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From: elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.games,comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Mac and Amiga (Games--Macintosh vs A500)
Message-ID: <00668212609@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM>
Date: 5 Mar 91 22:36:49 GMT
References: <19467@cbmvax.commodore.com> <27253@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <1991Mar3.223546.12173@rice.edu> <1991Mar4.013846.26519@gsm001.uucp> <1991Mar4.030134.7183@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home
Lines: 41

From article <19467@cbmvax.commodore.com>, by raible@cbmvax.commodore.com (Bob Raible - LSI Design):
> In fact Jay Miner (former Atari guru) and Co. designed the Amiga to be
> the ultimate game machine. It wasn't until CBM came along that the
> decision was made to make a personal computer out of it. Soon afterwards

Wrongo. One of the original Amiga guys wrote a story about the history of
Amiga Corporation (RIP). A bunch of doctors wanted to build a game machine,
and hired Miner & friends to do it. Then the bottom dropped out of the game
machine market, around '83 or so. So then they re-worked it into a personal
computer. Jerry Pournelle saw one of the original prototypes, which was a
bunch of TTL stuffed onto a couple of huge circuit boards and kludged onto
a Sage Microsystems 68000-based machine's bus, & wrote about it in Byte in
'84 or so. This was long before Commodore came into the picture.

Commodore's contribution was to force the developers to release it to the
public before the OS was finished. Commodore was a bit strapped for cash,
at the time, and there were rumors of bankruptcy. Thus the popular
conception that Amigas are unreliable... in the early days, they WERE. As
you'd suspect, given that the developers told Commodore that they'd need
six more months and Commodore gave them two, releasing the code
un-finished.

> deciding to take the Amiga upscale. The result was a marketing fiasco,
> the A1000. This was to some extent corrected by the subsequent design

Too true. I flamed Commodore myself back then, saying that if they expected
to be taken seriously with no hard drive interface, they were deluding
themselves. A machine with no hard drive interface is a game machine.
Period. Of course Commodore pointed to Tecmar, but Tecmar never shipped.
It was over ten months before hard drive interfaces started shipping in
quantity for the Amiga.

And now the problem in the Amiga hard drive interface market is glut :-).
(I can think of over a dozen SCSI interfaces, ranging from awefully slow
programmed I/O capable of maybe 200K/second, to the super-fast DMA designs
capable of 2MB/sec or more).

--
Eric Lee Green   (318) 984-1820  P.O. Box 92191  Lafayette, LA 70509
elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM               uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg
 Looking for a job... tips, leads appreciated... inquire within...