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From: sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga: A market analysis
Message-ID: <5954@linus.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 30-May-87 23:45:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: linus.5954
Posted: Sat May 30 23:45:18 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Jun-87 01:14:41 EDT
References: <1444@cc5.bbn.com.BBN.COM>
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 47
In-reply-to: denbeste@cc5.bbn.com.BBN.COM's message of 30 May 87 20:19:15 GMT

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.1 of Thu Apr  9 1987 on linus (berkeley-unix)



>   Engineering development workstation: This market consists of trying to
>   replace all the terminals which are hooked with central computers with
>   individual computers on each engineer's desk. Main competitors in this
>   market are Apollo and Sun....
>   A1000 loses out here: no networking and no hard disk. A2000 may just
>   barely squeeze in if someone writes the software - then folks who don't
>   need networking may consider it. I consider this an outside possibility;
>   Commodore just doesn't have the reputation that it needs;
>   "You want us to buy our development tools from a maker of Video Games???"

Actually, I'm fairly confident that the Amiga, if properly marketed,
*could* sell well as a low-end CAD/engineering workstation, a cheap
alternative to Sun workstations.

Hard disks, Ethernet, and NFS are available for Amiga 1000s, and the
situation should be even better with A2000s.  And Amiga graphics and
speed would certainly be fast enough (esp. with a 68020 upgrade) to
compete effectively with Suns as engineering workstations.  But there
are two more conditions I believe are necessary for Amiga to compete
effectively in this area.

1.  The graphics *must* be improved still further.  A maximum
noninterlaced resolution of 640 x 200 was neat for personal computers
in 1985, but it's not enough to compete with Sun today.  (Even IBM
PC/AT's have add-on video boards that give better resolution than
this!)  If it were possible to get 1000 x 1000 resolution on the
A2000, Commodore might then have a real winner in the engineering
market. 

2.  AmigaDos has got to go.  If Unix became available on A2000's, then
engineering houses that have standardized on Unix workstations (like
Suns) could simply hang Amigas and Suns interchangeably on the same
Ethernet.  The engineers wouldn't need to learn another (not as good)
operating system; and the same CAD tools would run on both Amigas and
Suns.



Steven Litvintchouk
MITRE Corporation
Burlington Road
Bedford, MA  01730

Fone:  (617)271-7753
ARPA:  sdl@mitre-bedford
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