karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer) (07/07/88)
The first part could be subtitled "Misery Loves Company." In the "Nanobytes" section, a high-up at Atari is quoted as saying that the problem with the Amiga and the Atari ST is that they aren't powerful enough to do anything useful. Speak for yourself, I say, and I'm curious both about the slander (?) and the wisdom of the remark with respect to future sales of their own machine. Perhaps they're about to unveil an "Amiga killer." (Read "unveil" as "announce"; Post-Tramiel Atari has one of the highest vaporware to product ratios in the business, remember the ST blitter?) The second reference I found was made by good ol' Dr. Jerry Pournelle. Although he says the Amiga is the most fun machine he owns and it is the kind of machine that Byte owners would love, he makes the mistake of calling the Amiga's two user interfaces (the CLI and the Workbench) two operating systems. He points out that programs not supplied with an icon must be run from the CLI and, I think, that not all programs can be run from either environment. (I agree that this can be a pain, frustrating for non-techies, and urge Amiga programmers to support both modes where reasonable. Perhaps someone should send him a copy of Browser.) Further, he asserts that the operating system "almost works" (It seems to work OK for me) and perhaps rightfully criticizes Commodore for laying off the development team so early and moving development away from SilVal. He is unhappy about getting so many gurus (so am I, but hey) and mentions (for the tenth time) that calling them guru errors isn't all that funny, although he does admit that it might be that he doesn't know very much about the machine. (I'd still like to see a little more GOMF-style reporting of what happened, 1.4 maybe?) He also says that disk I/O is incredibly slow, and I have to admit it is pretty slow, although we're all looking very much forward to FFS and floppy track caching. I hope he gets a copy of FFS, and FACC II as well, and soon. He's always raving about various TSR programs and other tumors for the PC. He likes that kind of stuff. Surely he would find the Amiga equivalents at least as useful, and someday even begin to see the benefits of multitasking in this area. As you see, even with those super-laudative comments, the overall tone was negative. Dr. P has very ambivalent feelings about "our favorite machine." Perhaps the problem is that Dr. Pournelle just isn't getting the level of support from Commodore and the various Amiga product vendors and users as he is for his other machines. Oh how he loved his Godbout equipment, and it's no coincidence that whenever he had a problem, Bill Godbout came out and fixed it (like he did for all Godbout customers :-) Too, though, the crap has to work. Although Zenith gave him an $8000 laptop, and he likes laptops a lot, if it broke constantly he wouldn't have nice things to say about it. -- -- uunet!sugar!karl