From: papresco@cantor.math.uwaterloo.ca (Paul Prescod)
Subject: Re: Bus Standards
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 12:11:03 GMT

>There was a market long before the PC became prevalent. The difference is,
>in the past 4 million machines was unfathomable. Today, 100 million
>machines constitutes a viable user base. Should we simply banish all
>the peripheral machines and standardize with a single platform? Some
>of these marginal platforms have contributed more to computing than
>most are willing to admit.

No, we should not banish the peripheral machines, as they do
contribute.

On the other hand:  one has to wonder where software/hardware
technology would be today if people had tried harder to be compatible.

Let's call this hypothetical standard :" Open architecture" now what if
all the operating systems, like unix, AmigaDos and MacOS had run on
this architecture.  AmigaOS wouldn't be the ugly stepchild it is now.
People would run AmigaDos for some things, and pop over to a DOS session
for others.   What if the multimedia users had said:
"We need a new, multimedia bus with higher bandwith." and it had been
grafted onto the old CPU and the old software, so they could still run
their own stuff.  What if instead of the plethora of incompatible 68K,
Intel, RISC cpus, everyone wrote to one binary standard, but produced
variations on the speed, power, and price of the chips.  What if
instead of buying just from Commodore, or Apple, or IBM, you could buy
in parts, a CPU from Motorola (but still binary compabile, of course) a
video card from ATI, a hard drive from Conner, and put them together,
and still have software compatibility.

Would this not be the perfect computer market?  A true buyers market
where instead of competing with full machines, every part is optimized
and fine tuned by a corporation dedicated to that part?  Where a video
card, or operating system, or application, or bus could sink or swim on
it's own merits instead of as a part of a "package?"

"Open Architecture" it can still happen.

>anything, it's a question of whether it generates revenue. Tell me
>that multimedia CD-ROM support for Lotus 123 is not a blatant attempt
>to jump on the bandwagon. All praise the mighty buck.

Who cares WHY they are jumping on the bandwagon.  It's reduntant to say
they are doing it for money, that's all any corporation does anything
for.  That's why they exist!  To make money!  The point is, that
lotus' Multimedia 1-2-3 and Microsoft's multimedia word are going to
have a huge effect on "the computer world."  The Amiga was always into
multimedia for multimedia's sake.  Which is fine for some people, but
in the real world it is of limited commercial value. 

PC multimedia is multimedia for education's sake.  For productivity.
For fun.  Let's face it, raytracing is fun for some people, but, say,
multimedia seventh guest is probably going to be fun for EVERYBODY.
Amigavision is productive for some people, but learning how to use a
wordprocessor without paying $200.00 for a course is productive for a
much wider range of people.


>Who also consistently clarifies that AmigaTeX is an excellent product.

That doesn't meet his needs...

>>and another guy that said he had a PC to run astronomy
>>programs.
>
>It's not like there aren't any available on the Amiga.

That don't meet his needs.

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy