amiga questions

[Hugo Haesaert]

Hi All !

Rumour has it that Commodore financed their loss making PCclone 
venture with the profits of the Amiga sales, severely hindering the A 
development in the late 80s early 90s .  The 256 colour AGA chipset 
should have been on the market 2 years earlier .  When C folded, a 
third chipset AAA was almost ready, but by that time the PC graphics 
chipsets had started taking off, and the subsequent owners have never 
caught up .  Gross mis-management indeed .

Bear in mind the first Amiga came out when the Appel was still very 
green in the face, and the PC greeted you with the A> or C> prompt .
Worldwide, in 2nd half of the 80s, the Amiga had largest sales of any 
home computer .

To date, it is still the only consumer computer with a real 
multitasking OS .  Version 3.5 is due out in the middle of this year .

Several clone machines are getting on the market, some using PPC 
processors to speed up certain aspects of the OS, several progs have 
been ported to run native on PPC .  A G3-G4 accelerator is in the 
works (Phase 5), doing away with the 68K altogether, as the emulation 
is many times faster than 68060 50MHz . (which was comparable to a 60-
100MHz windoze Pentium)

Gateway's Amiga business is planning to present totally new Amiga's 
at the Messe in Cologne in nov this year .  Running a new real time 
OS based on the QNX kernel .  Hardware details are not yet available 
at this time, but word has it no mainstream cpu manufacturer is 
involved .

I'm still using my A4000 for sequencing with Bars&Pipes, unsurpassed 
upto this day . (and the little ones sometimes get powered up, just 
for fun ;-) )

Listening to Mods on my P133 sucks, the 8Mhz 68000 2Mb A500+ is a lot 
better, and will not hang on half of them, like windoze :)

As the Sunrise AD516 was far too expensive in Belgium i looked in all 
Manhattan shops on 5 visits .  Never found one for sale .  And the 
distributors had none ready for shipping either .  Grrrrrrr .

Anyone has one for sale, at a reasonable price ?  Still looking ...

Later .


Keep 'em oscillating :)


Hugo
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