Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!jade!eris!mwm From: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (Don't have strength to leave) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Future Amigas & suggestions (Very Long) Message-ID: <1728@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Tue, 18-Nov-86 22:55:57 EST Article-I.D.: jade.1728 Posted: Tue Nov 18 22:55:57 1986 Date-Received: Wed, 19-Nov-86 21:52:11 EST References: <320@plx.UUCP> <9304@sun.uucp> <323@plx.UUCP> Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (Don't have strength to leave) Meyer) Distribution: net Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 219 I can't STAND it. Ed has come up with such utter bilge this time, I have to say something. In article <323@plx.UUCP> ed@plx.UUCP (Ed Chaban) writes: >These are markets? Come on now! anyone interested in doing professional >video will use a PIXAR or something. Amateurs may be interested in using >the Amiga but this is not a serious market. (no starving artist can >afford a $2500 machine) Not true. I worked for a company that was doing quite well selling video images to small local stations, and was doing well because we sold our images for much less than our competitors. That's the way of vertical markets. If the Amiga can do the job for an order of magnitude less than the competition, it'll sell like hotcakes. >So what? 512K is nothing these days. What you failed to mention Chuck is >the fact that most memory expansions for the Amiga take up the Bus so >further expansion is impossible. Which is a good reason not to buy them. If that's the worst you can say about the Amiga expansion, then C/A has done a *great* job. >I *HOPE* I'm proven wrong here, but I understand that the new 68010 >1 Meg machine will be a seperate product (although completely compatable >with the A1000) and the Commodore will *NOT* make an upgrade available. Commodore doesn't *have* to make them available. I've got a 2.5Meg 68010 Amiga *right now*. The only thing I know of that I'd like from the new one is the extended addressing in the custom chips. And that may be available as an upgrade. Since I don't set policy for CBM, I can't say for sure. What's the source you're so sure of? >Yep! I am making statements based on preconcieved standards. That's what >standards are for! You cannot successfully market a product without *AT LEAST* >matching the capabilities of your competition. Like the Piece of Crap matched CP/M-80? All you could get for it was garbage for the first year or so, and damned little of that. Similar comments apply about the Mac. >The average buyer does not CARE about operating system internals! >He want's a tool to get his work done. All the Amiga Operating System >has done is confuse those programmers who were comfortable with CPM or >MS-Dos or UNIX. You got that right. I tell people to find the software they want to run, and then buy hardware to run on it. And any programmer unable to handle the difference between Unix and AmigaDOS needs to change fields. Since CP/M and MS-Dos aren't really operating systems, I'll cut those people a little slack. But message-passing, multi-tasking OS's are the way the world is going (like, the next ARPA-sponsored Unix release!), so they should look on AmigaDOS/Tripos as a chance to get a running start. >Again, Amiga has *IGNORED* standards and >tried to establish their own. Only Apple and IBM can do that now that >the Personal Computer Marketplace has matured. Tripos is as much of a standard as CP/M or Messy-DOS is, being older then either one. It's about as old as Unix, and trying to claim that Unix is a standard merely shows that you don't know anything about Unix. Since Tripos didn't have mouse/windowing support (oddly enough, there aren't standards for those things on Unix, CP/M or MS-DOS, either) it had to be added. Intuition is nicer and less flexible than Sunstools, which is nicer and less flexible than X (what DEC peddles with Ultrix VAXStations). Actually, CP/M isn't a standard (let's see, three different file systems, and two different user interfaces), and MS-DOS isn't a standard - at best it's a moving target. Ducking those two things was one of the BEST things Amiga did. I've sold all my CP/M systems (all four, two 68K, one 8088/8080, one z80), as I never used the silly things. Getting me to go back to such drek would be harder than getting me to code COBOL for a living. Remember - standards merely freeze what we know now, and are thus to be counted as enemies of progress. It's only natural that the Amiga would be hated by anyone enamored of "standards." > (1) Spreadsheets > a. IBM has Lotus. > b. Mac has EXCEL. > c. AMIGA has MAXIPLAN which was written in C (READ: shit!) > or VIP which ignores all the wonderful hardware. Right. C blows green road runners. But you gotta remember that one of your oh-so-precious "standards" (Unix) is driven by C. But Unix blows green road runners, too. And take a look at the word processors and BASIC on the IBM PC for the first year. Gee, they were automatically translated from the 8080 versions. Talk about ignoring all the hardware (calling the IBM PC hardware wonderful is more than I can stomach). Such things are to be expected early in the life of a new generation of hardware/OS. > (2) Word Processing > a. IBM practically defined it with Wordstar. Don't tell MicroPro that - after all, they wrote WordStar, and were selling it on CP/M-80 boxes long before there was an IBM PC. I think even before there was an 8088. But whether from MicroPro or IBM, WordStar is still a piece of SHIT I wouldn't inflict on anyone but an enemy. > (3) A comittment to keeping the product alive > a. The IBM PC has been around for eons. God, your memory is short. I remember when IBM announced the PC (and it was obsolete THEN). Also, note that there have been new IBM PC's about every two years, and each one has new features that the old ones don't, and little or no upgrade from IBM. Ditto for the operating systems. Why do you think that this is OK for IBM, but so bad for Amiga? > b. The Apple ][ lives on and the Mac has been > here for about 4 years. Right - but can you still buy a stock Mac, with 128K? Gee, I though putting more memory in them was a bad thing. Oh, yeah - you can't do 68010 upgrades on the MAC because the applications software abuses the processor in ways that break on the 68010. To bad - no cheap faster machine for Apple. > c. AMIGA is about a year old and will be > "Replaced" (you said it, I didn't) in > a few months. > Replaced means "another will be sold instead." As longs as 1) the same software runs on both and 2) it's got the same expansion bus, who cares? Every indication is that this will be so. True, a year is a bit short (2 years is closer to normal), but the Amiga had serious birthing pains due to an unnamed twit who mismanaged Commodore and now does the same for Atari. >> My only comment to this is that the Mac and the IBM PC have both been around >> for 4 or more years. If you believe it is possible to create a Lotus or Excel >> or Wordstar or Word in one year on a new machine you are very naive. The *only* > >Only if you use some God-Forsaken-Obscure operating system you mean. Since the applications you like so much are written in assembler, they damned well won't port from MS-DOS machines to an Amiga, or any other machine with a real CPU. You could probably put Unix on an Amiga, and get the C applications (but those are SHIT, or so you claimed), but the resulting system would have been twice as expensive, and MUCH slower. Finally, last time I looked, Apple had as yet to license the Mac OS to anyone else. So you either get to reverse engineer it, or start over from scratch. Face it - of your four "standard" OS's, CP/M, the MAC OS and Messy-DOS are little more than program loaders with some kludges to support special-case multitasking. One requires a CPU that's downwards compatable with the 4004. Another is highly proprietary. The third is about dead. As for the fourth (Unix), I notice that you didn't name any applications that ran on Unix. Is that because they're all "shit?" In any case, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that there were more AmigaDOS systems in use than Unix systems (after all, there are only a couple of hundred thousand Unix boxes out there). And what makes you think Tripos is obscure? I'd been looking at different Tripos boxes for TWO YEARS before the Amiga came out. Guess what - the Amiga was the first 68K box that met all my specs. And guess what it ran? Of course, if your are as well informed about OS's as you are about the Amiga, I wouldn't be surprised if we've already mentioned every OS you're familiar with (quick question - how many OS's does IBM sell? I count at least ten). >The point I was trying to make is that if Commodore was serious about making >the Amiga a success, more time would have been spent on *SOFTWARE* In order >to make up for that dearth of software a quick & dirty Software Kludge Look CAREFULLY at the IBM PC market. Nuts, look at *ANY* computer market. Notice that those machines that have lots of neat software tend to have most of it come from people *other* than the vendor. That means it was written by software houses. Which means that the software houses had the machines. How do you think that they got the machines? Gee, the bought them, just like everybody else. That means that they were being sold. Isn't that odd, that's what CBM has been doing with the Amiga - selling it to developers. The Amiga had more software available when it went on sale than *ANY* micro I'm familiar with when they first went on sale - and that covers all the successfull ones, and quite a few now defunct machines (ok, I'll conceede those micros that were running a hardware/OS combination for which there had been development already). Over the past year, it's been adding software at a faster rate than any micro in it's first year except the Apple ][ (yes, that includes the IBM PC), with the same disclaimers. >called the "Transformer" was created. When that fell on it's ass, the >Sidecar was announced. I understand that the next Amiga will have IBM >Clone Hardware *BUILT IN* Ironic isn't it? the "Better Mousetrap" will >have to rely on an ancient design by a BIG corporation and compete with >similar clones from the far east with *FAR* lower prices. That would be foolish indeed. The most successful dual-processor micro around has been the Compupro DPU, with an 8088/8080, and that had a life of a year or two, between the time the 8088 first started catching on (with QDOS and CP/M-86) and the time the software market got into reasonable shape. Other attempts at such have been dismal failures (can you say "Ohio Scientific"? I knew you could.) Of course, buying an Amiga (with or without an eighty-eighty-sux in it) for IBM PC compatability is crazy. >MADNESS!!! Right. I hope this has helped straighten you out a little. >Ed Chaban (former AMIGA owner!) And I'll add my voice to those requesting that you spread your opinionated mis-information elsewhere, as you no longer own one of the machines discussed in this newsgroup.