kraussW@batman.moravian.EDU ( SysAdm) (11/04/89)
I was at the UNIX Expo in New York City yesterday (11/2) and saw THREE Amiga 2500UX machines. They were holding their own right along side the big names in the workstation world at the UNIX International booth. (Sun, HP, DEC, Etc.) All machines were running an X-Windows demo. I asked the person I thought was demonstrating the Amiga when it would available. It turned out that the person was actually demonstrating a 386 Machine next to the 2500UX. What was interesting was that he commented that he was real impressed with it. (He had tried it earlier that day.) He just couln't figure out why the Commodore guy never hung around to show it to anyone. So I went to the other 2500UX's where there were two Commodore guys. When asked when it would be released they said, "Early 1990". They couldn't comment on the price. They were not really actively showing the machines. They were running a generic demo that everyone else was running. But at least that was running as fast or faster than the other machines. It was nice to see an amiga with a screen as big as my SPARCstation. At any rate we now know for sure that it will be running a 25Mhz 68030. As for the expo itself, it was a glimpse of things to come. I was glad I had the opportunity to listen to Bill Joy, VP of Sun Microsystems. He said many things that confirmed the direction Commodore. I'll try to summarize some of his main points/opinions. 1) The question is no longer "IF UNIX". UNIX is big enough that virtually every company is supporting it, or at least porting it to their machines so that they won'r lose their market share. 2) Hardware no longer will be the "Computing Frontier". 32 Bit machines will be the standard for the next decade. He also claims that as a result of the merging of SYS-V and SunOS (Berkeley), System V Rel 4 will be the standard UNIX OS across all UNIX machines/architectures. Advances in UNIX will not be very many. The hot spot, or the frontier for computing for the next decade will be APPLICATIONS. Since many UNIX boxes will be running the same OS with the same user interface, whether that be motif or open look, the applications will be available for ALL machines with very small portability problems. This is what he thinks Open Systems is... Many architectures, many manufactors, one operating system, one application is easily ported to all. 3) The age of monochrome is over. The age of terminals is over. Workstations are in. The application should run in front of you resulting in all the power of the architecture being available for your execution of the application. Color will play a big part in the next decade. 4) The age of proprietary Operating Systems is coming to a close. He feels that the competition between proprietary OS's (Apple, MS-DOS) and UNIX is good but that eventually UNIX will be the direction the industry will take. 5) Workstation prices will continue to drop as a result of increased technology. What does this mean for the Amiga and the Amiga user? (Set the "here comes my opinion" flag = true :-) 1) The amiga line, especially the 68020, 68030 based machines meet the definition of workstations and will be well equipt for the coming decade. 2) I believe thatt he UNIIX being released with the 2500UX is System 5 Release 4. What this will do is make the applications available for the other machines running SVR4 available to the Amiga. (Assuming that either Open Look or Motif are set down as standards.) This will forever put an end to to the question, "Is there any software for it?" It will also allow those programmers dedicated to the Amiga to be able to market their products for the entire market, rather than just the Amiga Market. 3) Hopefully Commodore is looking at machines beyond the 680x0 processor family. It would be real exciting to see CBM release a RISC or SPARC machine. There are alreay many manufactors who are releasing machines based on the Motorola 88000 RISC chip. I am confident that Commodore can do what it's done in the past, release a quality machine for less than the competition. 4) (Praises) The Amiga 2000 design with it's processor slot is a terrific design. The user can buy a machine for the home and has a CLEAR upgrade path to a faster machine. While I have been a Commodore fan since I bought my VIC-20 for $250, I haven't had the time to fully explore the Amiga 1000 that I convinced my father to buy for his business. I am not familiar with the Amiga 2000 bus so if I am wrong about my next statement, forgive my ignorance and send flames directly to me. I *think* that the current bus is only 16 bits wide. It would be nice to see that bus extended to 32 bits while maintaining the ability to accept the 16 bit boards. (Hardware GURUS, how about it? 32bits for Memory Boards, other future boards but still work with current coprocessors.) Furthermore as technology becomes better it would be good if all the chips on board the amiga could work at higher clock speeds. (It would be nice if they would be enhanced to 32 bits but we're talking a MAJOR design effort.) 5) We as users need to see the direction that the entire industry is going. While AmigaDOS is fine for single user applications, it is not secure or rubust enough to be able to support multiuser applications. The machines are getting to the point where they are incredibly powerful. We need to be able to share that power. Again I don't claim to be an expert on AmigaDOS but it would take a major rewrite of the OS to add multiuser or distributed processing support to the current operating system. So rather than trying to add these features to a proprietary OS, provide an easy upgrade path to SVR4. Perhaps by distinguishing the differences and advantages between AmigaDOS and UNIX we can realize that both are needed to support the different uses of the hardware. AmigaDOS for the single user, for the beginner, for the low cost computing requirements. UNIX for the multi user, networked, higher cost computing requirements. I certainly do not mean to put AmigaDOS down, it is a powerful OS in it's own right, but serves a different purpose that UNIX. Well, I've rambled long enough. My intention is NOT to start a war of words but to encourage discussion on these views/ideas. I don't claim to be an Amiga expert or a good speller, my strength lies in UNIX administration. I do think that unlike other companies, Commodore does respect the needs/ opinions of its users so we in effect can hammer out some of the things we would like to see in the future. Press On, Bill Krauss -- | William F. Krauss III | Moravian College, CompSci Dept, Bethlehem PA 18018 | | Computer Science Dept | CSNET/INTERNET -> kraussW@moravian.edu | | System Administrator | UUCP -> ...!rutgers!liberty!batman!kraussW | | Phone - 215-861-1441 | BITNET -> kraussW%moravian.edu@relay.cs.net |
peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) (11/06/89)
In article <574@batman.moravian.EDU> kraussW@batman.moravian.EDU ( SysAdm) writes: > 3) The age of monochrome is over. > Color will play a big part in the next decade. I doubt this very much. For any given technology level and price you can get higher resolution, higher speed, and a larger screen in monochrome than in color. Until we reach the point that a cheap color screen can exceed any human perceptual dimension (time, space, visual field) monochrome will be a viable option. -- Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva `-_-' ...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.hackercorp.com 'U` ``Back off dude! I'm a topologist!'' -- Andrew Molitor <amolitor@eagle.wesleyan.edu>