From: hyc@hanauma.jpl.nasa.gov (Howard Chu)
Subject: Re: FALCON VS AMIGA
Organization: SAR Systems Development & Processing, JPL
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 06:01:24 GMT

In article <1992Sep23.123005.1863@rdg.dec.com> cadwallader@forty2.enet.dec.com () writes:
> I agree there've been many articles recently where the language
>hasn't been the only problem, but perhaps people develop 
>bone-heads when the machine they've become addicted to is under
>the threat of being wiped out?
>
>Thanks for a "sane" article! That's a good point, which is why I try to
>convince people to wait for the Falcon to settle a bit:
>
>o There is a REAL threat /|\ might go under, Warner Comms were in trouble!

Warner isn't in control of Atari Corp. any more. What are you trying to
say here?

>o The Falcon may not be as good as it sounds in practice, talk filtering up
>  now suggests it is really slow because of sharing same bus for cpu/gfx, a
>  recent note said it was really slow just decompressing a GIF.

It definitely sounds like no 68030 burst mode, which is a real drag. No one
has ruled out the possibility of adding TT-RAM as an upgrade, though.

>o No point shouting about it now, wait 'til the competition has become
>  apparent, there is NOW a new Acorn A3010 home machine and there will yet
>  be several new Amigas. You COULD make the wrong choice too early.

That's the choice you make in choosing to buy something labeled "new." Some
folks just gotta have the latest/greatest/newest offerings, most people don't
mind waiting.

>o I don't see why people stick to certain companies, I have had computers
>  from Amstrad (CPC), /|\ (520STFM) and CBM (A500, A500+), and I would
>  consider changing when the market settles and the scene is set, if there
>  is a clearly superior machine to the Amiga-to-come.

This is an interesting question. If we were talking PC-clones, there's really
no reason to be loyal to any particular brand name, one clone is equipped much
the same as any other, performs the same, etc. (I still remember the laugh I
got from the first time I picked up a PC-magazine and saw a system benchmark,
comparing a Dell 386 against a bunch of other 386 boxes. What was the point?
All the specs were within 2% of each other... What a joke...) I'd guess in
the PC case you go with the vendor who sells cheapest and/or has the best
customer support.

Then there's the Macintosh market - what motivates loyalty there? Many of my
friends got Macs in 1984 because they were die-hard Apple ][ hackers and this
was Apple's next-generation machine. I'd guess that kind of loyalty is no
longer a factor, since Apple has tried so hard to kill the Apple // line, and
the //gs was kind of orphaned from Apple's main development efforts. I'd guess
people don't so much "choose" Macintoshes so much as they choose *not* to use
PCs because "PCs are too complicated to learn to use." Then once they've
started down that garden path, there's really no going back. Apple's
documentation uses a completely different jargon than every other existing
computer system ever used, making it difficult for people who "learned
computers" on a Mac to switch up to any other system. (Sure, they tried to
eliminate jargon by using "plain English" terminology, but when the rest of
the computing world calls a cursor a cursor and Apple calls 'em pointers, and
Apple calls pointers something else entirely, your average naive Mac user is
in for a world of confusion when faced with the rest of the computing world.
The decision to attempt to eliminate jargon was obviously a well-reasoned one,
it not only makes the system appear more user-friendly, but it locks users in
to the Apple product line; their users never learn the basic language necessary
for navigating in a real computing environment. Kind of like Orwell's 1984,
the Dictionary of DoubleSpeak shrank with every new release as the government
eliminated more words and thus more concepts from the people's language...)

For Atari or Amiga, what can you say? Atari and Amiga users must have pretty
strong reasons for going the way they did, given the pervasiveness of the
other systems. For most, I think the primary reason has been price, or rather,
perceived price/performance. (Hey, try to say *that* 5 times fast... }-) While
PCs are a dime-a-dozen, and most are readily expandable, it costs money to
expand, and it costs a lot of time figuring out what desired expansions are
required, and what expansions will cooperate within the same system. This has
always been a non-trivial problem, finding hardware expansions that will
co-exist, and will be supported by the software you buy. When I bought my
Atari 1040ST in 1987, the PC vs Atari question was a simple "no-contest." I
could get an ST with a megabyte of memory for under $1000, and it came with
a parallel port, serial port, MIDI ports, DMA port, in short, all the
expansion devices I could conceivably use, and I knew that they were all
supported by the OS ROM. The same could not be said of any PC system I saw,
and I spent many an amused hour watching my roommate open up the case of his
Taiwanese XT clone to pull out one multi-function adapter card to swap in
another one because one or the other grabbed an interrupt that conflicted
with something else. Again, in 1987, the Mac question was also "no-contest."
The Mac was too expensive, didn't have color graphics, didn't have enough
memory to be useful, didn't have cheap hard-drive support (as I recall, the
college was installing those hacked up Hyperdrives back then. And you think
only STs and Amigas have to endure the kludge phenomenon?) etc. etc. As time
has passed, the PC market hasn't changed dramatically, and neither has Mac
pricing. I still see questions every couple days from PC users saying "how
do I get my SoundBlaster card working with thus-and-such thing, when I
configure it into my system it hangs on boot-up." or "How do I get this
game adapter board working" or "how do I treat my EMS RAM as EEMS" or ...
To some degree, all of the Amiga, Atari, and Mac users have been spared this
pain by having traditionally closed-box systems, as long as the box was
versatile enough to begin with. Nowadays the Mac folks are having the same
problems with their Nubus/Nubus-II/PDS slots and such. It seems that the
Amiga still wins here since the Zorro bus is backward compatible.

But anyway ... so perhaps price, or packaging shaped the initial decision.
I'd figure total investment shapes the reasoning behind continued loyalty.
You spend this much time and money putting together an esoteric system
(certainly esoteric by the average PC-user's standards) and you really don't
want to give it all up to go with the mainstream machines. Particularly when
you know that despite the interesting advances made in the mainstream market
(Super-VGA, 24-bit color, etc.) there are still gaping holes in those other
alternatives, things that those systems just won't be able to do for you.

It would probably make an interesting survey to ask, something like:
	do you have a home computer system?
	how long have you owned it?
	how much have you used it?
	which brand (and model)?
	are you happy with it?
	if you knew then what you know now, would you still have bought it?

>o Think about how /|\ treat users, h/w upgrades are pitched in with no
>  warning and NO upgrade path. Floppy drives, TOS, STFM->STe etc... all
>  took place with an automatic alienation of loads of users in the process.
>  Before you say this about CBM and AGA, wait for the PowerUps that will
>  certainly appear!

Yeah, Atari's approach to introducing improved hardware certainly leaves
something to be desired. But I think this trend is changing, for example,
a 3rd party developer was able to convince Atari to make their latest OS
fully compatible all the way down to the original 520ST. The new 1.44MB
floppy drive upgrades are available thru distributors now, which is also
nice. You still can't buy an STe-style DMA sound upgrade, or an STe-style
analog joystick interface for plain STs, but things do seem to be changing.
Now if only Atari would try a better than luke-warm attempt at endorsing
VMEbus, things would definitely be improved...
-- 
  -- Howard Chu @ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

California, land of dreams. For many, moving out to CA is their first step
toward fulfilling their dreams. For most of them, it's also their last.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy