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Top 10 Personal Computers, Revised
rebelcool writes "Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has revised his Top 10 PCs of all time, mainly as a result of this Slashdot story. He addresses many of the replies written to him wondering why X system wasn't on the list in Y position, but also chose to replace the Apple Newton with the Amiga A1000."
I used to have my Dad's old Newton (I've since passed it down to my younger brother), and I have to say I agree. It's got sound output, incredible handwriting recognition software (NOT Graffiti, either), an infrared transender, and a lot of other nifty features that it took the rest of the computing world how many more years? to come out with. Bravo.
You know what's funny about the Apple Newton, the guy that was one of the leading software developers for it (Steve Strong) went back to teaching computer science and math in high school after they eliminated the project and downsized.
I was truely blessed to have him as a professor. I generally dislike mac (now only because it's properitary hardware, OS/X is a very nice operating system). The newton didn't fail because of lack of ingeniuity, or bad coding. It was groundbreaking, and had insanely good programmers.
It was a device before it's time.
If you were to make a list of devices influential to hand-held computing the newton would be undeniably #1
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
The Amstrad 1512?
In the UK anyway, it was one of the big milestones in computing.
I hate to say "RTFA," but you should RTFA!
The author specifically mentions this point, that he writes for a local paper and not some international news source, and thus, OF COURSE his list is North American-centric.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Because, if you read the article (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, what am I thinking?), it's because the Altair was the machine that Allen and Gates used to write their version of BASIC, and hence was the start of Microsoft. Which is certainly a pretty significant turn of events in home computing.
Uh, you're on crack. Slightly. The A3000 (desktop, which came before or at the same time as the T model... didn't it?) wasn't just an "A2000 with all the standard expansions." For one, it had the 68030 CPU with MMU and the 68882 FPU as standard. It had Zorro II and ISA slots. It had on-board SCSI. It had Kickstart & AmigaOS 2.x. Basically, it was much more of an upgrade than A1000 -> A2000.
Also, why would the AGA line be "infamous?" The 1200, 4000 and 4000T are clearly some of the finest Amigas, with a lot of great features and graphics which were still way ahead of the IBM machines. The A4000 was a large success, especially as a Video Toaster system.
Unfortunately you have to choose between putting a Color display card or an ethernet card in an SE/30. And the whole notion of attaching an external monitor to an SE/30 just seems unclean to me. I snap in the power cord, ADB cord, ethernet cord and it's all set up.
A Good Intro to NetBS
If that's not influential, what is? God knows most machines out there today are x86, and aren't IBM-made.
Dwight Silverman is right! The A1000 rulez! It is the oldest of my machines still running.
;) I used to send stuff to and use stuff fro FredFish before I even heard of GPL and FSF.
Marble Madness still gets some play time!
Thanks for remembeing this great machine...
~8^]
That's a very unlikely update - 500 pretty much replaced the 1000... He probably went to a 2000.
The 1000 is likely to have been picked simply because it was the first Amiga. It was the one that made jaws drop with what could be done in a home computer and started it all off. The 500 was just a cheaper, smaller 1000 with a ROM bootloader and different expansion slots.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Such as handle multiple screens of different resolution and sync on the same display at the same time - even overlaid atop each other.
How about creating a ram disk to store the kernel and other OS essentials in? Not a big deal today, right? Ok, how about BOOTING from it!? As long as you didn't need to cold boot, you could reboot the system in seconds off a ram drive.
One thing I sorely, sorely miss even today is virtual device assignments. What is the default directory for Word to store files in? Let's call it "docs:". Want to move that to a network file server? Doesn't matter, just change the device reference. Reinstall on a different hard drive with different partition scheme? Doesn't matter, just change the device reference. Want to relocate your document directory in the file system without having to drill through seventeen path entries? Doesn't matter, just change the device reference.
My favorite Amiga demo, though, was adding a new hard drive. Bring up the GUI partitioner and set partitions. Start formatting the first. Start formatting the second. Start formatting the Nth. What's the next thing you want to do - copy file over, right? Start copying files to the first partition - that hasn't even finished formatting yet! If the copying catches up to the formatting, it just waits.
The AmigaDOS/WorkBench OS is still the most efficient system I've ever used from the perspective of NOT *EVER* MAKING YOU WAIT ON THE @$%@#$% COMPUTER! Considering how few release iterations it went through, it was totally amazing how well it worked.
KeS
To my knowledge, the A1000 was created by Jay Minor, who i believe has "passed on" now. For give me if im wrong :). He worked at Atari and possibly lead the development of several of their chipsets. Jay wanted to create something astonishing, something to blow the computer world away. For some reason or another, Atari didnt want to. So Jay quite and moved to his back shed where he worked on the Amiga. You can still find pictures where each chip was built out of several bread boards... Interesting stuff!
:)
A miga_Lorraine_finally_.php
Anyway, eventualy commador bought the Amiga design and hired Jay, Made everyone involved famous and rich and then killed them Amiga less than 10 years later
Heres a nice, show report? and some technical details about the first Amiga or as it was code named, "lorraine".
http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_
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