And those programs were *expensive*. And the PC was *expensive*. You make think that in hind sight it was obvious that business computing should be identical to home computing, but at the time that the Amiga came out those were considered two separate market segments.
Use it properly probably translates here to "programming on it". The PC at the time was horrid. You didn't so much as program in DOS as program around it. Your program on a PC got a bare machine and knew to keep away from some memory regions. This was before Windows was popular. Whereas I had come from a Unix and VMS world, and programming on the Amiga felt like programming on an OS.
The Amiga could be used for any task that the PC+DOS could be used for. What the PC did better was to run off the shelf DOS software, and that's not actually a measure of quality or good design.
Remember, the most popular restaurant in the world is McDonald's. People should not assume that Microsoft and Intel became popular because they had superior technology.
Mostly because Amiga was bought by Commodore. The Amiga 1000 was definitely a good machine. The Amiga 2000 and 500 were just the same thing though in many ways. Commodore didn't proactively try to keep up with changes over time. The reason the PC kept up was because it became decentralized and cloned, so that third parties could try out massive hacks like VLB to take advantage of a desire for higher resolution graphics. The Amiga was stuck with NTSC resolutions because there was no investment to improve on this.
For 1986, there wasn't a better home computer out there for under $1000. In 1990 though, it was getting dusty.
The Amiga also had a real operating system. DOS basically loaded programs into RAM and provided basic disk services (mostly interfacing via the BIOS). The Amiga did that but also managed your memory, managed multiple tasks at the same time, provided actual APIs to program with, managed graphics, etc. DOS was mostly a glorified version of CP/M, and Windows at the time was slow and buggy and not very popular.
Like the original PC from IBM? Or the locked down proprietary Windows that overtook DOS? Every single computer you bought from a store when the Amiga was new was proprietary.
I don't think they realized that a business-only computer was what was going to win. Ie, why would a business oriented computer do well in the home? They're different markets so it made sense at the time that there could be two types of computers there.
Also remember that in the business world, the PC worked not because it could do these business applications better than a terminal on your desk that connected to the mainframes and minis. It succeeded because it meant you could do computing on your desk without the centralized computing priesthood getting involved. No need to apply for an account or having it charged to your budget monthly and no neckbeard telling you that you were using too many resources.
I will admit though that Lotus-123 was THE killer app for the PC. I liked that and learned it quickly, whereas today's Excel is just a lot of frustration.
The Amiga power users would make RAM disks, then load up the image from a floppy. Then a lot of stuff ran super fast, such as compiling and linking (many of the tools wrote to storage instead of RAM as they assumed you didn't have much RAM). I never met anyone with four floppies though, but two floppies was common, plus a big RAM upgrade.
If you're doing business stuff - spreadsheets - then the PC was ok because it had the popular spreadsheets by big name companies. The same reason the PC won in the long run, because you wanted to share the proprietary file format of Lotus or IBM than the proprietary file format something else.
But if productivity was in stuff like 3D design, television, audio, music, then the PC was not very useful. When I finally sold my Amiga, I had several musicians respond to my add on usenet.
Even today, I don't use spreadsheets, word processors, or databases on my home computer.
The hard part for me was that I bought the hard drive board, then went to Fry's to get a hard disk. The sales guy didn't want to sell me a hard disk without the PC hard drive board. I kept saying I just wanted the disk only, and the guy said "it won't work without a card!" Finally the manager said "just give him the drive"...
As a home computer, there wasn't much "needed" software. And even on the PC, if you needed stuff like a spreadsheet then you would often DOS instead of the clumsy Windows. For games, the Amiga held its own against anything on the PC. For video and audio, it had some of the best stuff until you had the budget for a professional set up. Remember too that Windows really struggled for awhile and had some serious competition, and in the workplace it didn't really get going until Windows 3.1. If someone had a PC at when the Amiga came out, they probably used DOS.
The Mac really wasn't architecturally better. It had a lot of hacks in it, but of course improved over time. The Amiga had a solid design and a solid OS (not counting the DOS layer TripOS). The Mac was also easily double the cost, and still couldn't do multitasking. The Mac had an interesting desktop design (borrowed from Xerox), but under the hood it wasn't that sophisticated.
When the Amiga 1000 came out, the competition was the Atari ST and Apple IIgs. At least that's how the media portrayed it. The Apple IIgs was really nothing special, sad to say, it was like an Apple II with better graphics and a 16-bit processor, none of the more advanced stuff from the Mac side of things seemed to be there. Atari ST had a few things going for it, but it was still a single-tasking system. What irked me the most about the Atari ST, and really not it's fault, was the jihad that Jack Tramiel had against the Amiga. All that bitterness was just sad.
Sort of agree here - Amiga wasn't ahead of it's time, the issue was that the rest of the microcomputer world was so backwards. The professional computing world was becoming sophisticated while the corresponding home market was like people were trying to invent a wheel from scratch without ever having seen one.
Now if the market was for computer hobbyists who don't mind cobbling together some parts and writing assembler, that would be fine, that was sort of what the pre-Microsoft world was like. But there was a market of consumers who could have used far more polished products than what they were offered in the 80s.
The purpose of severance pay is a bribe so that you don't sue for being unfairly terminated. You have to sign the legal docs before you get the extra pay.
If an employer screws around an employee, the word gets out. Over time they find it more difficult to hire quality employees. The same happens the other way, word will get out about the problem employees as well and they will find it harder to get hired.
"We, uh, we fixed the glitch so he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore so it'll just work itself out naturally. We always like to avoid conrontation whenever possible. The problem is solved from your end."
But you can't just walk off with the company badge key, or keep the laptop at home, etc. Maybe the article is just talking about hourly workers, but even then you have a good chance of getting blacklisted by the union or future employers. If you're not salaried, you certainly can be sued and companies aren't shy about this.
That's a bit different than showing up to work only to find that your badge doesn't work and the receptionist won't talk to you. You are told that you're laid off, and an employee should tell their employer if they're leaving as well. For instance, you would be liable to pay back any salary you receive after leaving (since they probably just think you're incapacitated in the hospital or something), and you have to give all your equipment back, and give back the badge key for sure. It's also the sort of thing that can follow you around, such as screwing up future job prospects or lowering your credit score.
This just seems like novice mistakes. Passwords should NEVER be stored. There is never a need to store a password at any time. If it's not stored then there is minimal chance of exposing the password. I think the newbies to programming don't know this, and they think that they have to compare the password typed in to a stored password, which is wrong. The first step is to make a secure hash of the password, and the second step is to clear the password from memory. Of course that's not all you need to do, but if you don't use those two steps then it means the implementer doesn't understand security. If a password is ever in a database then someone has screwed up.
The first sale doctrine is considered a mortal enemy by the publishing industry, not to mention several other industries. The first sale doctrine gets in the way of profits, and if you get in the way of profits be prepared for a fight.
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I remember PC users during the Amiga era fiddling with jumpers on their IDE cards and installing TSRs
And those programs were *expensive*. And the PC was *expensive*. You make think that in hind sight it was obvious that business computing should be identical to home computing, but at the time that the Amiga came out those were considered two separate market segments.
Use it properly probably translates here to "programming on it". The PC at the time was horrid. You didn't so much as program in DOS as program around it. Your program on a PC got a bare machine and knew to keep away from some memory regions. This was before Windows was popular. Whereas I had come from a Unix and VMS world, and programming on the Amiga felt like programming on an OS.
The Amiga could be used for any task that the PC+DOS could be used for. What the PC did better was to run off the shelf DOS software, and that's not actually a measure of quality or good design.
Remember, the most popular restaurant in the world is McDonald's. People should not assume that Microsoft and Intel became popular because they had superior technology.
Mostly because Amiga was bought by Commodore. The Amiga 1000 was definitely a good machine. The Amiga 2000 and 500 were just the same thing though in many ways. Commodore didn't proactively try to keep up with changes over time. The reason the PC kept up was because it became decentralized and cloned, so that third parties could try out massive hacks like VLB to take advantage of a desire for higher resolution graphics. The Amiga was stuck with NTSC resolutions because there was no investment to improve on this.
For 1986, there wasn't a better home computer out there for under $1000. In 1990 though, it was getting dusty.
The Amiga also had a real operating system. DOS basically loaded programs into RAM and provided basic disk services (mostly interfacing via the BIOS). The Amiga did that but also managed your memory, managed multiple tasks at the same time, provided actual APIs to program with, managed graphics, etc. DOS was mostly a glorified version of CP/M, and Windows at the time was slow and buggy and not very popular.
Like the original PC from IBM? Or the locked down proprietary Windows that overtook DOS? Every single computer you bought from a store when the Amiga was new was proprietary.
I don't think they realized that a business-only computer was what was going to win. Ie, why would a business oriented computer do well in the home? They're different markets so it made sense at the time that there could be two types of computers there.
Also remember that in the business world, the PC worked not because it could do these business applications better than a terminal on your desk that connected to the mainframes and minis. It succeeded because it meant you could do computing on your desk without the centralized computing priesthood getting involved. No need to apply for an account or having it charged to your budget monthly and no neckbeard telling you that you were using too many resources.
I will admit though that Lotus-123 was THE killer app for the PC. I liked that and learned it quickly, whereas today's Excel is just a lot of frustration.
The Amiga power users would make RAM disks, then load up the image from a floppy. Then a lot of stuff ran super fast, such as compiling and linking (many of the tools wrote to storage instead of RAM as they assumed you didn't have much RAM). I never met anyone with four floppies though, but two floppies was common, plus a big RAM upgrade.
If you're doing business stuff - spreadsheets - then the PC was ok because it had the popular spreadsheets by big name companies. The same reason the PC won in the long run, because you wanted to share the proprietary file format of Lotus or IBM than the proprietary file format something else.
But if productivity was in stuff like 3D design, television, audio, music, then the PC was not very useful. When I finally sold my Amiga, I had several musicians respond to my add on usenet.
Even today, I don't use spreadsheets, word processors, or databases on my home computer.
The hard part for me was that I bought the hard drive board, then went to Fry's to get a hard disk. The sales guy didn't want to sell me a hard disk without the PC hard drive board. I kept saying I just wanted the disk only, and the guy said "it won't work without a card!" Finally the manager said "just give him the drive"...
As a home computer, there wasn't much "needed" software. And even on the PC, if you needed stuff like a spreadsheet then you would often DOS instead of the clumsy Windows. For games, the Amiga held its own against anything on the PC. For video and audio, it had some of the best stuff until you had the budget for a professional set up. Remember too that Windows really struggled for awhile and had some serious competition, and in the workplace it didn't really get going until Windows 3.1. If someone had a PC at when the Amiga came out, they probably used DOS.
The Mac really wasn't architecturally better. It had a lot of hacks in it, but of course improved over time. The Amiga had a solid design and a solid OS (not counting the DOS layer TripOS). The Mac was also easily double the cost, and still couldn't do multitasking. The Mac had an interesting desktop design (borrowed from Xerox), but under the hood it wasn't that sophisticated.
When the Amiga 1000 came out, the competition was the Atari ST and Apple IIgs. At least that's how the media portrayed it. The Apple IIgs was really nothing special, sad to say, it was like an Apple II with better graphics and a 16-bit processor, none of the more advanced stuff from the Mac side of things seemed to be there. Atari ST had a few things going for it, but it was still a single-tasking system. What irked me the most about the Atari ST, and really not it's fault, was the jihad that Jack Tramiel had against the Amiga. All that bitterness was just sad.
Keyboard for the Amiga 1000 wasn't bad, and the Amiga 2000 keyboard was nice. The 500 was meant to be a simpler and cheaper product.
Oh ya, some people spend that much on a black and white graphics card for the PC.
Sort of agree here - Amiga wasn't ahead of it's time, the issue was that the rest of the microcomputer world was so backwards. The professional computing world was becoming sophisticated while the corresponding home market was like people were trying to invent a wheel from scratch without ever having seen one.
Now if the market was for computer hobbyists who don't mind cobbling together some parts and writing assembler, that would be fine, that was sort of what the pre-Microsoft world was like. But there was a market of consumers who could have used far more polished products than what they were offered in the 80s.
Chairman of the Board.
Unidentified, and flying, but we haven't determined if it is an object or not.
The purpose of severance pay is a bribe so that you don't sue for being unfairly terminated. You have to sign the legal docs before you get the extra pay.
If an employer screws around an employee, the word gets out. Over time they find it more difficult to hire quality employees. The same happens the other way, word will get out about the problem employees as well and they will find it harder to get hired.
"We, uh, we fixed the glitch so he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore so it'll just work itself out naturally. We always like to avoid conrontation whenever possible. The problem is solved from your end."
But you can't just walk off with the company badge key, or keep the laptop at home, etc. Maybe the article is just talking about hourly workers, but even then you have a good chance of getting blacklisted by the union or future employers. If you're not salaried, you certainly can be sued and companies aren't shy about this.
That's a bit different than showing up to work only to find that your badge doesn't work and the receptionist won't talk to you. You are told that you're laid off, and an employee should tell their employer if they're leaving as well. For instance, you would be liable to pay back any salary you receive after leaving (since they probably just think you're incapacitated in the hospital or something), and you have to give all your equipment back, and give back the badge key for sure. It's also the sort of thing that can follow you around, such as screwing up future job prospects or lowering your credit score.
Well if solar panels are built from a limited supply of materials, it's a good thing that we have an infinite supply of fossile fuels!
This just seems like novice mistakes. Passwords should NEVER be stored. There is never a need to store a password at any time. If it's not stored then there is minimal chance of exposing the password. I think the newbies to programming don't know this, and they think that they have to compare the password typed in to a stored password, which is wrong. The first step is to make a secure hash of the password, and the second step is to clear the password from memory. Of course that's not all you need to do, but if you don't use those two steps then it means the implementer doesn't understand security. If a password is ever in a database then someone has screwed up.
The first sale doctrine is considered a mortal enemy by the publishing industry, not to mention several other industries. The first sale doctrine gets in the way of profits, and if you get in the way of profits be prepared for a fight.