rminnich@metropolis.super.org (Ronald G Minnich) (08/16/88)
I find this discussion rather strange. We seem to be saying that while a few years ago you could get the amiga to do what others did for five times the price, now you can do it for only three times the price. I guess that is losing ground in a sense. But the amiga still has some nice properties. For all its problems i think the the Rom Kernel/exec have advantages over the unix i have been using for 13 years now. For example, I have read that one reason there is no history in the Bourne Shell is that Steve Bourne felt history belonged in the virtual terminal handler. Think how hard that is in Unix, and trivial it is in ConMan. Think about the fact that AReXX has made real integrated groups of programs possible on the amiga. Unix only ever got as far as pipes, which is why Unix programs are getting more and more monolithic (i just found out a while ago that some one decided to put 'uniq' into 'sort'- ugh!). Because pipes are so crude things are actually moving BACKWARDS in the Unix world, toward big heavy programs. You couldn't easily build Tom Rokicki's wonderful TeX system on a Unix machine. There are many, many things the Amiga got right that Unix still has not got right (food chain for example). No fault to unix, it is quite old. But i have no interest in running Unix on my machine, it gives me enough headaches at work. Or, to sum up, speaking as a long-time Unix hacker (V6 on), i LIKE the amiga software, and prefer it at home to Unix! Yes the amiga display is a disappointment nowadays. But so many other aspects of the machine are done right that i am keeping mine. ron