amiga questions

[KA4HJH]

>AT just gave up trying to sell Amigas to anyone but video professionals
>in the US...well they never even really tried at all. I never understood it
>but here if you can't run Word and Excel on it it's not a real computer.
>Even Aminet has moved to Germany. I'll say one thing for you guys
>(the Germans) you know a good Os and nice hardware when you see
>it!

It also has to be DOS compatible, otherwise it's not a REAL computer. "Mice
are just a fad. Real men don't use mice." (stated by a Pascal programmer
teaching my structured FORTRAN class in 2/84).  8-\


Actually, the Amiga's single biggest problem WAS the video. Sure it was
NTSC (Never The Same Color) compatible--great if you're doing broadcast
video, but what's the bandwidth?. Every program I ever saw dropped into the
non-interlaced mode to prevent eyestrain when it was doing things like word
processors and spreadsheets, which cuts the vertical resolution to nothing
(so much for WYSIWYG). Because the video had no really high-res
non-interlaced mode, developers didn't take it seriously. Then there was
the 12 bit palette, which severely limited doing photorealistic graphic
work. Again, the software industry just skipped it in favor of the Mac,
which was a lot more expensive but had 8 and 24 bit color at higher
resolutions, a 24 bit palette, etc.

I knew it from the first moment I saw the specs. I bought the first issue
of one of the Amiga magazines and couldn't believe what I was reading. Fast
blitters and whatnot--so what? They were fundamentally crippling the
platform while thinking they were doing something really clever...

"Zeitgeist" was the name of the main editorial...


The rest is history. Obviously the Amiga still has plenty of fans, for good
reasons. But it was doomed. It could never get a permanent foothold in the
PC marketplace, not in the US, anyway. In many respects the Atari ST was a
better candidate--the video was much more "business friendly"--but it faced
the same uphill battle. In the end the Mac became THE graphic platform
(unless you could afford a workstation)--along the way defining what such a
computer should be--because it had the critical mass of features, despite
being overpriced and the constant derision of people who are now slaves to
Microsoft. They eventually fixed the pricing, just in time. It's a good
thing Jobs is back.



I'm just an Old Testament-style prophet. Nobody listens to me. Call me
Cassandra... 8(

Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"