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From: gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: InfoWorld review of Amiga
Message-ID: <365@l5.uucp>
Date: Sun, 29-Dec-85 18:35:16 EST
Article-I.D.: l5.365
Posted: Sun Dec 29 18:35:16 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 31-Dec-85 00:39:03 EST
References: <617@ihlpm.UUCP> <2511@dragon.fluke.UUCP> <1958@islenet.UUCP> <309@3comvax.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 61

Please take this article in the spirit in which it's offerred.
I'm not trying to flame Amiga or amiga-lovers, just trying to inject
some reality into Mike Schwartz's critique of a "detrimental" Amiga
review in InfoWorld...

In article <309@3comvax.UUCP>, mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz) writes:
> The latest issue of InforWorld reviews the Amiga, and is a real detriment
> to the Amiga.  Not only did the article contain several
> mistakes, but they reviewed version 1.0 of the workbench and kickstart,
> which we knew had bugs.  Now, 1.1 has been out for a few weeks,

Maybe infoworld was one of the sites that got 1.0 after waiting for
1.1.  Or maybe they wrote the review a few weeks ago.  Lord knows even
the Usenet sometimes takes a few weeks to get an article to me.

> My Amiga crashes all the time when I pass extra parameters to function
> calls, etc., but during normal use, system crashes are rare. 

This is a recommendation of the machine?  Traditional 68000 Unix C
compilers don't coredump your C programs when you pass extra
parameters, they just ignore the extras.  Let alone crashing the whole
system.  Sounds like they botched the function call convention.

> InfoWorld also talked mostly about the 256K machine, which is like
> reviewing a 64K IBM PC.  The Amiga is an 8+Megabyte of RAM machine, 
> and those of us who own Amigas are just licking our chops waiting for
> the equivalent of an AST card.  The Amiga with 8+ megabytes and the
> 68020 should be compared with the IBM AT and MicroVax.

A vaporware comparison if I ever heard one.  Keep licking.

>                                        "As an aside, we forsee a flood
> of bad software written for the Amiga by programmers unaccustomed to
> multi-tasking programs..." is pretty stupid, if you ask me. 

I've seen too many programs written for SunWindows that sit there
burning 100% of the CPU polling when they should be select()ing.  I
suspect that people who buy Suns are more experienced than those
who buy Amigas (on the average, no flames please).  So I expect that
many Amiga developers will make the same kinds of mistakes and worse.

(Hmm, I recall that VM/370 had a test for polling loops in its supervisor
instruction emulation code, which would just sleep the virtual machine
until something interesting happened.  Commodore, are you listening?)

>                                                              InfoWorld
> did not even mention a single piece of software that we have all been
> seeing and hearing about since they were anounced and demonstrated at
> the June launch. 
> Another quote: "Judging from the number of beta-test programs floating
> around, we can expect to get a chance to judge the software side of the
> Amiga system a lot sooner than we could when the Macintosh was first
> introduced."  Well, in June, the Amiga had more software packages announced
> ...

You are just confirming what they said.  "There's lots of software being
announced and demoed and beta-tested and very little being shipped yet."

I'm glad InfoWorld hasn't fallen to the level of Byte in reviewing random
alpha test stuff to beat their ridiculous lead times for articles.
I want a review that tells me what I get if I walk in and buy one.