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From: forrest@blia.BLI.COM (Jon Forrest)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Initial Opinion of Amiga
Message-ID: <939@blia.BLI.COM>
Date: Thu, 13-Nov-86 12:25:09 EST
Article-I.D.: blia.939
Posted: Thu Nov 13 12:25:09 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Nov-86 20:07:54 EST
Organization: Britton Lee, Los Gatos, CA
Lines: 46

I recently received an Amiga on loan from a computer book
publishing company in order to test programs from a new
Amiga book I am doing a technical review of. I'm doing
the review even though I told them that I don't know anything
about Amiga's.

Anyway, I started this project with an open mind. Now, after
about 2 weeks of experience on the Amiga I thought I'd give
an accessment of the Amiga from the point of view of an experienced
computer programmer, although one without any Amiga experience or knowledge.

My opinion is that, with the exception of being able to display
many colors, the Amiga is pretty dismal. I deliberatly didn't look
into the internal aspects of AmigaDos but base my opinion on
user interface problems. I should also note that I mainly use
the CLI interface.

The first thing I noticed is that the Amiga doesn't use Control-S
and Control-Q to stop and start output to the screen. Control-S
does work but only carriage return seems to resume output. The
XON/XOFF protocol is so common that I would hope that there is some
good reason why Amiga doesn't use it.

The next thing that bothered my is that the Amiga is SLOOOOOOW in
performing tasks that a standard speed IBM PC can do much better.
For example, running DIR is unacceptably slow. Yet, this is a very
commonly run command. The CD command has the same problem.

What follows is a short list of other annoying features of the Amiga:

1. The lack of wild card characters is a bother.
2. I couldn't find the command for removing a directory.
3. The file system is very similar to Unix and MS-DOS. Why couldn't
	they use the same pathname syntax of one of these?
4. The amount of time it takes to respond to Control-C seems unpredictable.
	This is true even though I was running a compile which does I/O
	like crazy, which on the IBM is when Control-C's can be detected.

When I read other people's submissions complaining about systems I know
something about I often think to myself that the person who wrote
the article was obviously suffering from a severe case of cranial-anal
inversion. But, being in the same situation is a very enlightening
experience.

Jon Forrest
ucbvax!mtxinu!blia!forrest