Dave Haynie Talks About Developing The Commodore Amiga

[Iggy]

Dave talks about the past again.
Ever notice he never has anything good to say about the present?

[Iggy]

NASA I can understand, Haynie...not so much.
Jay Miner on the other hand...

Actually, there are a lot of people in the Amiga community I greatly respect, some of whom are still around developing.
Dave gets too much attention.

[Iggy]

Dave's a hardware guy, he talks about hardware... There is no new Amiga hardware, so he doesn't talk about the present.

Dave's done plenty of talking about software, which might be the core of why I resent his opinions.
Although the point about being negative about negativity sounds pretty valid.

As far as there not being any new Amiga hardware...
What's the stuff the runs OS4 (when you're not running it on modified legacy hardware)?
Then again, I don't feel like arguing that point yet again.

[Iggy]

And finally, Dave gave his explanation about the MorphOS statements back on April 2011. Seem pretty cut and dry to me.
 Far as I've seen, not that my research is exhaustive on it, the MorphOS folks haven't exactly come out and stated they have not used any Amiga code, or Phase5 code which is the code in which Commodore owned code was seen

No your "research" on this is pretty lame.
And Dave's comments were based on hearsay.

When you consider the differences in hardware and the basic structural differences between Amiga OS and MorphOS, the idea of using any Amiga code is pretty ludicrous.

OS4 made that attempt and that was probably a large part of the delay in releasing it.

While you all seem enamored by the "huge" developments of the past (none of which were particularly original), I stay in the present.

BTW - Maybe its just that I was never that impressed with Commodore, its hardware, or its engineers.

[Iggy]

Original?
Not really.
Xerox laid the ground work for this type of system, and then over priced their systems (as did Apple with the Lisa).
The Amiga was also slightly over priced, but in comparison it was much more of a commodity priced appliance.

Inevitably everything went in this direction.
Ease of adoption and intuitive use sold this approach.

But again, original?
No.

[Iggy]

The Amiga brought together a bunch of different technologies in a single well thought out package in a format that people found useful to use. I consider that original.

There was nothing original about the components that made up the iPad, but until Apple put the right parts into the right package, no one was even slightly interested in tablet computing.

Engineering is always about compromise, and it takes a while to get the balance right.

The Amiga was a breath of fresh air when released and was such a strong design, it held its own for almost 6 years with little or no serious upgrades!

"with little or no serious upgrades" - funny, most A.org posters would object to that, but I'd agree. Dave and company's enhancements were minor.

The iPad isn't that impressive. And, as stated before, the elements that made up the Amiga had their foundations in other company's research.

Edit - Then again, looking back over my posts, my attitude in this thread has been pretty fecal eyed.
I like old Sun systems for similar reasons, and they didn't invent a great deal of their earlier technology either.

[Iggy]

Fair enough.
Commodore management and their bean counters screwed the pooch.
I'll try to lay off Dave over resentment about an old comment.

It is worth noting, though, that he didn't address Piru's post.

[Iggy]

Hey, its 2048x1536 retina display on 10 inch display is quite nice. Many new laptops dont support more than 1920x1080 pixels.

Maybe you want to squint at a 2048 by 1536 resolution displayed on a 10 inch device, but I find even 1920 by 1080 on a 15 inch display a little too small.
Sure, great for pictures, lousy for most text displays.

[Iggy]

Iggy:  You are always an endless source of astonishment.  I love reading your quirky interpretation of Amiga history.  Facts be damned, you weave some of the most unique and entertaining conclusions of anyone here.  I could buy you a beer and listen to your stories all night!

Quirky?
Ah, your probably right.
I get a lot more "quirky" when discussing politics, religion, or history (then again, we are talking history).

...He is not a software guy and he is just wrong about everything software related.

Thanks for the pointer to the AmigaWorld post.
Same vague hearsay from Andy, no real evidence.
And again, 68K machine code would be of limited utility.

And doesn't "trust" Phase 5 personnel? Why? They fought to keep the platform alive. And Ralph Schmidt (who is at the core of Finkel's accusations) is an amazing programmer who created the MorphOS kernel (which in no way resembles Amiga OS).

On the iPad, You're all right, it hadn't occurred to me that the text could simply be more detailed.

[Iggy]

I guess that depends on when "day 1" would have been...

AA was waaaaaay late and so was AAA/Nyx.

If engineering had it's way (and the resources) the A3000 would have gotten AA from the start (or shortly after), about 2 years before it went into the market with the A4000.

So with a little bit of willpower they might have had AAA ready in 94, at which point it would have been quite competetiv.

"The next big thing" was Hombre, some PA_RISC(?) design running WindowsNT, completling cutting of any connection with Amiga, and making C= soley depending on MS far worse than in the 8bit days with MS_Basic.
Sure would have sold o.k. on the HW base, but would have ended C= as being just another novelty PC-maker with maybe some extra live being donated by offereing the chips as a PCI-GFX-card going the successfull road gone by 3DFX, 3DLabs, S3, Matrox etc.

So basically Haynie and friends legacy of work would have died and Amiga would have become yet another Windows machine (albeit on a RISC platform). Sounds like a losing proposition.

Frankly, this part of the story make me MORE satisfied with where we, the community, took the platform.

We're still here, and Haynie is history.

[Iggy]

All very educational, guys.
Keep it up.

Are you sure the choice of an HP processor wasn't influenced by the fact that they already had a relationship with HP fabbing chips?

And the C65 a "brainfart project"?
No that was the C128.

The C65 was a much better successor to the C64.

[Iggy]

Both C= and Amiga were big sellers in Europe.
65816 was compatible enough for Apple.
C128 sold a few millions, I think a nicer 65816 based system could have even sold more. MOS could have had developed a 32 bit CPU in house, freeing C= from shackels of Motorola and their pricing.

Amiga, as nice and as advanced as it was, lost Commodore 3 years of momentum and a lot of money untill A500 took off.
The PC model of backwards compatibility could have been applied on the C= 8(C64) -> 16(C65816) -> 32(6532) bit line. The C64 was the 2nd biggest platform in the 80s, it was foolish not to take advantage of that.

The view of an obvious C64 fan.
Frankly, rather than trying to morph the 8 bit C64 into a 16 then 32 bit machine, a investment in evolving than Amiga platform would have made more sense.
After all, the Amiga had an operating system.
To this day people with any sense focus on evolving that, rather than focusing on fixed hardware specs.

[Iggy]

@WolfToTheMoon

I can't think of a single legacy PC app I use, but I'm still using Windows.
If I want to run C64 apps (or Amiga for that matter) I can always run an emulator.
Software is the crucial issue here, not hardware, so in the end I think I made my point.