From: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: The Mac is not ideal (was Re: Amiga OS weaknesses and strengths)
Date: 4 Jan 93 17:00:07 GMT
Reply-To: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett)
Organization: BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED

In article <C0BJCq.MK9@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>My beef with AmigaOS as a whole is that it seems to be crafted oppositely
>to the MacOS.

	Thank goodness.  Otherwise, Apple's lawyers would be revving up
their lawsuits.

>The Mac OS is not very pretty under the surface, but is VERY elegant on the
>surface.  The Mac OS on the surface has lots and lots of niceties, big and
>small. AmigaOS is more elegant under the surface, but is almost completely
>devoid of niceties on the surface.

	Certainly the Amiga user interface needs some work.  I've never seen
a GUI that couldn't be improved, including the Mac's.  I've had the pleasure
of working with a Mac IIfx and a Mac IIci during the past few months, and
believe me there were times when I wanted to pull my hair out, shoot the
machine, or both.  The Amiga has a bunch of "niceties" in its user interface
that are an improvement over the Mac's implementation.

	First, let's talk about the joke Apple calls "multitasking."  I had
assumed that this means "the ability to run multiple programs
simultaneously," but obviously I was wrong.  The Mac has all these silly
exceptions when you can and can't multitask.  First, there's the famous
example that all other work is inaccessible whenever a dialog box is visible.
On the Amiga, when a system requester pops up, you are free to ignore it and
continue working until you want to respond to it.  This is a great
advantage, in my opinion.  I can't say how many times I've gotten a "Disk is
full" system requester, ignored it, deleted some files, and clicked "Retry"
to keep going.

	Next, there's this "PrintMonitor" thing.  I wanted it to be visible
and running all the time so I could watch the progress of the print queue.
Guess what?  As soon as you activate a different window, the Print Monitor
disappears.  What a joke.  In fairness, the Amiga does not even come with a
print monitor, but other systems (like UNIX) have it without this weird
restriction.

	Next, there's this weird distinction between DA's and normal
applications.  If you have a multitasking system, what's the point of DA's?
I believe that you can't run multiple copies of them (say, 2 copies of
the calculator), which is unnecessarily restrictive.  I remember this from
older versions of MacOS, so maybe it's changed by now.  On the Amiga, you
simply run whatever programs you want, as many copies as you want, unless
the programs were specifically written to prevent this.

	Now let's talk about performance.  These were 68030 machine with a
minimum of 8MB RAM.  And yet, when I did any printing, the stupid mouse
pointer became extremely sluggish and jerky.  And this was just printing...
nothing computationally intensive!  The Amiga mouse pointer never gets
slowed down by other work like this... certainly not on a 68030!!!

	I did a lot of telecommunications on these 2 Macs, communicating
through AppleTalk, and it was awful.  At one point, the remote machine
(a VAX) crashed.  This immediately caused the Mac to crash, which definitely
should not have happened.  On my Amiga, if the remote machine crashes,
the Amiga stays up.

	Finally, I'd like to see a way to abort a program after you have
double-clicked on its icon to launch it, but before the program actually
runs.  Neither the Amiga nor the Mac allows this, to my knowledge.

	The Amiga needs work, yes.  So does the Mac, OS/2, Windows, and the
$30,000 SPARCstation 10 in my office.  Based on my experience with both
Amigas and Macs, I'd take an Amiga anyday.

                                                        Dan

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| Dan Barrett -- Dept of Computer Science, Lederle Graduate Research Center |
| University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA  01003  --  barrett@cs.umass.edu |
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy