Mixed Up Amiga History

[gklinger]

The other option, besides buying up Be Inc. was to license AROS and then build Carbon and Mac OS systems on top of that as it is already object oriented and based on the AmigaOS that IBM licensed from Commodore to give OS/2 2.0 an object oriented WPS system as Commodore got there already in 1985 before anyone else did, and Apple was basically doing the same thing with OSX that Commodore did with AmigaDOS/Workbench in 1985.

The Amiga was already object oriented even going back to its 1970's roots as the Atari Lorianne project that was basically an Atari 2600 mod to turn the Atari 2600 into an object oriented GUI computer, but the Atari 400/800 projects put Lorianne on the back burner until Commodore bought out the team in the 1980's. The Amiga project predated the Apple Lisa project, and the Lorianne/Amiga team offered Apple to buy them out first, but gave Steve Jobs his idea for the Lisa computer (and later the Macintosh) and he told them no, and visited Xerox's PARC to get some more good ideas.

That's excerpted from this comment on Slashdot. It's so wrong that it hurts. Where do these people get this stuff? I haven't decided if I'm going to bother straightening that guy out. If anyone else is interested in doing so, please feel free.

[gimbal]

most likely you'll be called a douchebag for your efforts. I wouldn't bother.

[gklinger]

Originally Posted by gimbal

most likely you'll be called a douchebag for your efforts.

Sadly, you're probably right. I just hate that misinformation like that is being spread about and that there are people lapping it up.

I reckon I'll have to laugh this one off.

[Thalion]

Wow Nice story from a prallel universe.

[Minuous]

Here's another one I just stumbled across:

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/tao...l/ch02s05.html

That page is full of mistakes; some of the major Amiga-related ones are the screenshot of an A1000 supposedly running OS3.x in 1985, and the claim that the AmigaOS doesn't do preemptive multitasking, not really knowing what an MMU is for, claiming it had "weak hardware" (compared, presumably, to a Crapintosh?), etc.

[b0lt-thrower]

Originally Posted by Minuous

Here's another one I just stumbled across:

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/tao...l/ch02s05.html

That page is full of mistakes; some of the major Amiga-related ones are the screenshot of an A1000 supposedly running OS3.x in 1985, and the claim that the AmigaOS doesn't do preemptive multitasking, not really knowing what an MMU is for, claiming it had "weak hardware" (compared, presumably, to a Crapintosh?), etc.

Yeah; the comment on the very first entry for the Alto is a screamer:

"The input device on the left appears to be a touch tablet, a mouse alternative similar to the trackpads on modern portables."

Nnnnno...that's a key-chord for chorded mouse-use. Basically it's like six additional mouse buttons that the user can define.

"It wasn't called either a “workstation” "

Um.

Yeah. See, actually Engelbart based the entire model that Xerox built the Alto on based on the H. Vannevar Bush work titled As We May Think and "workstation" is exactly the term used. Strike two.

"Famously, in 1979 Steve Jobs was inspired to start the line of development that led to the Apple Macintosh after visiting PARC and seeing the Alto and D-machines in action there."

Skipping completely over the LISA.

"The Amiga followed the PARC GUI model, if perhaps less inventively than the Macintosh."

Yes, by having the OS able to preemptively multitask, and a full color display that could be output to any color monitor at the time as opposed to the Macintosh's 9" black and white fisheye screen. I will patiently await someone to post an image of a Mac running four animations in four windows on the desktop - it can be dated 1985 as you like; that's when the Amiga came out.

"remarkably effective graphics performance out of weak hardware"

Jesus Christ, where to start with this. The A1000 came with double the Macintosh's RAM, and the same CPU. The Amiga's audio was superior to the Mac's in every way; how the chips inter-operate with each other is leaps ahead of the Mac's hardware interfaces, the A1000 was actually expandable, the computer itself was built to take a Genlock device - the Macintosh wasn't doing desktop video for another ... what, two, three years? For a moderate "bump" you could get your Amiga with 256k more RAM and have four times what the Mac was shipping with. Pull the other one, anonymous webpage author: it's got bells on it.

"The design was revived at least twice, and as late as 2003 German-made Amiga clones were still available in Europe"

WAT.

"This is as good as the resolution of color monitors got in 1985"

N...no...no, it wasn't. Also as pointed out that's a 3.1 screen.

"Technically, the Amiga and Macintosh shared one major limitation with a subtle but important impact on UI design: unlike the PARC designs or any Unix machine, they supported only cooperative rather than preemptive multitasking."

To quote jacksfilms on Youtube: "OWHATAFOOK?"

...

Ugh. I feel dirty. That was an awful read, badly written.

[Minuous]

>Pull the other one, anonymous webpage author: it's got bells on it.

Actually the author is apparently some famous UNIX luser and the "unofficial spokesman for the open source movement" :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S_Raymond