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: <5118@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> Date: 7 Aug 88 05:39:43 GMT References: <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP> <554@gort.cme-durer.ARPA> <356@uwslh.UUCP> <17611@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> Followup-To: comp.sys.misc Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas Lines: 100 In message <17611@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>, jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) says: > The Amiga is the world's greatest toy computer. True... although I don't have any Amiga games, I hear that it plays darn good ones. > Fundamental problems: > > 1. The screen is TV resolution. This is not good enough for text. > You can see the dots all too well. It's like using a 1975-vintage > glass TTY, but with color. The screen is NTSC-compatible, you mean, not TV resolution (which chops off the top of NTSC monochrome for the audio signal and the chroma information). Yes, it's like using a 1975-vintage glass TTY, insofar as text display goes, and I'd love a better screen. Commodore has displayed one, 1008x800 or so, monochrome paper-white... I want one, if they ever release it! The problem is that hardware due "Real Soon Now" does not solve my current problems (the limited display capabilities of the Amiga). > 2. Commodore doesn't really believe in hard disks. It's like the > early days of the Mac; everything is diskette-oriented and most > disks seem to be bootable. With a certain amount of pain and anguish, > disk vendors have been able to bolt on hard disks. This works > about as well as it did on the Mac before Apple offered a hard disk. There was pain and anguish with the Amiga 1000. With the Amiga 2000, you plug in a hard drive and an SCSI controller, format the drive, put the SCSI driver on the bootdisk, and fire it up. It takes about 5 minutes to do, except for the low-level formatting of the drive. I've done it myself. No problem. The C Ltd. SCSI controller has only four chips on it -- wow, musta been a lotta pain and anguish went into designing that baby, huh?! The upcoming release (1.3) supports the hard drive better than 1.2, in that it is much faster and can finally boot off of hard drives. Other than that... > 3. The mechanical and electrical interfaces for the Amiga 1000 and > 500r are terrible. The problem is with venders who created cheap "slap-on-the-side" products instead of going with Zorro expansion slots. Commodore has explicitely warned, over and over again, that they do NOT recommend slapping products straight onto the CPU bus, like C Ltd., amongst others, did in their quest to reduce costs (said one disgruntled developer: "They build their stuff like they were building it for the Commodore 64, and they wonder why it doesn't work half the time?"). Note, however, that this is getting fairly moot, with the wide availability of Zorro ][ bus expanders for Amiga 2000 cards. > 4. The product is positioned as a high-end toy. Most of the > available Amiga software is games. On the other hand, there > are no serious spreadsheet programs for the Amiga. Are you serious? Have you used Maxiplan? Have you used (uh...) the Lotus 1-2-3 clone? Have you used Superbase Professional? Have you used WordPerfect? Have you used... oh heck, I could go on and on. The point is, while your local dealer apparently only carries game, that's a problem with your local dealer, not with the Amiga software base. Especially in video and graphics applications, where the Amiga has a much larger software base than any other available personal computer. Quick, want to do image processing? (PixMate, whose author was invited to SigGraph to give a presentation, or Butcher). Want to do ray tracing and animations? (Sculpt 3-d, etc.). Want to run a complete television studio and do video production work? (here... The Director, and at least 2 other products whose names I can't recall). Want to do computer art? (Deluxe Paint, Photon Paint, and a dozen others). > The major networking vendors do not support the Amiga Not true. While you are not going to hook an Amiga up to non-standard IBM PC networks, Ameristar's Ethernet works just fine with the industry-standard Network File System, and TCP-IP stuff like ftp and rlogin, and they also have a low-cost Arcnet card. > The one vendor in Palo Alto that still handles the Amiga > now relegates them to the back of the shop, and has removed all > Amiga material from the store window. A definite problem. There are very few good Amiga dealers. It looks like you got the worst of one of the bad ones. You have my condolences. > 5. The file system is on the fragile side. It is all too easy to > destroy a disk. This applies to both fixed and removable > media. (Known bug: invoke the system call DELAY with a 0 > argument and track 40 of a disk will be trashed!) >It's a fascinating machine. I have an Amiga 1000 myself. But if you have >only one machine, it probably shouldn't be an Amiga. I can see where you would say that, since you obviously were burned by a bad dealer and early (buggy) hardware and software. I don't agree, but hey, that's life... -- 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.