The Atari ST had built-in hard disk support in 1985.
The A1200 wasn't launched until 1992 - much too late to make any difference.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
'3D in hardware' is a bit of a stretch.
I remember my Amiga polygon function used the blitter to draw individual horizontal lines for the polygons but it wasn't really much faster than the 'software' Atari ST version. The blitter was only faster when pixels needed to be shifted left/right.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Why is that amazing? Even the Sinclair Spectrum had that 'feature'...
The Amiga 1000/500 were the only ones that really counted, the rest of the world had already moved on when the 68040 Amigas appeared. Amiga programming was my job at the time and I think I only ever saw one of the 68040 Amigas in the real world. We certainly didn't buy any in our company.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Almost everything the Amiga's hardware could do in terms of sound and graphics would chew CPU time on the PC.
Sure... but the Amiga's CPU was very slow compared to the PC's. We're talking 7.2MHz 68000 vs. 16 or 20MHz 286. In real terms the sound mixing wasn't a factor.
The problem with specialized chips is, well, they're specialized. The Amiga was only really good at certain video effects (ie. screen scrolling and 2D sprites). All the fancy hardware was no help at all if you weren't doing that...and unfortunately for the Amiga it the world wasn't doing that. The real world was going 3D (eg. Wolfenstein 3D) and the puny Amiga CPU combined with its awkward video memory layout meant it simply couldn't compete in that world.
(If that's all we wanted to do we'd have stuck with the 'back' button).
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Problem was...anything over four bitplanes on the Amiga started stealing RAM access cycles from the CPU.
IIRC the HAM and EHB modes completely blocked the CPU during the active display time (ie. most of the time).
was dismayed by what I faced in the PC world by comparison at the time.
I dunno...for screen-scrolling games the Amiga was definitely king but things were starting to go 3D around that time. The PC was way better at 3D than the Amiga.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Amiga was better in almost every single aspect except for the amount of software available
So? The Acorn Archimedes was better than the Amiga in almost every single aspect... except it had even less software than the Amiga. At the end of the day it's the software that counts (this fact was demonstrated many times during the 1980s with many worthy machines dying on the store shelves due to lack of software while 'inferior' machines sold in the millions...).
And you didn't need an Atari ST... That was silly
That was a joke.
Sort of - I did most of my Amiga coding that way and lots of people grabbed copies of my homebrew dev. system. The main factor was the hard disks. The ST had a built-in SCSI connector and the hard disks just worked. Getting an Amiga to work with a hard disk was much more of a black art.
Marketing can give you some boost but it basically can only amplify what is fundamentally true and good about a product.
That only works if the customer can see what's good and true about a product. The financial companies do their best to make that impossible. Many retail goods companies do it too, eg. Apple censoring their own forums whenever they have a problem with a product.
The truth usually only appears after major meltdowns.
Small companies aren't immune either, some of the most bare-faced lies I've ever been told were by small companies (who actually had practice meetings to see who can lie the best when the lie is an 'important' one).
Most of the people I know who are "Dell Shops" do it because they get a service contract with Dell.
Whether or not that's a good way to do things is irregardless. The point is that Dell knows how to sell PCs to PHBs (who really don't care if you can get the same thing $200 cheaper elsewhere - $200 is background noise in the TCO).
The A1000 is the one true Amiga - gotta love the tuck-away keyboard design (and the nice keyboard).
The A500 was an amateurish-looking waste of desk space. I'm sure that's partly what killed it off as a 'serious' computer. Put one of those side by side with an IBM PC (and model M keyboard) and see which one gets chosen for 'business'.
Commodore wanted it to be a 'serious' machine but it never stood a chance against IBM (eg. adding a hard disk to an Amiga and getting it to boot from it was a joke).
If they'd sold it on it's strengths it might have done better - ie. sell it to hacker types and compete with Atari/Nintendo's closed systems instead of taking on IBM.
I'm still not sure how Commodore managed to go from selling 50 million machines to bankruptcy in a couple of years.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 0
Towards the end of the Amiga's lifetime the PC had 386 CPUs, VGA graphics and Soundblasters whereas the Amiga had stood still. Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it.
The Amiga could do fancy scrolling effects but at the end of the day it was really only 16 color graphics in a plasticky box with no real sign that it was evolving into anything better.
If you stood it side by side with a PC in 1987 it was obvious which of the two was going to 'win'.
It was fun to write 'demos' on them though...
(So long as you had an Atari ST at the side to edit/assemble the 68000 code - using AmigaOS for work was a nasty experience)
You need to read The Daily WTF a bit more to see the problem with semiskilled programmers...in the long run they cost far more money than doing the job properly.
re: "Calculators are bad because anyone can use them, engineers should use slide rules."
That's a stupid argument, engineers should always use the best tools available.
What Bjarne's saying is that no calculator will make you a mathematician. In the same way no programming language will ever free you from having to express problems both completely and in simple terms, and that's the hard part of programming.
At higher levels language syntax is irrelevant. What counts is the ability to express your design succinctly. Languages with missing abilities turn out to be a pain (eg. lack of operator overloading in Java makes numerical programs very verbose and hard to read).
Until I can play mkv files in a cheap DVD player then they're a non-starter for me. AVI might be rubbish but it works.
I also wanted to chop up a mkv file into pieces the other day and there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to VirtualDUB for this, I thought there would be something by now.
Is matroska gaining any support in the mainstream world or is it just another niche format like ogg?
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1980s calling ... we want our ST vs. Amiga flamewar back!
I said the ST was better at something than the Amiga!!!
Does that still get you worked up into a lather even after all these years? Lucky for me it was only the hard disk...I could have mentioned graphics!
Real men didn't use operating systems back then...we wrote boot sectors for floppies and took over the entire machine.
The Atari ST had built-in hard disk support in 1985.
The A1200 wasn't launched until 1992 - much too late to make any difference.
'3D in hardware' is a bit of a stretch.
I remember my Amiga polygon function used the blitter to draw individual horizontal lines for the polygons but it wasn't really much faster than the 'software' Atari ST version. The blitter was only faster when pixels needed to be shifted left/right.
Why is that amazing? Even the Sinclair Spectrum had that 'feature'...
The A600 and A1200 weren't released until 1992 ... by then the Amiga was already dead to everybody except the fanatics.
It was a serious computer developed by some really smart and talented software and hardware engineers, but people didn't see it that way.
So were many other machines of that era (e.g. NeXT, Acorn Archimedes). They all died for the same reason: Lack of software.
The Amiga 1000/500 were the only ones that really counted, the rest of the world had already moved on when the 68040 Amigas appeared. Amiga programming was my job at the time and I think I only ever saw one of the 68040 Amigas in the real world. We certainly didn't buy any in our company.
Almost everything the Amiga's hardware could do in terms of sound and graphics would chew CPU time on the PC.
Sure ... but the Amiga's CPU was very slow compared to the PC's. We're talking 7.2MHz 68000 vs. 16 or 20MHz 286. In real terms the sound mixing wasn't a factor.
The problem with specialized chips is, well, they're specialized. The Amiga was only really good at certain video effects (ie. screen scrolling and 2D sprites). All the fancy hardware was no help at all if you weren't doing that...and unfortunately for the Amiga it the world wasn't doing that. The real world was going 3D (eg. Wolfenstein 3D) and the puny Amiga CPU combined with its awkward video memory layout meant it simply couldn't compete in that world.
Yes.
(If that's all we wanted to do we'd have stuck with the 'back' button).
Problem was...anything over four bitplanes on the Amiga started stealing RAM access cycles from the CPU.
IIRC the HAM and EHB modes completely blocked the CPU during the active display time (ie. most of the time).
was dismayed by what I faced in the PC world by comparison at the time.
I dunno...for screen-scrolling games the Amiga was definitely king but things were starting to go 3D around that time. The PC was way better at 3D than the Amiga.
Amiga was better in almost every single aspect except for the amount of software available
So? The Acorn Archimedes was better than the Amiga in almost every single aspect ... except it had even less software than the Amiga. At the end of the day it's the software that counts (this fact was demonstrated many times during the 1980s with many worthy machines dying on the store shelves due to lack of software while 'inferior' machines sold in the millions...).
And you didn't need an Atari ST... That was silly
That was a joke.
Sort of - I did most of my Amiga coding that way and lots of people grabbed copies of my homebrew dev. system. The main factor was the hard disks. The ST had a built-in SCSI connector and the hard disks just worked. Getting an Amiga to work with a hard disk was much more of a black art.
Just download an emulator. All of the fun ... none of the diskettes.
(Ok, you won't be able to program any PWM effects on the 'power' LED, but hey...)
PS: That 'perfect steak' was probably dropped on the floor at some point...and in the small restaurant business the hygiene rules are for losers.
Marketing can give you some boost but it basically can only amplify what is fundamentally true and good about a product.
That only works if the customer can see what's good and true about a product. The financial companies do their best to make that impossible. Many retail goods companies do it too, eg. Apple censoring their own forums whenever they have a problem with a product.
The truth usually only appears after major meltdowns.
Small companies aren't immune either, some of the most bare-faced lies I've ever been told were by small companies (who actually had practice meetings to see who can lie the best when the lie is an 'important' one).
Most of the people I know who are "Dell Shops" do it because they get a service contract with Dell.
Whether or not that's a good way to do things is irregardless. The point is that Dell knows how to sell PCs to PHBs (who really don't care if you can get the same thing $200 cheaper elsewhere - $200 is background noise in the TCO).
The A1000 is the one true Amiga - gotta love the tuck-away keyboard design (and the nice keyboard).
The A500 was an amateurish-looking waste of desk space. I'm sure that's partly what killed it off as a 'serious' computer. Put one of those side by side with an IBM PC (and model M keyboard) and see which one gets chosen for 'business'.
Commodore wanted it to be a 'serious' machine but it never stood a chance against IBM (eg. adding a hard disk to an Amiga and getting it to boot from it was a joke).
If they'd sold it on it's strengths it might have done better - ie. sell it to hacker types and compete with Atari/Nintendo's closed systems instead of taking on IBM.
I'm still not sure how Commodore managed to go from selling 50 million machines to bankruptcy in a couple of years.
Towards the end of the Amiga's lifetime the PC had 386 CPUs, VGA graphics and Soundblasters whereas the Amiga had stood still. Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it.
The Amiga could do fancy scrolling effects but at the end of the day it was really only 16 color graphics in a plasticky box with no real sign that it was evolving into anything better.
If you stood it side by side with a PC in 1987 it was obvious which of the two was going to 'win'.
It was fun to write 'demos' on them though...
(So long as you had an Atari ST at the side to edit/assemble the 68000 code - using AmigaOS for work was a nasty experience)
whoosh!
I guess these days I'm more interested in a USB connector than a plastic disc spinner.
I'm not going to upgrade my TV to get mkv support, I'd be looking for a separate box. Is there a logo I should look for?
You need to read The Daily WTF a bit more to see the problem with semiskilled programmers...in the long run they cost far more money than doing the job properly.
re: "Calculators are bad because anyone can use them, engineers should use slide rules."
That's a stupid argument, engineers should always use the best tools available.
What Bjarne's saying is that no calculator will make you a mathematician. In the same way no programming language will ever free you from having to express problems both completely and in simple terms, and that's the hard part of programming.
At higher levels language syntax is irrelevant. What counts is the ability to express your design succinctly. Languages with missing abilities turn out to be a pain (eg. lack of operator overloading in Java makes numerical programs very verbose and hard to read).
Until I can play mkv files in a cheap DVD player then they're a non-starter for me. AVI might be rubbish but it works.
I also wanted to chop up a mkv file into pieces the other day and there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to VirtualDUB for this, I thought there would be something by now.
Is matroska gaining any support in the mainstream world or is it just another niche format like ogg?