye-bye before it dies, while the PC just
freezes.

Sure you can buy more CPU horsepower in the IBMPC world.  I just saw a 35MHz
iAPX386 machine with VGA for a base price of $11,000.  Wow!  The fully
configured system tested by Byte cost (if memory serves) over $16K!  And the
improved Cray Research Y-MP is down to $23 million.  But what can you get
for a competitive price of, say $3K?  Stereo audio with four analog channels?
Not really.  4096 simultaneous colors?  No (VGA is 256 out of 11M).  How
about multitasking?  No...Well, you can run UNIX, or MINIX, but only if you
want to roll-your-own software.  Maybe OS/2 in a couple more years.  What
about CPU speed?  Not clock rate in MHz, but how fast does it draw/calcu-
late/compile?  Nah.

You can buy add-ons for better video for the Mac.  It costs a grand.  But
hay, anybody who'd buy a computer from Apple has already admitted he has too
much money and wants the problem fixed.  I think the Mac II even has
reasonable audio.  The price is almost competitive if you buy the stripped
down model (but then you can't add the video...).

Amiga software is cheaper.  Partly this is the market.  Less business users
own Amigas, so margins are lower on Amiga products.  But partly it's the
software.  IBM and Mac people havn't figured it out yet, but a real OS makes
it much easier to write programs that talk to each other, or run simultaneously.
Sure you can do a file download and edit simultaneously on a PC, who needs
multitasking?  The answer is that ANY two (or three or four) things can
run concurrently on an Amiga, and nobody had to design all four programs
specifically to run with each other.  There's no dark magic to writing programs 
that multitask on the Amiga, so development costs are way lower.  Is AmigaDOS
buggy? A little, sure.  Not worse than other programs the same size, and better
than many.  Just try installing a new TSR utility on a well accessorized
PC and tell me the OS is gonna take care of the resulting chaos.

So Mr. Levine, I guess I'm guilty as charged.  I still think the Amiga is an
optimal mix of features and price.  But it would serve you well to remember:

1.  Clock frequency does not determine CPU horsepower.  A 68000 at 7.16 MHz
    is probably about on a par with a '286 at 10 or 12 MHz.  A lot also
    depends on the speed of the peripherals.  Much as I've heard Amiga users
    wail about the slowness of the floppy and filesystem, it still seems
    pretty speedy compared to a PC.  And I've never heard Amiga users complain
    about video throughput even when they are comparing against MacII's.

2.  You don't have to be the fastest to be the best.  Not every customer
    needs to do three dimensional solid modelling in real time.  It is the
    mix of features AND price that makes a difference.  Compare any PC
    against a Cray purely on the basis of CPU horsepower, and the PC will
    lose every time.

3.  It is the configuration purchased by most users that should be used
    to judge a PC.  Just because you can buy a 24-bitplane board for the
    MacII does not mean more than a handfull will buy one.

All this aside, the Amiga may still never be the biggest-selling PC.  People
don't trust its DOS compatibility.  It has a bad, and mostly undeserved
reputation.  And now, finally, you can buy a standard machine from Apple
with almost equivalent capabilities if you have lots of money.  But the
Amiga is still a success.  Over a milion units sold.  Pulled Commodore out
of the jaws of corporate death.  Supports an entire industry of sfotware and
hardware.  And even after four years, it is still more than adequate for the
old and new tasks this writer puts it to.

Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, and now, I give you mine too.