From: mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Dave Hanie for C= Chairman of Board of Diretors! was Re: LET'S RESC
Date: 31 Jul 92 18:06:57 GMT
Organization: Amiga makes it possible
X-NewsSoftware: GRn 1.16f (beta) by Mike Schwartz & Michael B. Smith

In article <1992Jul31.121329.6941@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:
> In article <mykes.0awt@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG> mykes@amiga0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) writes:
> >>    I think this was the single biggest blunder on Commodore's part.  This is
> >> what caused the A2000 to be a piece of crud system compared to what it should
> >> have been; the A2000 was released almost two years after the A1000, and
> >> contained no improvements at all other than some slots.
> >>
> >
> >CBM didn't blunder as much as you imply.  As I already said, the Amiga 1000 was
> >an incompetent product and fell flat on its face and besmirched the Amiga's
> >reputation forever.
>
>    The first of anything is going to be crud.  Take a look at the first Mac,
> the first PC, the first Sun workstation, and so on.  Everybody is entitled to
> mistakes.  It is not a blunder to make a mistake; it is a blunder to not fix
> that mistake immediately.  Commodore had a chance to fix many of the mistakes
> made with the A1000 when developing the A2000.  That they didn't fix any of
> them with the A2000 is the REAL blunder.
>

The first Mac shipped with an OS that didn't crash with < 5 minutes of use.
And it shipped with 2 honest to goodness business/productivity apps that
actually worked and didn't force you to reset the machine to exit from.
Mac got good reviews, amiga reviews said "the machine has potential, but
crashes every 10 seconds..."  People STILL think the Amiga crashes a lot.

The A2000 is a LOT more than a 1000 and much more of the machine that people
could use.  It even had IBM PC slots, ability to add a bridgeboard (compare
that to the sidecar), all had EHB, and an OS that worked (did not crash).
And you could put a HD in a slot, RAM in a slot, and not have a bunch of
boards slapped together hanging off the side of your machine.

I do not see what you might have wanted instead.

> > The real blunder was in letting Jay Miner get away instead
> >of getting him to do enhanced chipsets!
>
>    Maybe, but I'd heard that Jay Minor was in pretty ill health by 1986.  They
> should have kept the rest of the team, though.  A lot could have been
> accomplished toward a much better A2000 and a much better OS if the original
> team had not been disbanded, even without Jay Minor in charge.
>

I love the A2000 as is.  Sticking a HD in it and calling it a brand new model
computer is a farce, though.  Sticking an 020 board in it and calling it
a brand new computer is a farce, too.

Jay Miner is alive and well and working for some other company now.  Where
is Dave Needle these days?  Hmmmm... :)   Where is =RJ= these days?  And don't
forget that the original AMiga team gave us the OS that doesn't have DIG or VM
or MP.  Meanwhile, for the original Mac, people came up with big hires displays
with apps and the desktop working on it.

> ---
> | Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
> -----------------------------------------------------

--
Amiga programmer of: GRn, MailMinder, Budokan, Beyond Dark Castle, Dark Castle
Sega Genesis programmer of: Dick Tracy and Marble Madness.
Mike Schwartz  (ames!zorch!amiga0!mykes or mykes@amiga0.sf-bay.org)
1124 Fremont Ave.
Los Altos, CA 94024