Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!psuvax1!rutgers!ucsd!ames!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Amiga or PC-AT ?
Message-ID: <5114@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 7 Aug 88 04:53:53 GMT
References: <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP> <554@gort.cme-durer.ARPA>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 57

In message <554@gort.cme-durer.ARPA>, brickman@cme-durer.ARPA (Jonathan E. Brickman) says:
>I suspect the answer hinges on just exactly how much $$$ you've got
>available.  I would ordinarily vote heavily against the Amiga, because
>of three things:
>(1) Awkward and rigid color mapping arrangement.
>(2) Very limited software availability.
>(3) Unreliable operating system.

part 1) may partially apply (HAM mode certainly is awkward enough).
But software availability and the reliability of the operating system
have been non-issues for at least the last year (as you'd expect, from
a machine released over 3 years ago). This is not 1985, when there
were only two Amiga programs on the market and the Amiga crashed if
you touched the mouse :-}. 

The main vote against the Amiga is simply that it will not do what he
wants to do (4096 colors on-screen at one time, in 640x400
resolution). 

>similar capability, you might want to consider it.  Please bear in mind,
>though, that if you were to go with an AT with a VGA, you would be buying
>a _very_ well-supported machine with a very polished and multiply-compatible
>graphics card running two popular operating systems (PC-DOS and OS/2, with
>probable future X-Windows on larger machines).  Whereas if you were
>to buy and Amiga, you are buying outdated hardware (68000 at low speed --
>almost nothing uses those things anymore), a cheaply built and unexpandable
>graphics capability (uses interlaced graphics -- hard on the eyes at
>max resolution), an operating system which crashes roughly three times as
>frequently as PC-DOS 2.0 (3.3 is much better yet) with corresponding loss
>of data, work, temper, and possibly disk data, and very limited
>expandability (limited simply because very few companies build the stuff).

Well, at work I am using an Amiga with 5 megabytes of memory, a 68020
with 68881, and a fairly reliable operating system (release 1.2 of the
OS). I could run Unix if I wanted to (but I don't have the hard drive
capacity -- the machine has only a 30 meg Miniscribe right now).  It
has a FlickerFixer expansion in it with a Multisync monitor to
eliminate interlace. We are currently doing image processing on 768K
image files (8-bit RGB). I have been running it, using a BETA TEST
version of 1.3 system software, for over 4 months of heavy development
use, and have not lost a single bit of data off of either hard drive
or floppy. I crash it fairly regularly, mostly by passing bad pointers
within my programs and getting an address exception, or by running
buggy public domain software. But under those conditions, an IBM
compatible would crash just as badly.
   Your arguments would have been valid 2 years ago, in 1986, for the
Amiga. But they would have also been valid in 1983 for the IBM PC.
Time moves on. If you do not need higher resolutions than currently
available, the Amiga makes a fine little graphics box, expandable to a
degree you'll never find with any MS-DOS machine (quick -- how many
users of MS-DOS have machines with 5 megabytes of memory, FULLY
ACCESSIBLE BY ALL PROGRAMS?).

--
Eric Lee Green    ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg
          Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509              
       MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.