Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!swbatl!texbell!moxie!texsun!newstop!sun!frisbee!jcb From: jcb@frisbee.Sun.COM (Jim Becker) Newsgroups: alt.sources.amiga Subject: Re: Amiga Blues Message-ID: <140833@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 17 Aug 90 00:18:06 GMT References: <20260001@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com> <1037@flash.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Lines: 88 mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (Real Amigas have keyboard garages) Meyer) writes: In article stergios@portia.Stanford.EDU (stergios marinopoulos) writes: speaking of winers, is this the same mwm that went on and on and on and on about the new bus specs, that they were incompatible, and finally bryce made a custom jig for? my, how people change. Not it isn't. Bryce never made the custom jig. CBM cost me thousands of dollars and months of time by making what amounted to a cosmetic change. If you read what I've written here carefully, you'll see that I mention that change as a justifiable reason to be pissed, because it caused expansion hardware to be delayed and A1000 expansion hardware to cost more than it should. A number of the original hardware manufacturers lost a hell of a lot more money because of changes made. The Pal box from Byte by Byte cost well into six digits to get out in even limited production, using the original Zorro standard. Then CBM decided to drop this for a different form factor. That's a lot of bucks to piss away just to have things changed. Of course no one in their right mind would produce cards for Zorro, even if there was a limited market for them at the time. The PalJr that was shipped by Byte by Byte was actually hardware that was designed by the Amiga folks to be introduced at the time of the launch. (Byte by Byte bought rights to it from CBM.) It was all working and on schedule within Amiga (well, as best as the schedule was). However CBM canned it and decided not to come out with harddisk and expansion memory hardware. So it took another year and a half to get something out, and people developed with 512K and floppies. This is a good example of shooting yourself in the foot early on. Even if they did a limited production run of this hardware, and charged a lot of money, they would have created a developers platform that would have enhanced software deveoplment enormously. I never flamed CBM about what the vendors did - that's not CBM's fault. I never flamed CBM for promising one thing and delivering another - for the most part, they delivered on their promises. Live! Genlock, SCSI, Unix? Perhaps CBM is a lot better than Atari, but these four elements were released at least two years after they were working in the lab. I know that it takes a long time to get things into production, but this was not based as much on technical problems as political. Although never an employee, from what I could see going on this was my impression. The advancement of my software (Multi-Media) depended on harddisk and genlock to make it snazzy. I quit waiting for hardware in Fall of 1987, and for the most part nothing came out for over a year in any kind of reliable volume. Can't live on crackers that long.. I have to admit they did a good job with the A500, but think if they had put SCSI on it, like the Atari, there would have been a big difference. I never flamed the software vendors for providing software that didn't multitask - I rarely have problems with that. All I ever did was flame CBM for doing everything they could to kill the A1000 expansion market. That resulted in expansion hardware being delayed and overpriced. If you tried to buy hardware at reasonable prices/times (i.e. - what it would have been if CBM hadn't made those changes), it was unreliable because it didn't follow spec. That wasn't CBMs fault. There is a lot of blame that can be placed on CBM not following a straight track. They have had some pretty shakey relations with dealers and others in the past. From what I've heard things are better. So what's the change? I haven't been in the Amiga world for a while, but hear that it's gotten better. The sad thing is that the Amiga attracted some of the brightest and most creative people I've seen, who were eventually turned off in one way or the other by CBM. There were more developers originally for the Amiga than any other computer. They seemed to come in waves though, with a high burn-out/turnoff rate. Too bad - it's a great machine, and could have really made a big difference in the computer world. Five years have gone by, and it's still ahead of plenty computers, but will never go bigtime 'cause of it's sorted history. Anyone want an A1000 with Zorro backplane?