Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!uunet!cbmvax!daveh From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Worrying about new Macs? Message-ID: <15344@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 23 Oct 90 17:06:37 GMT References: <41371@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <123@gorf.UUCP> Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 69 In article <123@gorf.UUCP> rms@gorf.mn.org (Roger M. Shimada) writes: >Amiga vaporware: > I think the Amiga has the dubious honor of the having > some of the worse kept or never to be completed > products. I picked up the first copy of AmigaWorld, > and once in awhile think about Live! which took awhile > to release, the Toaster, UNIX...and unspeakables like > the Tecmar add-ons and Turbo Pascal. I don't think the Amiga's worse than anything else in this respect, only that [a] we all know it better and [b] it was in the rather unusual position of having a magazine on it printed up before it was ever shown. Any time a new machine has been introduced (and there have been quite a few new one introed since I began to mess around with computers in '76, though many of them haven't made it this far), all kinds of companies announce support. Some make it, some don't. Some stay with their intentions, some reconsider. No big surprise. >Amiga floppy drives: > Using the blitter to do track based I/O was an interesting cost > saving measure that wasn't worth it. 1.44MB floppies are now common > in both the PC and Mac worlds. The blitter doesn't do track I/O; the actual I/O is done via a dedicated DMA slot on the chip bus. If you don't think this was a good idea, you should see what happens to a Mac during disk I/O. The main reason the Amiga system stays active during a floppy disk transfer is that all the floppy timing is guaranteed in hardware, regardless of what you have the CPU doing at the time. 1.44/1.72MB floppies aren't impossible, just trickier. I have previously described three ways this can be done on the Amiga with simple hardware, though I don't know how Applied Engineering does theirs. > One of the first things that many people could do with > the current generation of computers is write. One of > the normal steps involved in writing is printing. ... > Most people will be using dot-matrix printers. Amigas > loose to Macs here. This is inexcusable, as Apple's 9-pin > dot-matrix print quality hasn't changed significantly > since 1983 - when they did it on the Lisa. They only did one printer. And that's all you hook up to the Mac. If Commodore supported only one kind of printer, they could have had software that did everything with 140DPI in mind. However, the Amiga philosophy was to make things as open as possible. So they supported printer device drivers to support any kind of printer, with vastly different resolutions. Early print dumps and programs didn't support this well. Currently, I can get a printout on a 360DPI dot matrix, 300 DPI HPLJ, or any Postscript printer that's pretty close to what that printer's capable of. So at least some of the market's software has caught up -- if you're still expecting miracles from TextCraft, you may have a long wait... > Last I read AmigaDOS would not run under Amiga UNIX, which if > true, will be a media laughingstock when compared to A/UX. Don't count on it. Apple wants to make UNIX people into Macintosh people, and they are even trying to promote the Mac GUI as Yet Another UNIX GUI, of course a proprietary one. Amiga UNIX is for UNIX people who would like to remain UNIX people and use Amigas. So it's standard UNIX. Sure, it would be nice to have Amiga tasks running under UNIX, but not at the expense of doing UNIX right. >Roger M. Shimada rms@gorf.mn.org -or- rms@gorf.sialis.com -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold -REM