Article 50547 of comp.sys.amiga.misc: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!gaia.ucs.orst.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!sgiblab!swrinde!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!nic-nac.CSU.net!charnel.net.csuchico.edu!charnel!olivea!gossip.pyramid.com!pyramid!cbmvax!cbmnews!cbmnews!daveh From: daveh@canopus.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Re: OS3.1 Message-ID: Date: 20 Apr 94 15:19:15 GMT References: <2o9i08$bnq@news.iastate.edu> <2oaj2e$itk@rainbow.sosi.com> <2ocpie$qhh@tekadm1.cse.tek.com> <2ogko5$pti@rainbow.sosi.com> <2oh3gp$s4l@hpsystem1.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> Sender: news@cbmnews.commodore.com Organization: Commodore Business Machines, West Chester, PA Lines: 55 In-Reply-To: stieber@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE's message of 13 Apr 1994 15: 35:53 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: canopus.cad.commodore.com In article <2oh3gp$s4l@hpsystem1.informatik.tu-muenchen.de> stieber@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE (Christian Stieber) writes: Maxwell Daymon (mdaymon@rainbow.sosi.com) wrote: [ lots of great stuff deleted -- everyone please read Maxwells article ] : So, by complaining about the OS upgrades, you are contributing to the : global domination of this planet. Commodore and Apple are the last hope : for a free world. Well - maybe that's a LITTLE dramatic... ;-) Apple is better off than Commodore, because for some reason unknown to me (okay, maybe Commodore did something wrong in the beginning) Apple systems are considered "professional" -> many large software companies make software for them, while Commodore systems are "game stuff" -> a few small companies make software for it. Apple spent lots of marketing money selling the Apple II systems into "professional" applications back in the 70s. Due these good ads, and the lack of much organized competition, they were regarded as a professional system. Most other 6502 based systems, like the C64, were marketed as game machines and home computers. Apple did a few technical things right, like offering a few slots in the Apple II. But it was mainly marketing; the C64 was in many ways a more powerful system. IBM would have been regarded as professional no matter what they entered the market with at the time. It just happened that, since they didn't really understand the PC market, they copied lots of stuff. The Apple II, the largest single success in the business market at the time, had slots, so they would too. And CP/M was a pretty big success as a business OS, though on many machines with no big company leading. MS-DOS began as a bad clone of CP/M, but it was close enough for CP/M users to be comfortable using. It was IBM's past reputation, and good marketing once again, that sold the business community on the IBM PC. Macs took a long time to establish in much of any business market, and Apple hasn't been all that happy getting them into as much of that market as they want. Yet, good marketing and past reputation is responsible for the Mac's success. Rule # 1: The average PC user is afraid of computers and of change. Rule # 2: Technical merit is meaningless to the masses. Rule # 3: Belief is more important than reality. These rules actually function circularly to explain a whole lot about the past 10-15 years of the computer industry. Why it didn't matter how bad the 80x86 architecture was. Why MS-DOS and MS-Windows were successful. Why UNIX and OS/2 weren't. Why people still program in BASIC. Why nearly all computer users are still running 16-bit operating systems, nearly ten years after 32-bit operating system became available on personal computers. -- Dave Haynie | C= Amiga, High-End Systems | Ki No Kawa Ryu Aikido daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com | Engineering = Art + Science | "Life was never meant {BIX,Portal}: hazy | "The Crew That Never Rests" | to be painless" "Wish there was something real, wish there was something true" -NIN Article 75791 of comp.sys.amiga.hardware: Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Path: news.CSOS.ORST.EDU!engr.orst.edu!reuter.cse.ogi.edu!hp-cv!hp-pcd!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!newsfeed.pitt.edu!dsinc!scala!news From: dave.haynie@scala.com (Dave Haynie) Subject: Re: Are we being forced to buy APPLE? Sender: news@scala.scala.com (Usenet administrator) Message-ID: <1994Sep6.173329.12237@scala.scala.com> Date: Tue, 6 Sep 1994 17:33:29 GMT Lines: 186 Reply-To: dave.haynie@scala.com (Dave Haynie) References: <346k2j$m5k@anshar.shadow.net> Nntp-Posting-Host: gator Organization: Scala Inc., US Research & Development In <346k2j$m5k@anshar.shadow.net>, victorm@anshar.shadow.net (Victor Marrero) writes: >Is there some sort of a conspiracy going on? IBMs are a waste of energy, >and everything else dying out. What is left? An apple? Unless something happens, and happens very soon, with the Amiga technology, you won't see any new Amigas. Even if the technology is bought, whoever gets it is going to be hard pressed to update things quickly enough. My personal opinion: they need to open it up. If any 3rd party can license Amiga chips and/or the AmigaOS for a fair price (something in keeping with similar pricing in the PClone industry), there's some chance an Amiga market will re-emerge and start to grow. Without that, you're going to need a new owner with very deep pockets. That's from an overall system view, of course. I'm not saying the new Amiga company would be clueless. Greg Berlin is still there, and ready as ever to move forward with 68060 technology, some of which has been in the works for quite some time. Software updates and something beyond AA would be much longer in development. OTHER HARDWARE As for the other systems, your choice is gradually moving toward one of Operating System, primarily, and CPU, secondarily. The hardware on modern PClones is getting good, and cheap. Ignore, for the moment, the ugliness hidden down in the 80x86 and ISA bus architecture. What you have left is a PCI based system, which is exactly where the Amiga was headed. I won't pretend that these systems are as good as what I had planned, but they're better, hardware-wise, than existing Amigas, for many applications. The ISA bus is brain damaged, but it's no worse than things like the internal 8520 bus you have in every Amiga. As long as you have PCI, you treat ISA as "the place for slow, dumb peripheral chips" and it doesn't look so bad. You load up on that when you put the system together, get it all to work together (via jumpers and, hopefully, an expert or a good book on the ISA bus). PCI is a very good bus, it's designed specifically for building modular, high-performance computers at a low cost. I designed my own bus for this at Amiga, but scrapped it when I got a PCI bus spec. PCI offered the same range of performance, slightly better CPU independence, and something you can't design into any bus: industry acceptance. Which translates to low costs. The next big push in the PClone industry seems to be standardization of the "passive PCI architecture". All this means is that, today, the PCI bus controller is right where the EISA or ISA bus controller was a few years ago in the PClone design -- it sits in a chip or two that are designed as general PC system glue. So, while PCI doesn't mandate any specific "host" processor or any processor dependence, most of the PCI chipsets capable of motherboard control out there hook directly to a Pentium or '486. What you eventually want (and what we were planning at Amiga) is a motherboard that controls all of the PCI stuff without a CPU in place. That way, you can add the CPU of choice just like any other PCI card. Several, if your software can deal with that. Apple has announced their move to PCI on the next generation PowerMacs. That's a reasonable thing to do, and they really don't have a choice, since pretty much every other PC and Workstation vendor, except Sun, is doing something with PCI. The main problem with Apple is that, despite all their previous problems with being "proprietary", all their evidence that software vendors make more money than hardware vendors, etc. they don't want to give up being proprietary. While they have jumped into this PowerPC thing with IBM, they are balking the "reference platform" architecture that IBM, Motorola, and everyone else is standardizing on. The reason the PClones did so well, more than anything else, was that everyone copied the IBM machines down to the finest detail, so every system was hardware compatible. Sure, it was a bad specification, IBM never sat down to think this stuff through. But regardless, like the ISA bus, it became a standard. Now IBM, Motorola, and others are sitting down to establish a similar hardware/firmware standard for PowerPC machines. Only Apple is rocking the boat. While they may claim it's over technical details, don't believe it. They really aren't prepared to be open. That should scare you away from their hardware. And the reason for that is SOFTWARE. OTHER SOFTWARE I'll state off the bat that I haven't found anything I like as much as the Amiga OS. And that, if you liked the Amiga OS, the big three, MS-DOS, Windows, and MacOS will probably send you screaming from any new computer in record time. Ignoring MS-DOS (which is on the way out), you have today's Windows and MacOS, both of which are severely flawed. Both companies run "cooperative multitaking", which is probably OK if you're just trying to keep that wordprocessor going while you look for a file or check something on your scheduling program. But it's not what you do on the Amiga, especially if you're a ray tracing geek, or doing anything else that's pounding hardware and CPU cycles very heavily. Both OSs are full of 1970's technology, with some nice bits of modern stuff (some you can't get on the Amiga) thrown on top. Windows will fighten you for many reasons. It can seem fast at times (its usually running on hardware much faster than the Amiga or Mac you're using, but it need it), while at other times it goes to sleep. Lots of neat CD-ROM games are out for it, and that, or little 180x90 movies, are what Windows people call "multimedia". It's not what you think of on as The M Word on the Amiga. Video, schmideo. Render it offline, you have big hard disk. Another spooky think about Windows is a bit harder to define. It kind of hits you when you realize just how Windows sits on top of MS-DOS. Like, every program you see on the Windows "Program Manager" is kind of a magic trick. They don't really exist, at least, not the way you see them. After all, underneath is MS-DOS, with 8.3 filenames. You can go to the "File manager" to see what's really on the hard disk. Anything with a ".GRP" extension is probably a magic Windows file that sets up a "program group", which is the thing that looks like a directory, but isn't, when you're in the "Program Manager". Got it? Supposedly in Windows 4.0 you'll have a normal correspondence between what you see on the "desktop" and what's in your filesystem, like Amiga, Mac, UNIX, OS/2, etc. does now (yes, most of these can mess with this correspondence, via links, special icon types, program objects, etc. But they're never as spooky, at least to me). Windows 3.1 also crashes alot, at least in my experiences. And that's just using tools, not developing. The Mac OS has its own spookiness. The windowing system is certainly slicker than that of Windows. Of course, it better be, since ordinary mortals don't get a command-line interface for the Mac (developers do, after a fashion). The thing that scared me the most about the Mac OS (aside from frequent crashes, though maybe I got unlucky here too), was just how they got the windowing to go so slow. Even on fast machines, it's unnerving. The last Quadra I placed with made my old SparcStation IPC (SunOS UNIX and X Windows) seem snappy. Macs also seem to have the slowest hard disks around, though maybe the newer ones are finally learning about DMA. Or at least good PIO, like some of the better IDEs tend to be. Of course, you aren't locked into these OSs, especially if you have a PClone. UNIX is one alternative, especially if you're the hacker type and don't care too much about large company support. You can get Linunx, a net-supported UNIX clone, for free by download, or for about $40.00 on a read-to-run CD-ROM. I played with this, it seems to be as real a UNIX as anything else today. Just about any UNIX/X code you get off the net should compile, and of course all compilers and such, TCP/IP, GNU, etc. come with it. I got OS/2 for my PClone at home, and now we're using this as the standard development system OS at Scala too. Again, the price was right: it was about $30.00 on CD-ROM, when sold as OS/2 for Windows, since IBM didn't have to pay off Microsoft. OS/2 doesn't feel much like AmigaOS, but it has many of the things about AmigaOS they everyone likes. It's a real multitaking OS with its set of quirks, but prehaps, like AmigaOS, less arcane than UNIX. It has a fairly decent windowing system, and some pretty cool object-oriented GUI stuff in the "Workplace Shell" (the Workbench analog). You can have multiple OS/2 shells up, though they suffer from the "terminal emulation" nonsense that you'll find with MS-DOS, Windows, etc. -- you can't arbitrarily resize them like you can in AmigaOS and UNIX/X. At least the supplied shells; there's no reason to believe an Amiga-like shell would be a big deal. There's lots of PD support for OS/2, mainly because, like the Amiga early on, it attracted lots of hacker types who were sick of the mainstream stuff. Most of the OS/2 system these days is running 32-bit code, unlike the predominant 16-bit code that makes up Windows. You can find commercial applications for OS/2, but they're much less common than those for Windows or the Mac. You can run Windows and MS-DOS applications under OS/2. MS-DOS programs work much better than under Windows, and some Windows programs work well enough to fool you into thinking they're OS/2 programs. On the other hand, some Windows programs can crash OS/2, something you're not likely to see happening in native OS/2 apps, even when developing code. >Was the fall of commodore some weird conspiracy.... Who's to say. It's clear that it was either planned that way or one of the greatest moron-fests of all time. The handwriting was on the wall back in 1991, and yet nothing was done to stop it. It was very clear to those of us involved just how to stop it, and many things were tried. At every turn, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. But I digress. I made a video to explain some of that nonsense :-) >The amiga is powerful and cheap. > >Do we need to be rich to have this power? You do need lots more memory to run any of the OSs I mentioned above. OS/2 is livable with 12MB, but really wants 16MB or more. I would recommend that for the MacOS, most UNIXs, and Windows as well. I have 16MB on my A3000, 8MB on my A3000+, and rarely use more than 6MB when going full out. Dave Haynie | ex-Commodore Engineering | Ki No Kawa Ryu Aikido Sr. Systems Engineer | Class of '94 | "Life was never Scala Inc., US R&D | "See us in the movie!" | meant to be painless"