Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll

Amigan writes "Over on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that an actual demonstration of the Amiga OS (circa 1988) on an Amiga A1000 may have been the turning point in the lawsuit of IP Innovation v. Red Hat/Novell."

Comments

Amiga demos rocked!

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Commodore has sushi and sold it as fish, sadly. The Amiga demos always kicked ass even if you weren't doing X.

Re:Amiga demos rocked!

[dangitman]

Eating meat raw has always been a sign of unsophistication in Western culture.

As the other reply notes - Steak Tartare and Carpaccio have long been considered at the heights of sophisticated Western dining.

Sushi became popular exactly because of this - by rejecting our own culture and embracing an alien one, you show how sophisticated and different you are from the masses. In addition, the high cost (in the 80s anyway) kept the morons out.

I don't buy this argument. Firstly, it contradicts itself - if you are eating a certain food just to show how different you are, doesn't that make you a moron? So if this were the case, wouldn't it be keeping the morons in?

I think there's a much simpler explanation - Globalization exposed people to different foreign cultures, and sushi is delicious. Over time, foreign foods become normalized. In the 1980s, there just weren't very many sushi restaurants outside of Japan, so few people got exposed to it. I very much doubt that most customers ate it simply to be snobby or different.

So what would be your current day example of such behavior? I mean, you don't see people going to, say, Danish restaurants and acting "oh, look how edgy and different I am eating this food that hardly anybody eats!"

Re:MORE

[RichardDeVries]

Those millions are spent on implementations, not on 'concepts and ideas'.

Upton Sinclair to the rescue by way of Al Gore

[jeko]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Re:MORE

[shaitand]

Which is an illustration of the IP problem. A design is a textbook case of something which clearly belongs to copyright protection, not patent.

Re:It's True.

[MrHanky]

Nice comment, but I'm not sure you're speaking the absolute truth. John Carmack pretty much reinvented the side scroller for PC hardware with the Commander Keen series (scrolling is easy on the Amiga, but difficult to do well on a primitive EGA/VGA screen), and he wasn't an Amiga programmer. When he went on to make the more influential Wolfenstein and Doom, he still wasn't an Amiga programmer. On the demo scene, the legendary Future Crew apparently moved from the C64. Wing Commander, the game that finally took the computer gaming crown to the PC, was certainly not done in Amiga style -- it was full of DOS hacks, and the graphics didn't replicate any of the techniques made popular by the Amiga.

Re:It's True.

[Rockoon]

No, it was not like HAM mode.

The IIgs's 3200 color mode literally had a unique 16 color palette for each and every scanline, hence 16 * 200 = 3200.

HAM had a 16 color (4-bit) palette for the entire screen, and then a pixel (which were 6-bit, not 4-bit) could be flagged to be a modification of the previous (from the scanline above) pixel color. HAM mode was an ugly thing to program for and was certainly not suitable for efficient rendering.

The IIgs thrived on its per-scanline capabilities. Each scanline could literally have a different palette and resolution.

It was lacking a blitter chip so was deficient compared to the amiga in 2D sprite based stuff, but it was much better at vector and 3D rendering (because of its Fill Mode) than the Amiga.

It also had 32 channel mono wavetable synthesis (16 stereo), compared to Amiga's 4 pannable mono channels.

So no, the Amiga was not way ahead of the pack in capabilities. The Amiga was good, but it really wasn't as special as Amiga users made it out to be. The Amiga had a much bigger install base so got a lot more games written for it. Apple was playing two-faced during this period, pushing the Mac instead of the IIgs.