From: John.Carver@launchpad.unc.edu (John Carver)
Subject: a MB style flame against IBMs
Organization: University of North Carolina Extended Bulletin Board Service
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 05:56:34 GMT

WARNING: you might want to bail out now and skip all this.  Its just a
meaningless tirade against IBMS after what I went through recently.  So
if you keep reading afte this warning, don't complain to me, man.

Here we go...

Here is some advice to Amiga users: if you're thinking about moving over
to the IBM compatible world, don't do it.  You'll find it hopelessly
primitive and kludgy.

I just spent some time working with 2 folks on a project on IBMs
running some sort of Windows 3.1 GUI.  I can't believe people even take
that seriously!  We keep running into problems, and i say, "well, Can't
you just clip that text there and paste it into the other window"? 
Nope, they say.  Then the other says he has a program that lets you do
that.  We try it.  It crashes the machine.  Some conflict with expanded
ram, he says.  Or maybe it was extended ram - I forgot.

Then later we're messing around and my friend is going to show me some
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.

I guess I always had the impression that with so many of these machines
out there, they were better than they seem to be.  They just look
_really_ primitve to me - things that would be simple on the Amiga are
hard there because the FOO driver conflicts with the hyberbolic ram, and
needs an ultra graphics driver which doesn't work with the mouse utility
currently in use.

I dunno about OS/2, but definately folks, forget Windows.  It doesn't
have anything like Commodities.  It doesn't have multiple screens.  It
is slower than molasses in January even on a 486/33.  The "animation"
(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
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.

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.

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
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
AmigaDos CLI, as awful as it is, lets you recall and edit lots of
previous commands.  Can't IBM with its billions of dollars do what CBM
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.

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.

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

    * cost
    * better "default" graphics (if you consider adding a SVGA cared to
      be "default")
    * more business apps (offset mostly by the awful environmnet)
    * cooler games, sooner.  Clones do make good game machines - seriously.

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

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.  

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.

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 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.

(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!)

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.

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