What still makes Amiga superior today?

[jlmjr1957]

I don't know if I can say superior, but one of the things I've noticed it that old computers, like old cars, have character and are worth the time and effort you put into them to keep them running.

New computers, like new cars, are in most cases an appliance to get a task done. When they are used up a few years down the road, then they are just discarded and no one cares. (I've never seen anyone that wanted to restore an early '90s 386 computer or a Toyota Corolla from the same era.)

-JM

[Egg-Chen]

I like how fast and responsive is my Amiga 1260. I use a Compact Flash as a hardrive to store my programms, docs, saves etc. but everything else is done in Ramdisk, so it's very fast.

I remember 10 years ago, as a student, I was working on a project with Macromedia Director (on Mac) at the university, and I needed an intro scene for my project, so I decided to use Lightwave on my Amiga to make a CG intro, and I was amazed by the efficiency of the OS multitasking.

It was totally crazy, each frames were saved in the Ramdisk, then, while Lightwave was processing an other frame, I was making an image conversion on ImageFX (from 24 bit IFF to 256 colors GIF) and saving on a SCSI (the Blizzard 1260 SCSI module) Iomega ZIP 100 the frames once converted. All this during almost 20 hours without any crash, everything ran flawlessly !  :-)

[persia]

I do miss the power of the Mac command line when using an Amiga.  I miss Xcode tools where the wole operating system is there for me to use.  But I think you are right the Amiga has such hardware limitations that you have to be clever to make things work and there's no Xcode, you have to figure out how to do things without help.

The Amiga is like a Volvo, you need to get real friendly with it because you don't know when it will break and you have to fix it yourself because the only repairman is in another town and you would have to mortgage your house just to speak with him.

[Wol]

The lightning fast user interface, instant menus, instant
screen switchin and instant OFF.

No other OS can do this, Mac UI is about 100 times slower and Winblows UI is about 1000+ Slower..


Wol.

[redfox]

Simply put, Amigas are fun.

At work I use a pc with Windows XP Professional on a giant corporate network.

At home, I usually use my Amiga, even though we have a laptop and 2 other pc's with XP. I think the Amiga is just more fun to use.

---
redfox

[Hodgkinson]

EDanaII:  :lol: :-D

[Vlabguy1]

Well there are many , many reasons..

Here is a nice simple one..Longevity and still very usable today.  Cant
say  that about a PC of the same era

My Amigas are still GOING, with little to no effort on my part.
Boot up in like 5secs..and your up and running.

Rich

[AeroMan]

Egg-Chen wrote:

It was totally crazy, each frames were saved in the Ramdisk, then, while Lightwave was processing an other frame, I was making an image conversion on ImageFX (from 24 bit IFF to 256 colors GIF) and saving on a SCSI (the Blizzard 1260 SCSI module) Iomega ZIP 100 the frames once converted. All this during almost 20 hours without any crash, everything ran flawlessly !  :-)

When my A1200 was brand new I used to run a MOD Player (can't remember wich one), render that Camaro model with Imagine, format a disk and write some stuff in Memacs just to impress my PC user friends with "oh, yeah, this is just a 14MHz machine with 2Mb"...

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
(sorry, I coudn't resist... Commas are so nice  :-D )

[marcfrick2112]

Egg-Chen: Very cool... Wonder if AREXX or something could be used to automate the process   :-?  Myself, I used Rend24 running alongside Lightwave to convert the frames as they were generated, save to a DCTV ANIM, and then delete the original frames when done.

OK, the Amiga isn't perfect.. but it's actually the little things that I like. Using LShift-Backspace to delete everything to the left of the cursor, LShift-Del for the right. Being able to type foreign characters easily (How do you do it on a US Windows machine, anyway?) Or, maybe my first attempt at a big .anim in Lightwave, I had only 32MB RAM ATT, I watched as my RAM was being eaten up... My Amiga finally crashed when I was down to about 880K Chip and 32K Fast RAM. Wow, my miggy really struggled to keep going.  :-)
 I like that I can sort of see what's going on, between progs. like SnoopDos, PriMan, Dopus, and while DOpus is available for PC's, I like the simplicity of DOpus 4 on the Amiga, besides it's free!
   IFF standards for files, sure, not perfect by a long shot, but for me anyway, I think it helps with imaginative uses on the Amiga. I have a horrid graphics program for the PC called 'PhotoImpressions', seems real nice, layers, special F/X, etc... unitl you save a picture, it insists on saving in its' own proprietary format...you have to specify file-type everytime you save/modify a picture.. that's in addition to the 'File XX already exists, do you want to overwrite' and all of the dozen or more 'idiot' requesters... (you wanna quit, are you sure, are you sure that you are sure???)
Ack, I just gave away my prefence for Amiga's... I said 'requesters', of course they are called 'dialog boxes' on a PC.... :lol:

[amigadave]

persia wrote:
I do miss the power of the Mac command line when using an Amiga.  I miss Xcode tools where the wole operating system is there for me to use.  But I think you are right the Amiga has such hardware limitations that you have to be clever to make things work and there's no Xcode, you have to figure out how to do things without help.

The Amiga is like a Volvo, you need to get real friendly with it because you don't know when it will break and you have to fix it yourself because the only repairman is in another town and you would have to mortgage your house just to speak with him.

I am really puzzled with the reply above.  Is it me, or do others see something strange with it?

To start with, the All Amiga OSes I know of have a command line interface to get to the heart of the system.  I guess he is saying that the Mac command line is so different and perhaps better than the Amiga command line interface.  I don't know as I don't use the command line when using my Mac.

I can understand the part about not having Xcode tools.

Again I don't understand him saying that "you would have to mortgage your house just to speak with him (an Amiga repairman).  The Amiga community is the best at helping their own to diagnose problems and help get things working again.  If it is a hardware problem that requires expert repair, then I agree it is very difficult to find and probably a bit expensive.

I think getting a Mac repaired is just as expensive, if not more than my Amigas.

[amigadave]

double post

The Mac command line is, well, not a Mac command line - it's just a unix shell, which, imho, leaves the Mac with two interfaces, one that is useless (at most tasks) for being too simple, and one that is (relatively) useless for being beyond the scope of what a 'power user' ought to need to know to do Mac-ish tasks.

Don't get me wrong - I love unix's power, but if I want it, I'll run netbsd, solaris, or linux (and in that order of preference, too). The Mac operating system used to have quite a bit of grace and simplicity, but these days I find myself wondering things such as: "Why does this os keep mount points around long after the gui has removed them?" or "Why is my Library directory filled up with every version of everything that's ever been installed or updated?".

I liked System 7.0.1 (w/ update) and it's been downhill since then. I was happy having an OS I could strip down to run in a couple of hundred kB. I have a perfectly good G4 Mac Mini sitting unused because I can't be bothered with OSX anymore. I'd love to run something else on this machine that my fiancee would actually find friendly enough to use. She actually remembers using an Amiga back in the day, so if only I could run something like it on hardware that I have lying around _before_ it's an antique!

And for what it's worth, having been an apple tech, I can tell you that parts cost aside, it would have cost you far more (even back when you could buy amigas from commodore) to have paid me for the labor on a mac than it would to pay some reasonable soul to do work for you on an amiga now, given the ridiculous apple designs. The original iMacs took upwards of two hours just to get at _anything_ much less put it back so the case fit together again. I put a scsi controller in my A1200 in 3 minutes the other day, without instructions, lol. Try not having the Apple service guides and see how far you get!

[stefcep2]

Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.

true but CGX and P96 are third party add-ons

Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.

Modern X86 CPUs are already running significantly faster than the rest the computer e.g. CPU clock speed vs main memory vs harddisk.  

There are other areas that reduces the performance in the  PC e.g. harddisk and main memory.

In X86 PC land, increasing main memory capacity and installing faster hard disk benefits more than installing faster CPU.

true but the RAM and Hard disk systems -what with new buses- are probably 10-50 times faster than what you have on an Amiga.  Its just that the OS needs gargantuan amounts of data to be loaded back and forth to do the simplest of things that slows it down.  This what I mean by the immediate speed increase that you get with an Amiga that you don't with a PC. The OS doesn't suck up you resources in proprtion to how big or fast those resources are.

Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space.  I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD.  How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?

Whenever I read the hardware spec on a modern PC and then use one it makes me want to cry, because it should be SO MUCH faster, but isn't.

[JKD]

You forgot to mention AppleScript...pretty much a lot of the power of ARexx and it has a nice visual way to build macros....for tha apps that support it.

Finder is beautiful in it's simplicity...I just switched back to Windows for my main work machine and I loathe it...miss all the little shortcuts and the simple things the MacUI does that you take for granted :-/

..but yeah bash/whatever is no use to most people...

...and I'm sorry but System 7 was horrible...it might have been a huge step forward for the Mac but ugh!

First iMacs were fun to service....an hours worth of assembly and disassembly to do virtually anything...our techs had a nightmare but Apple paid well$$$

Amiga has Nothing on a modern OS....except maybe a little nostalgic fun....which could be Everything too

[Varthall]

stefcep2 wrote:

Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.

true but CGX and P96 are third party add-ons

Not anymore, P96 has been integrated into the system.

Varthall

[PR]

We do!

Side-effects, no virus/adware. Lightning fast (OS4). I can pay a bill and check the e-mail and power off at the same time the pc is still booting & loading the virus programs which cost quite a lot too!

Second answer:
Hyperion and the new forthcomming update (DVI,Amigainput?+ "surprises"  etc.) !

Oh yeah and the retro-games...