mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike Meyer) (10/02/86)
At just about the time the Amiga-Mac wars started, a Mac-liking friend asked me what I thought about my Amiga, and whether or not it had a future. After seeing the response, he suggested I post it. Conversations with other Mac-liking friends has convinced me. Warning: This is written by a convert. I did *not* buy my Amiga for the color or sound; I almost bought a B&W monitor. I got converted later. But you've been warned. ---------------- Those who claim that the Amiga is going to vanish because it's late or some such are foolish. [Enter missionary mode.] The Amiga is *NOT* just "another Mac" or even "a better Mac." It's the first of a whole new class of machine - enough CPU to do real work, plus graphics & sound to do a game machine proud, plus the MAC interface, plus multitasking. The graphics are enticing artists - people who make a living at it - into using the machine to create artwork. Cartoonists have discovered that you can turn out high-quality animations with little or no other equipment. The GenLOCK hardware is going to lower the threshold cost for a TV station to start doing it's own commercials. [Genlock takes ANY video image and merges that as color 0 with the Amiga image. You get the result back suitable for feeding to a monitor, or to a video recorder.] The sound quality is something else. There are musicians who got to play with Beta versions of the some of the note processing software, and are going slowly crazy wondering when they'll get real versions. The //gs will eat some of that market because it didn't get out. The CPU is a win, also. Especially since there's ALREADY a 68020/68881 upgrade for the thing. But even without that, there's a "space artist" who uses the Amiga to calculate planetary positions/views and build an IFF (the graphics interchange format) file with horizons + planet outlines in it. The multitasking means you get to play with all this stuff at the same time. Just this evening, I was coping disks for a friend (foreground in the CLI), reading mail (term program run off workbench), and occasionally running YaBOING (backgrounded from the CLI). The same IBM-PC lover mentioned above claims that people dont' really need multitasking, except for print spooling. But he runs a half-dozen things that catch magic keystrokes and do things for him. All of these have to know intimate details of the IBM-PC. (I *NEVER* call it just the PC. My current PC is a VAX 8800. IBM doesn't make the worlds only Personal Computer; so it's always IBM-PC!) Most of those things are just workbench selections on the Amiga, and are nothing but stock programs. I suspect that, as the Amiga gets wider exposure, people are going to change their attitudes about multi-tasking. It's easier and more useful on the Amiga than on a Sun. [Exit missionary mode.] Realistically, nobody can say whether a machine will or won't succeed. Remember the IBM-PC/jr? I think the Amiga has a good chance of living quite a while. How long did it take for software to make the Mac a usefull machine to show up? The IBM-PC took better than 6 months, even with IBM backing it. The Amiga hasn't been out quite a year yet, and there's a pretty good selection of software (including a multi-user BBS!). Not great - much of it is still obviously ports from less friendly environments. But that's changing. As for new systems displacing it - I'd be surprised. Most of the work being done on pcs today could be done on good old 8080 and z80 systems - just a bit slower (large spreadsheets would require lots of overlays). Those chips - and the 6502 - can shuffle characters around as fast as an 80286 or a 68010 (oh, yeah - I do have a 68010 in my Amiga), and that's what 90+% of pcs time is spent doing. The point of this is that bigger/faster processors aren't that important, except to people who want the latest toys, and those who are obsessed by speed. Since it's software that sells machines, I don't think that new technology will hurt the Amiga sales much. I don't know what Atari is up to (other than trying to buy Amiga from Commodore!), but we can look at Apple. The //gs could be a serious threat - it's got graphics nearly as good, better sound, most of the speed, and // compatability. I don't expect it to make any more difference than the // + RS CoCo combined, especially since it retails for more than an Amiga. Then there's the new Apple box running Unix. Since my poor little Amiga is nearly as nice to use as a Sun, I don't expect much from this, either. Will it have the color graphics + sound? Will it run Mac software (good trick, that). More importantly, WHAT WILL IT COST? I seriously doubt that it'll be cheaper than a //gs. My guess is the only thing it'll have on an Amiga is a bigger/faster processor, plus Mac compatability. The compatability will make it some sales. But will it sell to people who would have bought an Amiga instead of a Mac? I don't expect so; but I have trouble conceiving of the frame of mind that makes an Amiga preferable to a Mac, but a multi-tasking Mac preferable to an Amiga (exceptions being people who wouldn't have bought a stock Mac or Amiga in any case, like those looking for a cheap Sun). In summary, I don't think the Amiga is late. The new machines on the horizon aren't going to displace it - except for the new Amigas :-) (68010 standard, more expansion slots, plus who knows what for the version after next). I think it's got a secure market spot, as the Sun for people who can't afford Suns, if nothing else. But trying to make an Amiga look like Unix is doing a disservice to both the machine and the user. I expect it to start selling like crazy to people who hadn't bought machines because there weren't machine capable of doing what they wanted, and slowly sell to people who are looking for an IBM-PC plus extras. Enough. No, more than enough. Back to Robo City News.... <mike