From: jerry@cs.mcgill.ca (Gerald (Jerry) KUCH)
Subject: Re: My next machine: Amiga or PC Clone? Help me out.
Organization: McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 15:40:57 GMT

In article <1992Sep26.024342.10883@utstat.uucp> philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) writes:
>In article <1992Sep25.174831.11207@news2.cis.umn.edu> coult@poincare.geom.umn.edu (coult) writes:
>
>[ ]
>>
>It's the OS that matters, not the hardware. That 486 may have certain 

Not sure if I agree here... the OS is certainly important, but the hardware
is far from irrelevant...

>attractive features. It is still largely DOS based, despite Windows. OS/2

Hmmmm.... attractive features?  Four general purpose registers, some of which
are more general purpose than others?  (I always wondered what Intel meant
when they used the phrase "general purpose?"  Yes, here is my general purpose
meat tenderizer... here is my general purpose mitral valve replacement...
here is my general purpose femtosecond laser spectrometer...).  An instruction
set with the orthogonality of parallel lines?  A cache design that is arguably
less sophisticated than the 68020's...  a register set so puny that external
caching becomes an actual performance enhancer rather than a stupid buzzword
novelty?  Yeeeeee----uckkk.

Part of the problems arise from running DOS... particularly the memory 
annoyances.  But some of the actual chip design seems just brain dead.

>version 2.0 does lead one to be hopeful but there's very little software
>that is specific to it.

Kind of unfortunate I guess.  OS/2 looks like a good try... too bad the
nebulous market powers that be aren't treating it all that kindly, with
a competitor that wasn't even really supposed to be a competitor selling
3,000,000 copies in its first 6 weeks on the market...

>Maple is available for the Amiga. AmigaTeX is also available. Assuming you

Maple... great port to the Amiga.  I have to find out if we have a site 
licence for it.

>have a good terminal program, I assume that your heavy computing will be
>done on a workstation. Thus, what you want to make sure of is (1) there's

Sensible assumption.

>a site license for Maple (it also has an educational price) (2) you don't

Educational price is around $450 I think... still pretty reasonable, but
the site licence pricing is sure better... :-)

>mind learning LaTeX/TeX and using AmigaTeX which is about as good a version
>as you will find and (3) you can forgo the graphical frontend to TeX as

That's true.  The NeXT version of TeX (now bundled with it) is very similar
and just as good with respect to zippy previewers and utilities... I guess
that stands to reason since the Amiga and NeXT versions are written by the
same person... :-)

>found in Scientific Word (for Windows). Few people know about Scientific
>Word, but it is one application that makes a PC worth buying.

I find that graphical/visual front-ends to TeX/LaTeX tend to defeat some of
the purpose of having a logical-based document preparation system.  That's
just a philosophical thing though.  I'd take TeX with a faster compiler
and previewer anyday.

With AmigaTeX (commercial), Maple (commercial) and VLT (shareware), you can
set up a pretty good math/science workstation environment (provided you're
running on a fairly quick Amiga with a decent size hard disk), with compute-
intensive jobs offloaded to whatever you're connecting to with VLT.  The
smooth and quick multitasking makes running all that stuff together really
convenient and ARexx lets you do a lot of good gluing together of disparate
apps from different manufacturers.

>My suggestion (and I have a number of systems, including a 486-33MHz with
>doubling capabilities, bells and whistles, etc...) is as follows:
> 
>(1) If you don't need a computer for children's educational programs, that
>    is a negative against both the PC and the Mac.

Yep.

>(2) If you intend on doing most of your computing on a "micro", get a NeXT.

Reasonable choice.  Although things like color tend to cost a lot on the
NeXT.

>(3) Offloading to a more powerful system makes more sense to me. I would
>    therefore stick with the Amiga. I'd get AmigaTeX, Maple and some version
>    of X for it.

Dale Luck of gfxbase makes an XWindows package for the Amiga that gets 
discussed a lot...  a posting to c.s.a.datacomm would probably bring him
to the surface pretty quickly with the straight information on it.

>Basically the PC is not a well integrated system. There's always something 
>one has to fiddle with. The A4000 is nicer than any 486 system I've seen.
>Then again, I'm biased as I've used and grown to dislike 486's. The one thing
>they do have is a large installed base putting out tons of junk.

Yep.  

>Philip McDunnough
>University of Toronto
>philip@utstat.toronto.edu


-- 
 Jerry Kuch (jerry@cs.mcgill.ca) ---- PUT YOUR HAND INSIDE THE PUPPET HEAD.
 "I was wrong to play God.  Life is precious, not a thing to be toyed with.
  Now take out that brain and flush it down the toilet."
                  --- M. Burns  "Treehouse of Horror II"
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy