geoffk@otl.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Geoffrey Kim) (10/23/87)
Fellow Amigans,
I picked this piece of enfuriating drivel up from rec.music.synth
and would appreciate help in setting this obviously misguided
individual straight. Thank you for your support.
Geoffk @hp-sdd!ncr-sd!otl
#Newsgroups: rec.music.synth
#Subject: IBM PC Midi Interface
#Message-ID: <7973@mirror.TMC.COM>
#Date: 23 Oct 87 04:56:16 GMT
#Sender: UUCP@mirror.TMC.COM
#Lines: 113
#In response to Duke Robillard ....
#Why would you ever want to 'break down and buy an Amiga'? You already have
#a computer which will blow away (in MIDI applications) anything else on the
#market. Sure you see a lot of neat ads for Amiga, Arari and Mac music
#applications, but you have to read between the lines. Remember, the Mac was
#suposed to be the computer for 'the rest of us' (i.e., non business, non
#technically oriented users. Similarly, the Amiga was originally crafted as
#a graphics engine and is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified game
#playing machine with very pretty graphics. The Atari ST, well, what can I
#say. I am not belittling any of these machines, and because of their 68000
#architecture, they are very technologically sophisticated. Their problem
#lies in the software which overly uses their graphics interfaces and makes
#mouse clicking a probable future course in major computer departments. The
#Mac, has finally been allowed access into the business world because it
#finally spawned software which is usefull to the business world. The Mac and
#Amiga (and to some extent the ST) have been taken to the hearts of many
#musician software developers. Unfortunately, the software is far from
#spectacular. The Mark of the Unicorn stuff nonwithstanding, for the most part
#the 68000 stuff available for music comes in only 3 flavors (with varying
#degrees of excellence): Sequencers with graphics interfaces which make them
#look like they are emulating multi-track recording studios (right down to
#simulated tape reels and tape transport controls - Can simulated vU meters
#be far away?); scoring programs which take the output of sequencers and
#produce musical notation; and patch editors and librarians. All the stuff
#is OK for what it does, but it is accompanied by too much graphics overbaggage
#so that you really loose track of what it is you are REALLY trying to
#accomplish. If some clever programmers start to work on some real production
#software (this does appear to be happening for the Mac), clearly it might be
#of interest to consider purchasing one of the 68000 machines for MIDI use.
#The final flaw in the 68000 marketplace (Amiga and ST, especially) is the
#gameland background from whence the machines themselves were spawned. While
#it has been sometime since there has been any successfully marketed copy
#protected programs in the IBM PC market, almost anything worth more than
#$19.00 come copy protected for the 68000 machines. People with game-playing
#computers have become accustomed to buying software which is copy protected.
#Conversely, most people with IBM type equipment, have hard disks (when you
#can add 20 Meg for under $300, and a Mac external floppy costs more than $200
#it is easy to see why this is true) and even Lotus learned that it isn't
#fun to alienate the hard disk user, even tho the point of necessitating
#the use of Key disks. So now that I have hopefully convinced you that you
#really don't need, or want an Amiga (there is nothoing that you can do with
#one that you can't expand your IBM to do for less overall cost, and with
#a lot more support and convenience), I'll address the MIDI interface
#situation.
# [... omitted random garbage on PC MIDI card ...]
#If you really have to buy a 68000 system, get a MACII or something that
#has some serious real application (i.e., business use) support. At least
#in doing so you will have purchased a product which won't be orphaned when
#a new and better game playing, cutsie computer comes around. It's a shame
#that 68000 technology hasn't been exploited as it should have been about
#2 years ago. Hello 65816, surprise 68000!
#John
#Rossi@NUSC.ARPA
------cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (10/26/87)
PLEASE DON'T! This person is obviously misguided but PLEASE do not
start some stupid "my computer is better than your computer" char
broil match. We don't need it.
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) (10/27/87)
[LONG reposting omitted - see the referenced article]
Before a lot of you loyal Amigans jump all over this IBM fan's case,
take a look at the negative comments he made. Aren't these exactly
the same bitches we've been passing back and forth about the Amiga for
a couple of years now, among ourselves? Among friends criticsm is
taken to be meant to be constructive, but it hurts when an outsider
says it. Still, a company that publishes a buss standard, changes it
while the machine is still being sold, and then replaces it for the
next upgrade, obsoleting all the add on hardware (yours and mine
included) DOES have a "game machine" mentality. Responsible companies
don't do this kind of stuff to their users. It is obvious that a lot
of the innovation ability left with the Los Gatos crowd. I have said
often to anyone that will listen that IBM set back the microcomputer
world five years by luring all the development talent into making
clones just a little cheaper. It makes me very sad that the folks
left at CBM thought this was the path of the future. This kind of
thinking wasn't part of the Los Gatos effort, which is why the A1000
was such a big win.
I don't do music stuff, but all the responsible music types here with
experience with several machines say the Amiga has the _worst_ music
software among the major players. Since the article was in response
to a request for help specificly by someone interested in midi, I
don't think it was out of line to recommend staying away from the
Amiga. If the request had been from a graphics freak like me and a
response to "stay away from the Amiga" had been given, a little furor
might be in order, but this was just good advice in this case.
OK, the guy doesn't like the Amiga, and he sure didn't go out of his
way to present a balanced picture of what makes the A1000 a nice
machine, like multitasking. Tastes vary. But he didn't say anything
out of line, he just presented some distasteful truths in a large,
hard to swallow lump. I don't think he deserves our flames. The
person to whom his article was directed might like to see the other
side (if any) via email, though. No sense abandoning even one sheep
to the wolves of White Plains. ;-)
Kent Paul Dolan, LCDR, NOAA, Retired; ODU MSCS grad student // Yet
UUCP : kent@xanth.UUCP or ...{sun,harvard}!xanth!kent // Another
CSNET : kent@odu.csnet ARPA : kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu \\ // Happy
USPost: P.O. Box 1559, Norfolk, Virginia 23501-1559 \// Amigan!
Voice : (804) 587-7760 -=][> Last one to Ceres is a rotten egg! -=][>grr@cbmvax.UUCP (10/28/87)
In article <2984@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > > [LONG reposting omitted - see the referenced article] > > Before a lot of you loyal Amigans jump all over this IBM fan's case, > take a look at the negative comments he made. Aren't these exactly > the same bitches we've been passing back and forth about the Amiga for > a couple of years now, among ourselves? Among friends criticsm is > taken to be meant to be constructive, but it hurts when an outsider > says it. Still, a company that publishes a buss standard, changes it > while the machine is still being sold, and then replaces it for the > next upgrade, obsoleting all the add on hardware (yours and mine > included) DOES have a "game machine" mentality. Responsible companies > don't do this kind of stuff to their users. Apple canned the Apple III completely. Apple canned the Lisa and had nothing to offer but the Macintosh, only the MAC II finally comes close in features and market placement. IBM changed from the PC bus to the AT bus and announced that most of the PC cards would not be supported in the AT. IBM dumped the PC/AT bus, an industry defacto standard for the micro-channel. IBM constantly announces new products with only enough backward compatibility to allow exiting users to upgrade before it's too late. DEC had three incompatible I/O busses on the PDP-8 family, two or three on the PDP-11, and god knows how many on the VAX family. SUN changed their expansion bus between the SUN-2 and SUN-3, did they change it between the SUN-1 and SUN-2 also? SUN has decided that some SUN-3 peripherals will not be supported on SUN-4 configurations, even though you can plug them in and the software supports them. TI walked away from away from the home computer market entirely, turning a computer that was a slow as beans, but had a real operating system and real expansion capability into scrap metal and plastic. TI dumped their low-end minicomputer compatible office systems in favor of incompatible PC compatibles. Radio Shack changes models every year or so with compatibility a sometimes sort of affair, This doesn't mean that Commodore is eligible for sainthood, but from this perspective, there were good reasons for changing the expansion bus. It's quite unfortunate that it couldn't have been done sooner so that those few developers who actually followed the specifications didn't get jerked around. > It is obvious that a lot > of the innovation ability left with the Los Gatos crowd. I have said > often to anyone that will listen that IBM set back the microcomputer > world five years by luring all the development talent into making > clones just a little cheaper. It makes me very sad that the folks > left at CBM thought this was the path of the future. This kind of > thinking wasn't part of the Los Gatos effort, which is why the A1000 > was such a big win. Come on, blow the smoke away and look at the facts. Amiga was about to either go out of business or sell the dream to the dreaded Jack Tramiel at Atari. Commodore made a $$$MASSIVE$$$ investment that brought the Amiga from a prototype to a production unit and funded a bunch of internal and third-party software work. The resulting product was exciting and sold reasonably well, but didn't represent a major part of Commodore's business in terms of volume or profits. Now what does Commodore do? Go back to C64's or game consoles? Come up with something with the look and feel of the Amiga, but none of the features? Just add a little memory, tweak the chips and hope the original market niches aren't saturated? Nope, Commodore decides to throw it's weight behind the Amiga, makes another big $investment$ and introduces two new products intended to correct the perceived market limitations of the original. One retains the features that made the A1000 attractive to the recreational users, but through tradeoffs like the integral keyboard and separate power supply, can be priced low enough to appeal to a broader user community, and can be sold without complicated technical explanations of why it's really twice as good as the cheaper Atari machines. The other model adds features intended to address the concerns of the professional or business user who sees the computer as a tool or a means to an end. The key features identified here were a reliable, internal expansion capability and some form of IBM compatibility so that this Amiga user doesn't need to have *two* computers on his desktop. Now I suppose it's natural for someone bought an A1000 to argue that this was the perfect machine, since it's the one they decided to buy. These people often seem to object to any changes, without much concern as to why we made the changes, or take the other extreme and insist that we should have made radical changes, and why are we wasting time. Some even like the paint the people in West Chester as either evil beings or dullards who don't understand the difference between an Amiga and an IBM PC! To wind this diatribe down, the task at hand at least from the engineering point of view is simple. First, ensure the survival of the Amiga, in both the corporate and market arenas, and second, get to work on new products to make sure the Amiga retains its advantages in the years to come. If we succeed, then we get to be heroes, though not gods. If we fail, there's no confusion about who to blame. Does anybody remember what Bob Pariseau said around the time of the Amiga launch? Something along the line of we're here to give you a computer, not a religion. Some people seem to have become confused in this respect. > I don't do music stuff, but all the responsible music types here with > experience with several machines say the Amiga has the _worst_ music > software among the major players. Perhaps one of the disadvantages of allowing too much glitz and hype and less on the cheap, utilitarian tool? -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {ihnp4|rutgers|allegra}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: out to lunch... Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)