From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Obituary [Amiga's] in Silicon Valley newspaper
Date: 23 Jul 92 20:17:35 GMT
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA

In article <kehlet.05ky@kehlet.adsp.sub.org> kehlet@kehlet.adsp.sub.org (Jesper Kehlet) writes:
>In article <1992Jul16.102852.3737@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au> davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn) writes:

>> I see the Amiga as the last of the great proprietary architectures of the
>> early to mid eighties.  

>One of the "last great proprietary architectures of the early to mid
>eighties"?  Hey, you should be writing articles on ancient history!

Sounds that way.  I think maybe that vision needs a little Windex, though.  The
Amiga wasn't released until the fall 1985, which clearly places it in the latter
half of the 80s, not the early 80s.

>I do not agree, that it "maintains the spirit of times gone by" -- doesn't
>that count for the peecee clowns as well?  

If only the PC had maintained the spirit of CP/M, but it instead went back to
times before that, when a strict adherence to the underlying hardware had to be
maintained.  That's not such a big deal for a proprietary architecture, but the
fact that the PC really was a proprietary architecture that became a standard
by industry proclamation rather than design has set the computer business back
like nothing else.  

Back to the point, though.  I think the intent above was to point out that the
"spirit of times gone by" in the Amiga relates to the fact that, back then, you
could introduce a new computer hardware and software architecture and have some
chance that it would succeed.  That's pretty much impossible now -- growth is
only really possible in small increments.  Part of the reason for that is that
far fewer of the people using computers really know that much about them, so 
they aren't interested in using anything new.  Also, the various elements in a
computer have been catching up to human needs, at least in-so-far as the user
interfaces exploit those resources.  If you have a 50MHz '486 or 25MHz '040, 
your OS or hardware doesn't really need to be all that clever, efficient, well 
designed, etc. to appear sufficiently so for the average user's needs.

>I do *NOT* see the Amiga architecture as ancient & old -- for like a good
>platform to build on.  

Some of the Amiga implementations, like the ECS chip set, are certainly old.  
None of the underlying architecture is dated.  In fact, if you look at IBM's
XGA, Intel's DVI, or any number of new graphics-related architectures, you'll
see quite a bit of the same ideas that have comprised the Amiga architecture
since "ancient times".  If you look at expansion buses, most of the modern
ones have caught up to where the Amiga has been since way back went, few have
gone beyond that except in performance (well, Amiga did too with Zorro III).
If you look at the latest PC systems, the buzz word these days is "Local Bus".
We provided an open Local Bus slot, the Coprocessor Slot, in the A2000 way back
in 1987.  I even called it the Local Bus.  

Software still has some catching up to do in some areas, but in other ways the
Amiga OS is as modern as anything else out there.  The hot word these days in
executive kernels (eg, Exec) is "microkernel architecture", as in the Mach 
kernel for UNIX systems or WindowsNT.  Amiga's DOS has always been device and
filesystem independent, something MS-DOS is still working on (or did MS-DOS
V5 finally get that right).  AmigaOS in general is a very efficient OS for
small computers -- most of the beyond-MS-DOS attempts are just new kinds of
big OSs waiting for computers to catch up with them.  Computers are catching
up, but unless you're the guy selling the OS, there's not a whole lot of reason
to need a new big OS, UNIX as a big OS has been around and stable much longer.
-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      BIX: hazy
	"Work like a horse, drink like a fish"	- Psychefunkapus