[net.micro.amiga] I've seen one

keashly@winston.UUCP (Lance Keashly) (09/14/85)

Yes I've seen and used the Amiga developers system.

I should really say taken a turn at it, I'm not the one responsible
for doing development. Anyway here are the things we have found out.

They use 16kx4 drams in the beast so yes it has a 16bit bus.

They mother board is two sided and very sparce, custom chips do that.

Anyone who comes out with a Unix type shell that can replace the cli's
abortion of commands will sell alot of copies. The cli is like nothing
I've seen before and like everything I've seen before. It is very inconsistent
in it's user interface and in general it will take alot of working with
the manuals before anyone will get the hang of it. Why they didn't do something
like copy known interfaces I'll never know. 

If you do development you're best bet is to do cross development. It took us
2 days before we got the Amiga to compile and link and run "hello world". More
examples would have helped ALOT!!

I like the keyboard. It has a good feel to me, the layout is generally good,
(the ctrl and CAP LOCK is annoying ), feedback is very good  (tactile and
sound).

The mouse is smooth, but the two buttons do get confusing at times.

The Intuition interface is hard to understand at times but not impossible.

In general the hardware is very nice. Quick graphics and nice layout. The
software is very poor, but it's potential is a bit awe-inspiring. A nice
unix like interface (I like CSH myself) with somewhat consistent interface
and a nice hard disk and you have yourself a very powerful machine. But not
yet.

PS. the write protected ram for the kickstart looks like it costs a bundle
to produce. It looks like a 4 layer board with dram controller and dram and
get this IT CONNECTS TO THE MAIN BOARD IN OVER 30 DIFFERENT LOCATIONS. 
impressive but expensive.

-- 
    Lance Keashly
    New Media Technologies Ltd.
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