u3369429@murdu.oz.UUCP (02/24/87)
Amiga, The Alternative (?) We (a bunch of economists) needed something to plot time series of about 450 observations, sometimes on a logarithmic Y-axis. The values are kept in ASCII files on a VAX. We have a MS-DOS micro, and we would be prepared to buy another micro for this specific purpose. I (an Amiga addict) called the supplier of that MS-DOS machine and Melbourne's largest Amiga dealer. I described our problem and they invited me to see them. That happened on Friday. Monday morning I saw the MS-DOS shop. The guy had decided that Supercalc 4 was the answer. He had a series of 450 observations prepared and showed me the graph 4 minutes after the machine was switched on. He then printed it and explained how to import data into Supercalc and I walked away. That afternoon, I saw the Amiga dealer. He had nothing prepared. When I re- iterated my problem, he suggested "Aegis Impact", brought the disk and the manual and left me alone. I quickly discovered that Impact could display only 20 observations. I then suggested that "Logistix" might be appropriate. Again, he brought two discs and a manual and left. I read that indeed it should do the job, then proceeded to run the supplied demo worksheets. Running them as an automatic sequence worked fine, though the graphs didn't look very impressive, mainly because they were displayed in a rather small window. Some messages during that demo were a bit discomforting, e.g.: Insufficient memory. Then I tried to do the first of those demo-graphs manually, and "System Error, stop all disk activity and re-boot" appeared! The salesman's comment:" The program works only under 1.1, this machine was kick-started using 1.2." So what are my options? I hate to say it, but the combination of CBM customer support, Amiga software suppliers and expertise among Amiga dealers seem to prevent the serious user from selecting a promising alternative to the MS-DOS world. I still love the Amiga for my personal use, but I can hardly recommend it for business applications. Michael Bednarek (u3369429@murdu.oz.au) "Just a thought: Wouldn't it be appropriate that CBM sponsored the distribution of comp.sys.amiga ?"
dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (02/25/87)
Well, if you were me (which you aren't), or I were you if your a programmer, simply write a small C program to do the plotting. -Matt