Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal Message-ID: <129266@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 14 Dec 89 22:48:24 GMT References: <6060@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <13910005@hpfelg.HP.COM> <4017@vax1.tcd.ie> <1989Dec6.203947.2366@aucs.uucp> <610@bmers58.UUCP> <32343@auc.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 57 In article <32343@auc.UUCP> rar@auc.UUCP (Rodney Ricks) writes: >Maybe Commodore pissed Borland off by getting their "official" Pascal from >MetaCompCo. If so (and if they didn't HAVE to do it to get the DOS), I think >that they made a BIG mistake. Is it really that tough to see what happened? I guess maybe because I live in the N. Cal Bay Area that it seemed so obvious to me what happenned with the Amiga and Borland. Look at it this way, it's 1984/85 and the Mac is still a novelty and Commodore who has the single largest installed base (the C64) is going to come out with a 16 bit computer that will cost less and do more than the Mac + or an 8088 PC clone. Jerry Pournelle is still writing on a CP/M-80 machine and wishing Write was available for "Lucy" his PC. Everyone who saw the Amiga at the Developers Conference in Monterey or at the SigGraph Demo or at the New York announcement said to themselves, "Gee, this box is going to kick the hell out of the low end computer business." Borland, and in particular Phillipe Kahn, note the potential and give some lip service to how they will put Turbo PASCAL, the best development environment for the PC onto the Amiga. Great, but what happened. Several things, on the technology side of things v24 and 1.0 and even 1.1 were not what anyone would call robust versions of the OS. The multitasking confused things and made the learning curve steep, and after the announcement Commodore began to show serious signs of financial instability. In order to "cure" this instability Commodore fires their technical staff. What, as a developer does that say to you? Well it says that this silly company is not long for the world, they somehow believe this buggy OS is adequate, they don't have any money to advertise the damn machine much less help us out on the learning curve. Now depending on your status you do one of two things : 1) You have a profitable software business supporting the Mac and PC. Then you just say, "Oh well, it would have been fun." And never look back. This is the Borland way. 2) You have bought the vision but you have a real job and so you concentrate on eating and make the Amiga an interesting sideline. 3) You decide to go for it and invest all of your time and energy making wonderful software for the Amiga. The #3 people saved us but died doing so, some of the #2 people are actually coming back now that the Amiga has "stabilized" and the #1 people are off believing that Commodore actually did go out of business like they predicted they would. A lot of people got seriously burned when the Amiga came out. They aren't about to jump back in because Commodore has bought some air time. Given a year of steady sales and good advertising, they might invest. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@Eng.Sun.COM These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you. "If it didn't have bones in it, it wouldn't be crunchy now would it?!"