From: jaker@csugrad.cs.vt.edu (Jake Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: a MB style flame against IBMs
Date: 23 Dec 92 17:52:59 GMT
Organization: Virginia Tech Computer Science Dept, Blacksburg, VA

John.Carver@launchpad.unc.edu (John Carver) writes:

>sound sampled files he's got.  Only he can't right now because the
>device driver for his CrystalFonts (?) graphics card is conflicting with
>the driver for his SoundBlatser Pro card - makes no sense to me, but he
>assures me he can use one or the other but not both at once.

Yep... ...MS-DOS was never designed to handle even the simplistic expansion
capabilities of PCs.  Simplistic in comparison to Amigas, I mean.

>(which he *was* able to show me) is slow and jerky.  The default color
>scheme for Windows is very ugly - even uglier than Amiga's, which is
>pretty ugly itself.  (ANd we couldn't figure out how to change the

No kidding... ...funny how Windows users go in to Amiga shops and look
at the default colors and just assume there's no way to change them,
isn't it?

>colors - how *do* you do that?  We wanted to ditch the damned white
>backgrounds, but the color prefs tool didn't want ot let us do it). 
>They can't do even simple things like format a floppy while showing me
>some animation files.  ("We can multitask with Windows 3.1 now", my
>friend says, "Even better than Amigas!" - "Then lets format this floppy
>for our data while you show me this graphics stuff", I say.  "Oh, it
>doesn't work that way", he says.)  Even the CPU speed on the 486/33 for
>stuff like uncompressing .lha files doesn't seem to be any great shakes
>compared to my Amiga 3000 - its probably faster, but not *that* much.

That's because the *CPU* is busy drawing your mouse pointer over and over
again while trying to get a little decompression done.  The Amiga, of course,
has several coprocessors, and a couple of them in combination do this kind
of thing without the CPU doing much at all.

>I'm surprised that with the sheer amount of industry support
>for these things, they're not better!  I'm sure they've got lots of good
>software, but the environmen tis pretty abysmal.

CBM should ship some 1200s out to companies and let them see for themselves
how good they are - they should include the 386SX PCMCIA PC emulator, some
graphics software, and tell them all about the *high* end machines.  They
should give both list *and* average retail prices on all models, talk about
interoperability with PCs and Macs, and then maybe they'd get some customers
interested!  I mean, an A1200 can't cost that much to make - maybe $300? -
sending them to Fortune 500 companies with instructions on how to hook them
up to SVGA monitors would cost CBM $150,000.  They talk about how they're a
"billion dollar company," so why don't they do some things like that to spread
the word directly?

>I admit, I've been tempted to go with the masses over to Clones, but
>man, I don't know if I could handle it.  I get used to stuff like
>ARexx - they don't have anything even close over there - not even under
>OS/2, as far as I know.  IBM and the Clones need to get their collective

OS/2 does have Rexx.

>butts in gear if they wanna compete with the Amiga for sheer power of
>the environment.  They've got cheap hardware - they've got lotsa
>software - but darned, it just doesn't hang together very well.  The
>specs all sound good, you know, and its dirt cheap.  But something is
>lacking.  1024x768 graphics are only so nice when you can't clip text
>between windows or have decent multitasking (maybe OS/2 helps there???)
>And my ancient A1000 blows away the interactive speed of Windows on the
>486.  Just dragging their equivilant of a workbench window around and
>having to wait for all the others to update can be an adventure, and
>don't even talk to me about the scroll speed of the two DOS windows he
>was running under Windows 3.0.  Man!  I bet it was barely scrolling one
>line per 3 seconds, and doing *lots* of disk activity during the
>scrolling.  He claimed it was a shortage of ram, he's only got 4 Mb:
>640K normal, 360K extended, 2 Mb expanded, 512K hyperbolic, 100K
>symbolic, 50K inverted, 75K orthoginal projected, etc...  I think the
>75K orthoginal projected is what he ran out of when scrolling.

>What else - oh, its a "multimedia pc", or MPC for short.  So I offered
>to give him a big (15 Mb) sound sample file I have, to covert to
>soundblaster format.  "I can't play it", he says, "I've only got 4 Mb of
>ram".  So I ask whether there are some PD programs to play directly from
>HD.  He doesn't think so.  Maybe there are and he just doesn't know it,
>who knows.  But if there are, the probably don't work unless you have at
>least 95K of inverted tangential ram. :-)

>The DOS command line, by default, doens't let you acces anything except
>the *one* previous command, and even they you can only backspace to
>correct things.  They can fix this, they claimed, but jeez, even the

Under MS-DOS 5 (and up, presumably), they do have this feature through
a TSR which is included with the system called "DOSKey."  Still, it's
an add-on to the COMMAND.COM shell (and of course, they still can't handle
filenames longer than 8 characters (oh, and a three-character extension),
all in uppercase (which is silly, since if you take a PC disk, pop it in
an Amiga, rename the volume using MultiDOS (THE BEST MS-DOS DISK HANDLER
FOR THE AMIGA) to something with mixed-case letters in it, and put it back
in a PC, the mixed-case letters are still mixed-case... ...which means the
OS is needlessly limiting MS-DOS users to same-case names).

>AmigaDos CLI, as awful as it is, lets you recall and edit lots of

Um, what's awful about it?  I happen rather to like it! :)

>previous commands.  Can't IBM with its billions of dollars do what CBM

To be fair, it's MicroSoft that's writing all this stuff.

>can do with a much smaller market on such a SIMPLE feature?  Its stuff
>like that which you take for granted on the Amiga, and when you go to
>WIndows, either you can't do it, or you have to hunt down some PD
>utility which does it, but might conflict iwth other PD utilities to do
>other things.

Yep.

>Lets not even get started on concepts like the 3.0 datatypes or ARexx. 
>That's *way* beyond them.  Sure, they've got nice single apps (face it,
>FrameMaker trashes ProPage and anything else for the Amiga), but want
>to make them talk under Windows?  Sorry!  Want to automate a simple task
>involving 2 or 3 apps?  Sorry!  Want to format a floppy while you look
>at some graphics?  Sorry!  Even the PD software seems to be of, in
>general, less quality than on the Amiga.  While direct-from-HD sound and
>anim players are a dime a dozen on the Amiga nd have been for years,
>they're either impossible or hard to come by under Windows 3.1.

No kidding.  I think a lot of the MS-DOS/Windows world's problem is that
even when given an environment that could let them work with each other,
PC software companies (with the possible exception of MonopolySoft itself)
just aren't up to it.

>I dunno, maybe OS/2 is a lot better, but if so, why do all these people
>use Windows and like it?  It stinks!   The Amiga walks all over it in 

The same reason anyone's still using the PC at all - it's there, and it's
bigger than everyone else is, so "it must be better."  And they say we
humans don't have herding instincts...

>so many ways it isn't even funny.  The only advantages they've got are:

>    * cost

Debatible, considering new Amiga prices compared with *comparable* PCs (ie
local-bus video, add a soundblaster, enough RAM to run OS/2 or Windows NT,
a fast enough processor to handle same, etcetera).

>    * better "default" graphics (if you consider adding a SVGA cared to
>      be "default")

AGA is superior to SVGA (SVGA being 800x600x256c), and comes standard on
the A1200 ($600 retail?).

>    * more business apps (offset mostly by the awful environmnet)

Unfortunately, yes.  I don't think they're entirely offset by the awful
environment, either.  A business application on its own is enough to get
a company to buy a shipload of computers, you know.

>    * cooler games, sooner.  Clones do make good game machines - seriously.

Not as good as an A1200 (or an A4000!), which will soon have games that once
again show who's game boss.

>Just something simple like multiple screens - if C= can do it, why can't
>IBM or Microsoft?

Well, if you listen to Dan and the OS/2 gang, multiple screens are *bad*.
I don't especially like them either (I want a gadget on windows that lets
you move them between screens (or any other means - doesn't have to be a
gadget!)), but they don't interrupt application consistency - for a long
time, Mac applications essentially ran on their own screens, and Apple has
had application consistency down to a science for a long time (well, system
7 finally broke them down, but...).

>Oh, here's another.  Both me and my friends use GNU emacs at work.  I
>also run it on my 3000, no troubles.  I ask my friend if he has it for
>his clone.  "Yep", he says.  So I suggest we use it for this editing
>task we're working on.  Well, it turns out that GNU emacs on the clone
>won't run at the same time as DOS _or_ Windows!  Yep - it uses some sort
>of supervisor or protected more or something and it takes over the
>machine from the OS.  You can't just run a GNU emacs window under
>Windows 3.1 like you can under AmigaDos.  (And want to drag and drop an
>icon on a file requester like you can do under AmigaDos?  Sorry!  First,
>they don't have a standard Windows file requester, and second, they
>don't have drag and drop if arbitrary icons onto windows, at least as
>far as either of my friends knew - Even the Mac has that!)  We settled on
>a vi clone - vi is small enough that if fits in the 640K of main memory,
>so it works.  

All I can say is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!"

>And if you think youre AMiga crashes a lot, just wait until you use
>Windows 3.1!  Crash-city!  YOu can make it crash just by *looking* at it
>crosswise.  I bet we had a crash every 10 minutes or so.

Actually, I don't think the Amiga crashes very much at all.  It has excellent
debugging utilities (I love enforcer - we're going off next month to get
married! :) ) that help we the programmers fix things before they get out and
eat systems.  What's really fun is when Windows "just crashes" - it locks up
because its drivers started moshing or Windows itself sent a file pointer to
la-la land (have you heard what you have to do under Windows just to build
a simple linked list safely?)...

>Oh, and did I mention disk speed?  They claim some pretty good numbers
>in an absolute speed (even though mostly DOS uses "trask stepping speed"
>instead of xfer speed).  But you have to wait *ages* for programs to
>load!  I load dpaint on my 3000 and *wham* its up there almost
>instantly.  Same for my WP.  Well, on this high-powered 486, we waited
>around 20 seconds for this one graphics program to load, and the program
>didn't even look like it did all *that* much.  (But their floppies are
>way faster than ours - gotta give them that.  And bigger).

I think 1.76MB is bigger than 1.44MB (and we don't need new controllers to
use 1.76MB floppies, either).

>I guess I should stop now.  Mostly I'm just incredulous that MB and
>similar types can flaim the Amiga so badly when its so vastly better
>than Windows 3.1 in so many areas.  Why can't the likes of IBM and
>Microsoft make Windows 3.1 halfway decent?  Maybe if Windows NT comes
>out and can be installed in 2 or 3 hundred Kb, it'll be great and I'll
>move to it.  Hell, maybe even if its 2 or 3 meg.  There *is* something
>to be said for having an installed base of 120 million machines just in
>the USA alone.  I'd be willing to ditch the Ami for a dos box, if
>Winodws NT turns out to be cool.  Then I could have my cool environment,
>and still have the cheap hardware and latest games.

Windows NT is so huge and slow that you need a 486 to run it and it currently
requires 12MB RAM and won't be happy in less than 16.  MS says they're going
to try to make it run in 8MB RAM.  This should be funny. :)

Admittedly, NT is neat, but it's not that neat.  Besides, if/when the Amiga
goes RISC, you'll be able to run NT, too (it'll probably have an AmigaDOS
API :) ).

>(Oh, and not only is 3.1 far less functional, its way *bigger* than
>AmigaDos!  Yeah!  More fattening, less nutrients!  Damn the
>functionality, add more size!)

Right-oh... ...I love making Windows users drool by opening 12 apps at the
same time on my 3000 and not having the system become a tar pit.

>John

>PS - oh, and I forgot to mention - you know how you can switch screen
>modes and graphics res in AmigaDos 2.04 by using the prefs tool?  KNow
>what you gotta do to switch from SVGA to something else under the
>Windows 3.1?  You gotta change some cryptic config files and reboot. 
>And even then it might not work, from what I can tell.  We needed to run
>some software which didn't like SVGA - instead of the software opening
>up a new screen in the format of its choice, we had to go through all
>that before we could run it.  Its been a long time since anyone has
>said, "Gag me with a spoon", but it might be appropriate here.

Actually, I said it last week in comp.sys.amiga.misc, I think.  But it
definitely applies to PCs...
-- 
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Jake Rose               :: Two men look out through the same bars.
jaker@csugrad.cs.vt.edu ::                     One sees mud, and one the stars.
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy