Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!linus!necntc!ames!amdahl!rtech!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Mac ][ bashing / blitters are not everything
Message-ID: <5053@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 7 Aug 88 10:32:33 GMT
References: <8808061931.AA02869@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 25

> >>> The Mac ][ still can't animate worth a pint of sour owl shit.
> >No blitter.

My Sun-3/160-C (1152x900x8 color) has no blitter and it is plenty fast.
It *does* have hardware that can merge the data that the CPU writes to the
color card, in with the existing data.  (In fact, it has 8 "rasterop chips",
one per plane, which can all work in parallel.)  But it doesn't do any DMA.
A 68020 makes a GREAT DMA controller, highly programmable and fast.  Most Sun
CPUs already run their memory flat-out at top speed, so any time a DMA
device is touching memory, the CPU is likely to be hung anyway.  The last
Amiga hardware design I looked at ran the CPU at like half the speed of RAM,
so they could use slow, cheap CPU chips.

> 	-It doesn't multitask worth a pint of sour owl shit either, though it
> 	 seems to be acceptable to the Mac users (better than what they had
> 	 before anyway).

Funny, we run A/UX (Almost Unix) on our Mac-II and it multitasks just
fine.  Even though A/UX shipped a year or 18 months late, it is finally
here.  Where is Amiga's Unix, so Amiga users can stop reinventing 10
and 20 and 30 year old software and start moving forward?
-- 
John Gilmore    {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu    gnu@toad.com
      "And if there's danger don't you try to overlook it,
       Because you knew the job was dangerous when you took it"