c162-fe@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Jonathan Dubman) (03/19/88)
Re: Why are you selling your Amiga?? I just finished reading Jim Blandy's letter on why he's selling his Amiga to get a Mac II. I'm not about to flame the Mac II; I think it's a great machine. I think there are some VERY important points to be made here. Computer futurists (and I think that's most of us!) stay tuned. >I've recently put my Amiga up for sale on misc.forsale; I'm going to >get a Mac II, which I can get at an educational discount. I think >the reasons behind the choice are interesting. After all, I think >almost anyone will agree that, in theory, there's nothing a Mac can >do an Amiga can't do better. With a superb architecture, an I/O >system well-matched with the operating system, and other similar >things, why would one want to switch to a simpler, more conventional >machine? #define JOHN_DVORAK_STYLE_BOLDFACE_FOR_EMPHASIS Good question! Here I go with a BOLD NEW STYLE of response to computer comparison comments. A meandering discussion without a slant towards one computer or the other. I respect both the Amiga and Mac II but find major, nay, fatal faults with both. Even the Amiga, which I love. I think both will be considered antiquated in the year 2000, much as CP/M machines are now. Also, I'm not dogmatic about these opinions; I just hammered them out. I'm flexible - talk me out of them. Here we go: * * * Apple sells high-cost, medium-powered personal computers. They charge very high prices for two reasons. 1. Like IBM, Apple is expert at marketing. Apple sells the computers for quite a lot over basic cost and emphasizes sales to business and education, which CAN AFFORD A LITTLE MORE. They are interested in RELIABILITY and SERVICE more than power and performance. Apple also has its user-interface, which, while flawed, is MORE CONSISTENT than any other. That's worth money in that it smooths the learning curve. Marketing experts that they are, Apple has educational discounts that sell to poor students like me, many of whom will probably end up in influential purchasing positions. It works the same way as COACH vs. BUSINESS class on airplanes. Pay what you can. Still, however, I think the Apple machines are overpriced. That's the primary reason why the "Computer for the rest of us" is a little exaggerated. What percentage of the U.S. population can afford a Mac II? Or even an Apple IIGS? Ten percent? Twenty percent? Do you realize an Apple IIGS, reasonably configured, costs about $2000 and is far inferior to a $1000 Amiga 500 system? 2. Apple puts LOTS of money into RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. They have a Cray II. They have large task forces on graphics, font art and research, and the human interface. Their fonts are professional. The user interface has no holes. I have my complaints, but it is a slick user interface. I might as well give the biggest complaints now. (1) SLUGGISH - no blitter. Actually, I've got an idea that will blow away the blitter for window-based systems, and I'm not kidding - but I'm saving it for the next posting. (2) Inability to separate contexts of different programs that may or may not require different screen modes. (i.e. no Intuition Screens.) Intuition Screens are not the final answer, but the Mac II's screen gets REALLY CLUTTERED and the palette is mashed when many programs run at "once". (However, Color Quickdraw actually does have a nice algorithm for approximating colors that it can't exactly match with the current palette.) (3) No command line interface (commercial stuff doesn't count - the computer isn't built with those in mind.) For now, command line interfaces are the closest thing we have to NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING. So that's why Apple charges high prices for their machines, along with millions of other comments. Now: Commodore sells low-cost, high-powered computers. Why are they low cost? They have to be low cost to compete with Apple and Atari. Look at the relative success of the Amiga 1000 and the Amiga 500. Continuing the airline analogy, the Amiga is the CONCORDE in the PEOPLE'S EXPRESS clothing. Also, people don't buy a FERRARI if looks like a VOLKSWAGEN, unless it's priced like a Volkswagen. The Mac's word processors are professional. The screen is optimized for beautiful text output. The spreadsheets are for real. The whole thing looks beautiful. Put a Mac II and an Amiga side-by-side running comparable TEXT-BASED software. No contest. Just like there's no contest in animation. Ever see a Mac II try to do animation? Apple can go talk about "elegant" single-processor simple-bitmapped graphics all you like, but the Mac II PALES in animation. And superfast graphics is going to be one of the key elements of the next-generation user interface. What are those key elements? 1. superfast, super hi-res graphics (I've got some wild ideas for that) idea is to encourage experimentation and develop better analogies for human thought than desktops and square icons with pull-down menus. 2. natural language processing, eventually with voice recognition. 3. artificial intelligence to recognize and take advantage of patterns in your behavior. The final screen is what people see and admire, even if the Mac II's operating system is fluffy in parts. (I could use stronger language, but this is not a flame.) On that subject: Mac II: Consistent and professional user interface, but bland. Excellent font-support. Excellent printer support. REALLY POOR operating system underneath. Bloody mess. Look at the Inside Macintosh Manuals. Nice manuals, nice glossy paper. There is even a nice hardbound programmer's introduction. Really, er, fluffy operating system. Kludgey, last-minute multitasking. But end users don't care, and why should they? Amiga: Zippy, nonstandard user interface. Professional, UNIX-like, high-performance, multitasking, message passing operating system. Relatively poor font support. Relatively poor printer support. (Of course, both blow the pants off the old 8-bit machines and the IBM PC's, which are CP/M in spirit, but we aren't talking about those. We're in a different league here. Also not talking about ST, which I think we can save for net.jokes.) VERY poor documentation, aside from Rob Peck's book. SPEED OF MICROCOMPUTERS At normal operations, the Mac II is fast. At floating point operations, the STANDARD Mac II is VERY FAST. The floating point coprocessor was a GREAT MOVE on Apple's part. However, the speed of the Mac II is basically in SPITE OF the operating system, not because of it. (If you really want to have fun, flame OS/2. What is it now, 2-megs and running slower than MS-DOS?) >Take a look at the software. For the Mac, every WP supports >multiple fonts, onscreen text attributes, proportional fonts, and >they're usually almost WYSIWYG. And this is expected. Mac users have higher standards for word processing and lower standards for graphics. The Amiga's standards are reversed. I don't want to belittle graphics. I think graphics are VERY IMPORTANT. Graphics and animation are a whole way of thinking. Boy do I have some ideas on what I could do with a micro supercomputer (not a super microcomputer) with Pixar-quality graphics. Not just the games - but the 3-D modeling, the mathematical exploration, the incredibly smooth user interface, the TEACHING POTENTIAL of such a machine!!! >On the Amiga, we've had TEXTCRAFT??!? Scribble!?!? The thing had >dot commands, for God's sake! What are we, troff afficandos? (Hey! Some of us are :-) Steve Jobs PERSONALLY OVERSAW the writing of Macwrite and MacPaint. They had to live up to his vision of the machine. Read "Steve Jobs - The Journey is the Reward" by Jeffrey S. Young. They were PART of the machine. On the Amiga, the vision was different. I'm not even sure what it was, or is. I think it's more of a hardware vision, whereas the Mac's vision was almost entirely software. The Amiga is the most impressive piece of computer hardware ever produced in its price range. It was made by real hackers, and I think originally designed for them as well! >Why did it take ten minutes (I'm exaggerating) to list a directory >under 1.1? Why was 1.2 better, but still awful compared to any PC >clone? Come on - when I know my machine could scream past them, why >is anything less than wonderful acceptable? Yes, you are right. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. THIS IS ONE OF THE WORST AND MOST BIZARRE IDIOTIC FEATURES OF THE AMIGA. I DON'T CARE WHAT ANYBODY SAYS ON THAT ISSUE. The file is so much a part of this machine that slow searches really impair it. Apple would never have let this happened. But Commodore was about to go out of business if they didn't finish this machine, and CAOS fell through... However... flip side is: The Amiga, with its multitasking and message-passing and generalized device I/O and CLI and so forth inherited from Unix an ability to PUT TOGETHER SMALL PROGRAMS IN POWERFUL WAYS. This is a little more complete under UNIX, which has more standard pipes. I have a lot of experience with the Mac. Once I tried to change all carriage returns to something else - never mind why, it had to be done - on each file in a certain directory. I wanted to perform a global search and replace on all 37 files. On Unix, I could do this in ONE COMMAND LINE (call to stream editor with * for a filename.) On the Mac, it took me ten hours. Okay, Unix doesn't have icons and so forth for these "cryptic" commands, but AT LEAST IT HAS THEM. And the Amiga has IFF. THIS IS A CONCEPT WITH VISION. It ain't perfect, but it has vision. IFF is an abstract, detatched version of what all this IPC (Inter-Process Communication) fuss is about. This really makes the Amiga powerful. >Deluxe paint. Suppose you want to do some hardcopy, like posters? >Maps? diagrams or charts for a homework paper or presentation? Why >can't the thing conveniently work with an image larger than the >screen like, say, the size of A PIECE OF PAPER???? Oh, sorry, I'll >do it SIDEWAYS. Right. Even MacPaint lets you work on a page at a >time. And MacPaint has been topped since. Why is this acceptable? It is not acceptable. The Mac blows away the Amiga in printed output. It could be said that the Mac INVENTED computerized printed output. But the Amiga blows away the Mac in animation. (And if you want my opinion, nothing on the Mac is half as good as Deluxe Paint. Kudos to DAN SILVA and Electronic Arts! You want to know the key? The natural ability to cut out any region and DRAW WITH IT. The difference between this and MacPaint is very much like the difference between recursion in C and in BASIC.) >It's frustrating knowing that your computer isn't living up to a >fraction of its potential. A computer's hardware is only the beginning. A few points need to be made. There are different sorts of "not living up to potential." 1. The Mac II's hardware doesn't live up to the potential of a 68020/68881 combination with those incredible graphics. (Amiga hardware is about as far as you can take a plain 68000!) 2. Neither the Mac II's OS nor the Amiga's OS live up to the actual hardware potential of the respective machine. Mac II has further go in this regard. 3. Neither the software of the Mac II nor the software of the Amiga live up to the potential of the machine. Amiga has further to go in this regard. (That can be read in two different ways - I mean both of them!) 4. (Philosophical) Very few PEOPLE live up to their potential. >I guess what I'm saying here is something about the nature of >computers. So if you think I'm just saying "mine's better than >yours," do the wise thing - ignore me. It's not worth the net. But >if you think I'm saying something new, post something, and let's >argue. :-) Gladly! Actually, I think the reason people defend their computers so much nowadays is that they increasingly identify with them. 100 years from now, with computerized sensory experience, the line may get really thin. ("My world's better than yours!" Hmmmm.) I, for one, can recognize the difference between a flame and a constructive comment. Just because we wear flame-retardant pyjamas doesn't mean we can't sit in front of a warm fire. Anybody want to poke it? -- >Jim Blandy *&(Jonathan Dubman) .signature to be modified once I master object-oriented languages which don't have pointer type casting and all that... crap! I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!
eric@hector.UUCP (Eric Lavitsky) (03/25/88)
In this sverely edited article <1661@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> c162-fe@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Jonathan Dubman) writes: >Re: Why are you selling your Amiga?? > >>I've recently put my Amiga up for sale on misc.forsale; I'm going to >>get a Mac II, which I can get at an educational discount. I think >>the reasons behind the choice are interesting. After all, I think >>almost anyone will agree that, in theory, there's nothing a Mac can >>do an Amiga can't do better. With a superb architecture, an I/O >>system well-matched with the operating system, and other similar >>things, why would one want to switch to a simpler, more conventional >>machine? >2. Apple puts LOTS of money into RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT. They have a >Cray II. They have large task forces on graphics, font art and research, and >the human interface. Their fonts are professional. The user interface has no >holes. I have my complaints, but it is a slick user interface. I might as >well give the biggest complaints now. >So that's why Apple charges high prices for their machines, along with millions >of other comments. Now: > >Commodore sells low-cost, high-powered computers. Why are they low cost? Also note that that is one of the forte's of CBM. They excel at cost reduction and mass production techniques - they've been doing it for years. But low cost of hardware does not mean low sophistication of hardware, and the software *must* match the level of the hardware. >SPEED OF MICROCOMPUTERS > >At normal operations, the Mac II is fast. At floating point operations, the >STANDARD Mac II is VERY FAST. The floating point coprocessor was a GREAT >MOVE on Apple's part. However, the speed of the Mac II is basically in >SPITE OF the operating system, not because of it. (If you really want to >have fun, flame OS/2. What is it now, 2-megs and running slower than MS-DOS?) Yeah - try Dale's new math libraries on a stock Amiga, an Amiga with a 25MHZ 68881 on an A2620, a Mac SE and a Mac II. I think you'll find the Amiga kicks the pants off the other machines for floating point - and all in a multitasking environment! >>On the Amiga, we've had TEXTCRAFT??!? Scribble!?!? The thing had >>dot commands, for God's sake! What are we, troff afficandos? > >(Hey! Some of us are :-) Steve Jobs PERSONALLY OVERSAW the writing of >Macwrite and MacPaint. They had to live up to his vision of the machine. >Read "Steve Jobs - The Journey is the Reward" by Jeffrey S. Young. >They were PART of the machine. On the Amiga, the vision was different. I'm >not even sure what it was, or is. I think it's more of a hardware vision, >whereas the Mac's vision was almost entirely software. The Amiga is the most >impressive piece of computer hardware ever produced in its price range. >It was made by real hackers, and I think originally designed for them as well! Absolutely - my biggest gripe with the Amiga has been the speed at which the System software has evolved. To make an Amiga application work well and fast takes less work on an Amiga (than a Mac); to make it look beautiful requires much more work than on a Mac. One example comes to mind - Jim Bayless at New Horizons spent oodles of time making his applications look like Mac applications, but heck - I don't always have that much time to spend. Just for fun the other day, I started looking through my old V25 manuals which I had just gotten back from a loan to a friend. I was looking for lost material like the blitter docs and decided to look through the Intuition manual... It hasn't changed much since then - and the thing that really caught my eye was the section on style in the Intuition user interface. The contradiction was something like this (from memory): "Be as daring as you like, don't be afraid to use wonderful imagery etc" and "These are the suggested guidelines for standard Amiga menus and key shortcuts". 'Cmon - "suggested guidelines"? - how wimpy can you get? I think RJ had some neat ideas, but not imposing some stricter guidelines on how applications should look was not one of them. I think he does realize now that other standard resources are needed across applications (file requesters, color requesters etc). Let's face it - the original folks were forced to rush their stuff out and then were laid off. One of the biggest mistakes of the older Commodore regime was to not put the highest value on the Amiga software people. A neat piece of hardware is nothing without good software to back it up. Things have been improving lately - they're finally hiring more people (still not enough though), but in relation to the number of people they have, the deadlines are still ridiculous. The entire Amiga programming staff was down at one point to 2 people on the West coast and perhaps 3 people on the East coast - can you say "understaffed"? Now it's more like 5 or 6 people out West and 6 or 7 back East. Yeah - we're gonna catch up to the Mac "real soon now". Hopefully, developers can help fill the gaps. >>Deluxe paint. Suppose you want to do some hardcopy, like posters? >>Maps? diagrams or charts for a homework paper or presentation? Why >>can't the thing conveniently work with an image larger than the >>screen like, say, the size of A PIECE OF PAPER???? Oh, sorry, I'll >>do it SIDEWAYS. Right. Even MacPaint lets you work on a page at a >>time. And MacPaint has been topped since. Why is this acceptable? > >It is not acceptable. The Mac blows away the Amiga in printed output. It >could be said that the Mac INVENTED computerized printed output. But the >Amiga blows away the Mac in animation. (And if you want my opinion, nothing on >the Mac is half as good as Deluxe Paint. Kudos to DAN SILVA and Electronic >Arts! You want to know the key? The natural ability to cut out any region >and DRAW WITH IT. The difference between this and MacPaint is very much like >the difference between recursion in C and in BASIC.) Hey - if you were a Mac owner and you came to see Dave Berezowski's presentation on the 1.3 printer device at the JAUG meeting last week, you would have been drooling all over the place - try using any of the neat new color printers on a Mac II! Now laser printers are another story... (nice job Dave!) Eric ARPA: eric@topaz.rutgers.edu "Lithium is no longer available UUCP: ...{wherever!}ulysses!eric on credit..." ...{wherever!}rutgers!topaz!eric - from Buckaroo Banzai SNAIL: 34 Maplehurst Ln, Piscataway, NJ 08854