u800552@lanl.gov (James R. White) (05/04/90)
I came to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory last August. When asked what kind of a PC I wanted, I immediately said an Amiga 2500. My boss was expecting me to say "A MAC-IIcx" or "A Compaq-386" or something similar. I then had to answer some tough questions, like "How are you going to hook up to the AppleTalk Network?" and "How are you going to hook up to the Ethernet Network?" I didn't have the right answers. According to one of the recent publications from our computing division, we bought around 1800 personal computers last year. These are equally split between IBMs and clones, Apples, and "Others" The "Other" category includes around 375 workstations, about 225 of which are Sun's, the rest include Silicon Graphics machines, NexTs, and whatever. I bet we bought less than 10 Amigas, if any. The group I work in is about 75% MACs, 15% Suns, and the rest split between NexTs and IBMs. When I was showing a friend of mine my Amiga, he was impressed by the animation. He is currently working on a project to hook up a Sun to a Cray via a fiber-optic system to do visualization of calculated results. Another friend was impressed - he is hooking up a MAC to some sort of a $50 K video tape system to digitize experimental results (inferring bubble velocities from video images). The Amiga could be used for a lot of this stuff, if it were perceived as a professional machine. Last August, it wasn't. Maybe with the networking options of the 3000, the Unix operating system and so on, maybe it will change it's image. The local dealers are oriented toward the home market (with 95% of the shelf space devoted to games). Imagine a businessman walking into your typical Amiga dealer (who also sells satellite dishes and other gee-whiz electronic home products), elbowing past a crowd of pimply-faced kids trying out the latest space-blaster game, and trying to talk about networking to a sales person who was selling shoes last week. I wound up with a Max IIcx, 8 MB of Ram, a 60 Meg hard drive, and a wonderful SuperMac 19" monitor (with 1023 x 786 resolution). What with software (Excel, Word, VersaTerm, Cricket Graph), the whole shebang came in at $10,000 (the monitor alone was $3796!). Now don't get me wrong, I love my Amigas (I have 2 Amiga-1000s at home), but the MAC had the technical advantages. Excel, MicroSoft Word, or VersaTerm alone are worth buying the machine for. As I am writing this message, I have got 3 different telecommunications windows open - 1 Ethernet window to a Cray-XMP via a VAX gateway machine, another Ethernet window open to a different Cray via a different VAX gateway, and a Versaterm window open to a VAX I am typing this window in. This window allows me to look at clearly readable 132 columns by 50 lines of display on a 256 color desktop. All the telecommunications windows are "active" in the sense that as things happen on the host machine, messages show up in the windows. This may not be "true" multitasking, but it is good enough. I think the Amiga handles windows better (quicker and smoother), but the MAC user-interface is nice (the ability to cut and paste darn near anything from any application to any other application) is a real time-saver. I hope the clipboard in the Amiga OS 2.0 is better supported. I also hope that the developers standardize the keyboard shortcuts (cut, copy, paste and quit). ________________________________________________________________________ | James R. White | N-6 - The Dukes of Nukes | | Los Alamos National Laboratory | "Running Codes is like walking on | | N-6 / MS K557 | water - works better when frozen." | | Los Alamos, NM 87544 | U800552@beta.lanl.gov | | Phone (505)-667-3853 (Work) | QVAX2::JWHITE | | Phone (505)-662-7554 (Home) | FTS 843-3853 | ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~