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From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Mac/Amiga religious war (was: Macintosh OS)
Message-ID: <1990Jun17.142040.21492@math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 90 14:20:40 GMT
References: <26637.266e6ed4@vaxb.acs.unt.edu> <6567@scolex.sco.COM> <1990Jun9.021855.8767@wolves.uucp>
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Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
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In article <1990Jun9.021855.8767@wolves.uucp> ggw@wolves.UUCP (Gregory G. Woodbury) writes:
>In article <6567@scolex.sco.COM> seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan) writes:
>>In article <26637.266e6ed4@vaxb.acs.unt.edu> ac08@vaxb.acs.unt.edu writes:
>>>> And on the Amiga, and the NeXT, you get both. [CLI & GUI]
>>>And once Amiga finishes polishing theirs, it'll be a helluva system.

>>Uhm, I hate to tell you this, but many people (including myself) prefer the
>>Amiga to the Mac.  Why?  It's faster, it has a "true OS," supports better
>>hardware, etc.

>>The GUI and CLI are both superior to what the Mac offers; the CLI is better
>>than the Mac can *ever* offer (excluding A/UX).

>	Unfortunately for the Amiga zelots, the maker doesn't have the
>wherewithal to turn it into a major player and all the good software is
>user contributed stuff.  And the hardware support is also mostly third
>party.
Third party hardware support is an asset, not a liability. It's one of the
benefits of an open architecture. It lets you pick and choose what kinds of
peripherals to obtain, without being locked into a single vendor's pricing
fixtures. Good user contributed software is also an asset - it shows that
the user community is interested in the machine and actively working with it.
It means that people are spending brainpower doing innovative projects on
the machine, instead of blindly pointing and clicking thru canned menus. It
means that the machine is alive, and in use, not just gathering dust in a
corner somewhere, or generating BTUs.

>	As for the Amiga GUI.  Its a pretty poor GUI at best (unless
>they have improved the default resolution of the monitor).

That interlaced video sure was ugly to look at, that's for sure. Apparently
the new A3000 has a flicker-killer circuit. (But I don't know the details, I
own an Atari ST. And the ST has hi-resolution without interlace...)
>
>	Unfortunately for the Mac enthusiasts, Apple is loseing its
>focus and costs way too much (unless you get it via a discount program).
>And without A/UX it doesn't really multitask worth a darn.

Was OS9/68K ever made available for the Mac? It seems that in the Unix arena
you need a 68030 based system before you can think about object-code
compatibility. It'd be nice to have compatibility for the humble 68000.
I've seen A/UX, and seen enough to know that I don't want to *use* A/UX.
I've *used* ST-Minix, and it's decent, but not too speedy. Of course, OS9
is a little more pricey than Minix...
--
  -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan
  ... the glass is always greener on the side ...