Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!gatech!ulysses!hector!eric From: eric@hector.UUCP (Eric Lavitsky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Why Sell Amiga (Amiga vs. Mac II) Message-ID: <10182@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> Date: 24 Mar 88 19:53:32 GMT References: <1661@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> Sender: netnews@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com Reply-To: eric@hector (Eric Lavitsky) Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill Lines: 114 Summary: My opinions on Amiga vs Mac System Software In this sverely edited article <1661@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> c162-fe@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Jonathan Dubman) writes: >Re: Why are you selling your Amiga?? > >>I've recently put my Amiga up for sale on misc.forsale; I'm going to >>get a Mac II, which I can get at an educational discount. I think >>the reasons behind the choice are interesting. After all, I think >>almost anyone will agree that, in theory, there's nothing a Mac can >>do an Amiga can't do better. With a superb architecture, an I/O >>system well-matched with the operating system, and other similar >>things, why would one want to switch to a simpler, more conventional >>machine? >2. Apple puts LOTS of money into RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. They have a >Cray II. They have large task forces on graphics, font art and research, and >the human interface. Their fonts are professional. The user interface has no >holes. I have my complaints, but it is a slick user interface. I might as >well give the biggest complaints now. >So that's why Apple charges high prices for their machines, along with millions >of other comments. Now: > >Commodore sells low-cost, high-powered computers. Why are they low cost? Also note that that is one of the forte's of CBM. They excel at cost reduction and mass production techniques - they've been doing it for years. But low cost of hardware does not mean low sophistication of hardware, and the software *must* match the level of the hardware. >SPEED OF MICROCOMPUTERS > >At normal operations, the Mac II is fast. At floating point operations, the >STANDARD Mac II is VERY FAST. The floating point coprocessor was a GREAT >MOVE on Apple's part. However, the speed of the Mac II is basically in >SPITE OF the operating system, not because of it. (If you really want to >have fun, flame OS/2. What is it now, 2-megs and running slower than MS-DOS?) Yeah - try Dale's new math libraries on a stock Amiga, an Amiga with a 25MHZ 68881 on an A2620, a Mac SE and a Mac II. I think you'll find the Amiga kicks the pants off the other machines for floating point - and all in a multitasking environment! >>On the Amiga, we've had TEXTCRAFT??!? Scribble!?!? The thing had >>dot commands, for God's sake! What are we, troff afficandos? > >(Hey! Some of us are :-) Steve Jobs PERSONALLY OVERSAW the writing of >Macwrite and MacPaint. They had to live up to his vision of the machine. >Read "Steve Jobs - The Journey is the Reward" by Jeffrey S. Young. >They were PART of the machine. On the Amiga, the vision was different. I'm >not even sure what it was, or is. I think it's more of a hardware vision, >whereas the Mac's vision was almost entirely software. The Amiga is the most >impressive piece of computer hardware ever produced in its price range. >It was made by real hackers, and I think originally designed for them as well! Absolutely - my biggest gripe with the Amiga has been the speed at which the System software has evolved. To make an Amiga application work well and fast takes less work on an Amiga (than a Mac); to make it look beautiful requires much more work than on a Mac. One example comes to mind - Jim Bayless at New Horizons spent oodles of time making his applications look like Mac applications, but heck - I don't always have that much time to spend. Just for fun the other day, I started looking through my old V25 manuals which I had just gotten back from a loan to a friend. I was looking for lost material like the blitter docs and decided to look through the Intuition manual... It hasn't changed much since then - and the thing that really caught my eye was the section on style in the Intuition user interface. The contradiction was something like this (from memory): "Be as daring as you like, don't be afraid to use wonderful imagery etc" and "These are the suggested guidelines for standard Amiga menus and key shortcuts". 'Cmon - "suggested guidelines"? - how wimpy can you get? I think RJ had some neat ideas, but not imposing some stricter guidelines on how applications should look was not one of them. I think he does realize now that other standard resources are needed across applications (file requesters, color requesters etc). Let's face it - the original folks were forced to rush their stuff out and then were laid off. One of the biggest mistakes of the older Commodore regime was to not put the highest value on the Amiga software people. A neat piece of hardware is nothing without good software to back it up. Things have been improving lately - they're finally hiring more people (still not enough though), but in relation to the number of people they have, the deadlines are still ridiculous. The entire Amiga programming staff was down at one point to 2 people on the West coast and perhaps 3 people on the East coast - can you say "understaffed"? Now it's more like 5 or 6 people out West and 6 or 7 back East. Yeah - we're gonna catch up to the Mac "real soon now". Hopefully, developers can help fill the gaps. >>Deluxe paint. Suppose you want to do some hardcopy, like posters? >>Maps? diagrams or charts for a homework paper or presentation? Why >>can't the thing conveniently work with an image larger than the >>screen like, say, the size of A PIECE OF PAPER???? Oh, sorry, I'll >>do it SIDEWAYS. Right. Even MacPaint lets you work on a page at a >>time. And MacPaint has been topped since. Why is this acceptable? > >It is not acceptable. The Mac blows away the Amiga in printed output. It >could be said that the Mac INVENTED computerized printed output. But the >Amiga blows away the Mac in animation. (And if you want my opinion, nothing on >the Mac is half as good as Deluxe Paint. Kudos to DAN SILVA and Electronic >Arts! You want to know the key? The natural ability to cut out any region >and DRAW WITH IT. The difference between this and MacPaint is very much like >the difference between recursion in C and in BASIC.) Hey - if you were a Mac owner and you came to see Dave Berezowski's presentation on the 1.3 printer device at the JAUG meeting last week, you would have been drooling all over the place - try using any of the neat new color printers on a Mac II! Now laser printers are another story... (nice job Dave!) Eric ARPA: eric@topaz.rutgers.edu "Lithium is no longer available UUCP: ...{wherever!}ulysses!eric on credit..." ...{wherever!}rutgers!topaz!eric - from Buckaroo Banzai SNAIL: 34 Maplehurst Ln, Piscataway, NJ 08854