From: nwickham@nyx.cs.du.edu (Neal Wickham)
Subject: Re: A growing dislike for Amiga
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Reply-To: nwickham@nyx.UUCP (Neal Wickham)
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix at U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 92 18:47:40 GMT



>What a load of crap.  Every day I think I hate this machine more and more.
>Staring at a word processor, you'd swear that you were looking at CGA
>text.  Sure they say the amiga has 4096 dazzling colours.. what they don't
>say is that the resolution of plain and simple text is garbage to look
>at for any length of time other than to type LEMMINGS on the CLI screen.


I agree that if word processing was the major criteria in the selection of
your computer that you would have been better off in buying a clone.

...and the resolution of Amiga text is the same as that of the Macs or
VGA.  The problem is in the interlaced display.  But again it is a trade
off with color staturation etc.  I have a friend who has both a NEC 
Multisync monitor and a Sony Triniton RGB monitor because he does not
want to give up color staturation for sharpness.


>Simple word processing is not worth the $200 or so we forked over for
>a lousy program (PenPal I believe.. we have since moved to Excellence!
>but I'll talk about that later...)  I wanted to get access to this
>hoard of software that was assumed to exist somewhere...  Right.  
>I can tell you right now why major software developers aren't going for
>this machine -- since businesses are large purchasers of equipment,
>they are not going to buy a machine if something as simple as
>Wordprocessing is hard on the eyes.  Scrolling down the screen is even
>worse...


Business simply tends to adopt standards.  Even Mac with its super-easy-
to-use GUI is having trouble in penetrating the buisness market.


>Excellence is yet another story.. We bought penpal from a dealer in
>saint john who we asked "does this have footnotes.. this is very
>important"   "Oh yeah, he said.. of course.. this is a good program."
>After paying $200+ for it... Sorry.. maybe no footnotes afterall.
>
>And thanks to the writers of penpal for their wonderful customer support.
>Not a PEEP after we sent in our card.  No  "extras" disk that we
>promised...  Anyways...


I agree that Amiga isn't a best choice for word processing.  But there
is WP 4.1 and I assume that if 4000 sales are strong that Word Perfect
will release its 5.1 version which they've already ported.


>What do I do?  I am a student in engineering so I go looking for
>some good graphing programs, a spreadsheet, think I found anything?
>Nope.  Except of course lots of pretty games.  What a nice game 
>computer, Commodore. 

I was an engineering student (just graduated) and Amiga worked great for me. 
(And for a couple of my friends who I talked into buying Amiga.)  I found a
great graphing program called Multiplot and it was public domain.  And I
used Maxiplan as a spreadsheet and it was great.  I liked it better than
Excell on the Macs at school for the things I used it for.  I'll never
forget the time I had to enter about 300 data points (six entries per point)
for a survey we did in my surveying class.  I just keyed them in fast and
furious and then had the software read the data back to me while I looked at
the field book and caught all of the mistakes in one pass. 

And then I used Mac emulation a lot.  It was great.  I had a couple of
classes that revolved around Mac software.  One was a planning & scheduling
course and the other was a cost analysis course.  While everyone else was
fighting over who got to stare into one of those 9 inch monitors and wait
for AppleTalk to respond, I took the software home and ran it on my Amiga at
my leisure.  

And while I'm on the emulation subject, I used one of the best DTP packages
on the market which is Design Studio for the Mac to do my resume... on my
Amiga and then printed it out with a friend's Laserjet.  And I did all the
cover letteres with Claris Works so that the fonts and style matched the
resume.

And I am currently learning MSdos on my Amiga and hope to have Windows
up and running before too long.
 

>Yes, these are simple reasons but simple reasons are why people buy
>computers.  Businesses use them for simple tasks like printing out
>customer address labels, correspondence, even keeping financial 
>records..   Graphic artists, who are probably the only ones who even
>care about the such great multiitude of colours and graphics
>'capabilities' can probably complain about the slowness of the machine.


Actually... one of the biggest selling points of the Amiga to my engineering
friends who bought them was the quality of Amiga games. ...along with other
things such as those mentioned above.  I mean... if you are going to sink
a lot of money into a computer, why not get one with a lot of versatility? 
:)  



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