karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer) (10/30/87)
Boy, a lot of people are flaming Commodore for the 1000 to 2000 upgrade. Considering the hosing Apple gave original 128K Macintosh buyers and Commodore's own history of introducing incompatible machines, I'd say we got off very, very easily. John Campbell, a former (and possibly current) editor of Analog once wrote that pioneering amounts to finding new and more horrible ways to die. Amiga buyers, particularly early ones, were pioneers, and as such they risked seeing their investment in the Amiga, in both time and money, die. Imagine if Commodore had released an incompatible machine, like, one that used the 386 instead of the 68000. Blammo, slow death for the A1000 as it suffocates from lack of exposure (not enough machines to support a major software market, perhaps the biggest complaint 'til now anyway). On the other hand, C= really couldn't afford to do that as they couldn't afford the typical one to two year wait for software. This way, the software is already ready. Also, I think C= realizes how much of the 1000 population is composed of hackers (I mean the good kind of hackers of course). I read of a study done of early buyers of the first runnable-out-of-the-box machine, the Apple ][, and the vast majority of buyers in the first couple of years were professional programmers. I think the phenomenal success of that machine can be attributed to this, and to its expandibility and low price. My point is that Apple had the hackers and then abandoned them. The closed architecture, monochrome, expensive (at first) Mac did not excite the hackers I know when it came out. Hackers bought the Amiga since it's release because it is the coolest home computer by far ever. I don't care if that can't be explained in a 30-second commercial: multitasking, the blitter, graphics coprocessor, Intuition, the CLI. Remember the first time you pulled down the Boing screen and did stuff with the workbench while Boing was still running and you could still hear the Boing audio? I knew when I saw Boing, Robocity, the workbench, its demos and the CLI that this was the machine for me. So, all these hackers went out and bought Amigas. And we suffered through the lack of software (other than a few goodies: dpaint, the development tools, Fred Fish's work) and a stinky bus-extending edge connector (I agree that costs had to be kept down) and at least three revisions of the external bus specifications to which the death of several fledgling hardware vendors is directly attributable. (A side note is that the bus is unlikely to change again for a long time now that the 2000 has a slotted backplane inside a cabinet.) Nonetheless, through all that rocky history, the machine and company are still here, now capable of playing for two new market niches (the all-important mammoth home market with the A500 and the low-end-high-end CAD/CAM/video production/scientific/personal workstation niches with the A2000.) ...and Commodore still has the hackers. If you don't think so then have a look at the cat demo from the BADGE killer demo contest. (and the others too, they're totally incredible) So, to the people who are bummed out about the minor incompatibilities: It could be worse. C= could have died. They could have come out with an incompatible machine. They didn't. The A500 is going to vastly increase the market for Amiga programs. Consequently, there should be much more software coming out for the Amiga 1000. Furthermore, from a software standpoint, the machines are extremely compatible. They didn't go to the Fat Agnes, for whatever reason, which improved compatibility. These A1000s that have several meg of RAM are still killer machines for developing software for the Amiga product line. Sure the 2000 is the ultimate for developers who can afford them, but almost every program that's come out *could* have been developed on the 500. No doubt many awesome programs will be developed on the 500. Commodore is doing a *wonderful* job supporting 1000 users by maintaining software compatibility, coming out with the market-widening 500 and 2000 and by subsidizing 1000 to 2000 upgrades. I think that upgrade deal demonstrates a continuing committment to their early customers, the hackers, of which one would be hard put to find any comparable examples in the business. I don't think Atari, Apple or IBM give a damn about hackers. (Note how quickly we had the docs on the internals compared to the ST guys. Also, one could immediately develop code with the Amiga. The first Mac programmers had to cross-compile from a Lisa!) Incidentally, I was in a Federated here in Houston today. They have a big new Atari display, and the salesman confidently informed me that the Amiga 2000 had been discontinued. He was quite certain. Now that I've set him straight I wonder if he'll stop telling people that...or not. Finally, regarding the lengthy reposting of the message from rec.music.synth where some guy flamed the Amiga, calling it a game machine and such, let's not start another net war over it, as the guy who did the reposting seems to want us to do. The guy flamed the Mac too, which was pretty dumb, because the Mark of the Unicorn MIDI software and the DigiDesign sample editing stuff is absolutely incredible and is the one reason why I would like to have a Mac. Anyway, calling Ami a good game machine is actually a really nice complement. What does one want in a game machine? A really fast processor, really good fast graphics, bunches of colors, high-quality sound, lots of memory...stuff that just happens to be quite useful for many other activities as well. --
dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) (10/31/87)
>Boy, a lot of people are flaming Commodore for the 1000 to 2000 upgrade. >Considering the hosing Apple gave original 128K Macintosh buyers and >Commodore's own history of introducing incompatible machines, I'd say >we got off very, very easily. What, you want the Amiga to be compatible with the C64??? I Apple hadn't hosed those poor people, Apple would be hosed itself. Actually, only a couple of people have flamed C-A for the upgrade. The rest of us either have no opinion or agree with C-A (I personally agree with the upgrade even though I do not intend to by an A2000 anytime soon). >Imagine if Commodore had released an incompatible machine, like, >one that used the 386 instead of the 68000. Blammo, slow death for the >A1000 as it suffocates from lack of exposure (not enough machines to C-A wouldn't want to do that anyway. Most people in this newsgroup don't give a (--bleep--) for Intel or their processor line. >Hackers bought the Amiga since it's release because it is the coolest >home computer by far ever. I don't care if that can't be explained in >a 30-second commercial: multitasking, the blitter, graphics coprocessor, >Intuition, the CLI. The OS that made it all possible! I don't know about all of you, but I was attracted to the extremely loveable operating system that allowed us Hackers to, well, hack, and make it all compatible. The best feature of the OS is multitasking, of course. >in the business. I don't think Atari, Apple or IBM give a damn about >hackers. (Note how quickly we had the docs on the internals compared to >the ST guys. Also, one could immediately develop code with the Amiga. >The first Mac programmers had to cross-compile from a Lisa!) Actually, Atari is the company that always had the great hacker base. Unfortunetly they made some *huge* mistakes with the ST. For instance, with every other company turning to a more sophisticated operating system, Atari stayed low-level with a 'proven' IBM-like OS, even down to using IBM's disk formats. As it turned out, they were still sufficiently different that the 'compatibility' wasn't worth a damn, and now they can't even effectively upgrade the machine without introducing huge incompatibilities. -Matt
jmpiazza@sunybcs.uucp (Joseph M. Piazza) (10/31/87)
In article <940@sugar.UUCP> karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: >Boy, a lot of people are flaming Commodore for the 1000 to 2000 upgrade. Huh? I can't think of one. Flames about design changes on the 2000 and 500, yes. Can the remaining 99 lines be worth reading? n