Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nuchat!sugar!karl From: karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: How 'Bout HyperCard! Summary: Sorry, I was impelled to respond to this "constructive" Amiga flame Message-ID: <1997@sugar.UUCP> Date: 15 May 88 13:26:35 GMT References: <15372@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <31411@linus.UUCP> <5324@cup.portal.com> <2755@tekig5.TEK.COM> Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX Lines: 76 In article <2755@tekig5.TEK.COM>, wayneck@tekig5.TEK.COM (Wayne Knapp) writes: > ...I was really beginning to wonder about Amiga fans. I take heart that some > people at least realize that the Amiga is just a machine and not a god. I don't think wanting Hypercard means that we don't think this Amiga is a god ;-) No. Hypercard says more about the resources Apple has and dedicates to the Mac. It may say more for the individual talents of the couple of guys who wrote it. From what I read, HyperCard may have been a gift to Apple in the sense that Unix was a gift to AT&T: the authors did it more or less without supervision or corporate intervention. > 1. Simple is better, specail hardware can give great results but often makes > programs hard to write/modify/create. I prefer simple hardware that is > flexible and fast. As an example, instead of a cooper/blitter/whatever > I would rather have a simple bitmap with lots of bits per/pixel. Fix > the resolution give me a powerful processor that I can program in C or > whatever I like. I believe simple fast hardware really opens the door > for ideas. True power is in ideas not hardware. So in the meantime, workstations and Mac IIs are the only machines that come close to the power to have remotely reasonable windowing performance without a blitter. Hey, you know, the blitter's not that hard to program, I mean, you can call C routines that say "move this rectangle in this raster from here to here" or "move this memory from here to here and perform this simple masking function on it" or draw a line from here to here. Those are the kinds of functions you're going to be doing anyway, and when you can't use the blitter, you can always use the CPU. Therefore, a blitter is an accelerator of common display (and other) functions. The argument that it is restrictive to have such an accelerator, when its presence can be made invisible to the programmer, is facetious. > 2. I hate to wait for computers. Buy a Cray. The point is, you can only buy as much performance as you can afford. Also, too bad you dismiss the blitter: A $550 Amiga 500 will knock the socks off of a Mac II manipulating windows, something most of us spend a whole lot of time doing. > 3. I hate to have to guess at why something isn't working. Memory protection and an operating system to use it, then? [Long chart comparing Amiga, Apple Mac, Atari ST & IBM PC deleted] Naah, your chart is hosed. You substitute Mac II in everywhere for the Mac to get A's for the Mac in performance, resolution, expandability, but not price, which for most of us makes the II "removed from consideration." If you separated the two, Mac would receive poor or OK marks for speed, expandability, graphics resolution and number of colors and Mac II would be F+ on price, not that it's a bad deal, just that it's a lot of money. C+ for price on Amiga? Come on. B- for Amiga speed vs B for Atari ST? We're not talking absolute CPU cycles here, except in the rarest cases, we're talking "How fast is it to use the machine?" and if you use the two machines to actually DO anything, I mean like click open drawers and move windows around and run real programs, you'll never notice the 11% faster CPU clock: the Amiga just blows the ST away. (I, too, own both.) > ... It shows that many Amiga programmers have great telent. Yes. The machine has attracted many great programmers. > Remember the machine is useless with out > the programmers. No machine can stand on it's own, it is mainly what people > have done with the machine. So I suggest people should respect the effort of > other people instead of respecting the machine. Sort of... OK, it is mainly what people have done with the machine, but it's also what the machine can do. HAM was a curiosity when the Amiga first came out, but thanks to the foresight of its creators, it became very, very useful when DigiView, and finally HAM paint programs and utilities, came out. So it takes both a good machine and good programmers, and you fail to make note of the part a powerful machine plays in attracting good programmers. -- "Now here's something you're really going to like!" -- Rocket J. Squirrel ..!{bellcore!tness1,uunet!nuchat}!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018