Amiga vs PC

[amigadave]

>Warning...may cause significant flaming (I hope not)<

I think it kinda depends on exactly what you see amiga as. For me, Aros as a rewrite of os3.x, counts. And given the advances the Aros team has made, I don't think there is any reason Aros can't be a perfectly usable desktop os in just a few years time.

The biggest difference between Aros, Morphos, and OS4 is the same difference between a modern pc and a PPC amiga. Aros has access to gigabytes of ram, Gigahertz multicore cpus etc. etc. for CHEAP.

Aros needs full Web capability, more media capability, and more apps and games and it is good to go. And as it is based directly on os3.x I would say that Amiga is capable of being very fully modern.

Enlighten me if you will, does AROS have the capability to make use of more than one core/CPU and how much RAM can it access?  There is no doubt that AROS has all other Amiga OSes beat on price, since it is free and I am not opposed to switching to AROS someday when it is fully mature and has more apps and games to run.  It might give me a reason to keep my Quad Core 3.0GHz, w/dual 512mb video cards and all the other bells and whistles PC, but by that time my PC will be very outdated anyway.

Looks like I missed all the fun that was going on in this thread.  I usually just ignore any thread that tries to compare the Amiga with anything else.:roflmao:

[amigadave]

@others
there is no reason Aros cannot support dual core quad core etc. and become a more user-freindly version of what linux is today.

No reason it cannot support multiple cpu's, or cores IN THE FUTURE, but what does it support today?

There is no reason AmigaOS4.x/MorphOS2.x can't do the same, given a couple hundred full time developers working 24/7 for a few years with an unlimited budget.  Of course it would hardly be the same OS by the time SMP, or something different that supports multiple cpu's/cores in some weird way.

[amigadave]

Nice story, but you don't need to be smart to build your own Tube Amp (and many people agree that they have a unique sound that can't be reproduced digitally).  Every student, including me built one in my High School Electronics 1 class.  All you really needed to know is which end of the soldering iron to pick up.  Of course, when I went to High School in the '70's we could get all the Tubes we needed from all the old TV sets that were dead and donated to the school.

I still remember one day while working on that Tube Amp I turned it off, turned it upside down, plugged in my soldering iron and walked away to talk to another student until it warmed up.  When I came back and started to solder I got a nice surprise when my little finger brushed up against the high voltage lead and a ground, that was about a 750 volt jolt from that monster transformer I had.  Low amperage, but it still made me jump and then decide to sit down for a bit and look for the a$$h0le that had switched my Tube Amp back on and sat back to watch the fun.  Another day my instructor came by while I was putting together a HeathKit Power Supply for the class to use and he leaned over the lab counter and put all of his weight on his palms on the counter.  It would have been okay if my soldering iron had not been under one of those palms.

Man, those were the good ole days.  We were a tiny High School on top of a mountain in Southern Calif., but we were the first school in the whole country that had it's own video production equipment and taped every football game for the coaches & team to study, as well as many other school events.  All the gear was old out of date equipment that had been donated, but it worked great.

[amigadave]

I have noticed that rabbit chasing occurs frequently around here. ........

Amiga needs more software now than anything else.

This thread is getting really ....... boring I guess is the best description as it goes down hill into name calling and "yes it is" - "no it isn't" arguments.

I will agree that the Amiga needs more software, or more accurately, it needs new software, as the archives of old software are really quite impressive.  We need users that can show other computer users the FUN of using an Amiga and all of its variants and encourage more bedroom programmers to write code, or join with others writing code and porting existing apps and games to the Amiga, AOS4.x, MorphOS2.x & AROS.  Ports from other platforms are not a bad thing, but original software would be a great thing to have as well.

[amigadave]

Is that your qualified opinion? Browsing on my old A1200 with 040/16MB fast (when the 040 card works, but that's a different story) on AGA is not a lot of fun, either. It starts off fine but sooner or later (depending on how many image intensive pages I've visited), I'm down to my last MB of memory and my 040 feels more like an 020 until I either flush the images or turn them off. That's with a minimal installation of OS3.5 and the usual 040 speedup patches installed (RemApollo, 040 ieee math libraries etc).

It's not just a case of misremembering either. This behaviour was observed recently, during the development of the old browser proxy for iBrowse/Aweb.

I don't know why anyone would argue with you and claim that it is any fun trying to use the Internet on an Amiga today.  I have my A1200 w/256mb RAM & 060/50mhz w/Indivision and it is not a pleasant experience.  Sure it can be done, but it does not compare to using the Internet on any Mac or PC.  I have been using Amigas since 1986 and even back in 1990 when I first started using the Internet on a regular basis, I would do it from my Bridgeboard in my A2000/030, or while running Shapeshifter and MacOS7.6 and Netscape most of the time as it was a better experience than my registered version of AWeb2 or IBrowse.  Maybe others had better luck with their Amiga browsers on more powerful Amigas than what I owned at the time, and maybe some are just too biased to admit that by the time the A3000 was released the Amiga was already falling behind the PC in many areas.  Not that I wanted to switch at that time because I still preferred the AmigaOS's responsive behavior, but I could tell then that being an Amiga user meant that I was going to miss out on certain hardware advances and lots of software that was being written (hence my purchase of the Vortex GG Bridgeboard)

[amigadave]

@stefcep2,

You don't have to believe the "glossy brochure", just go find one of the many videos of the Lightwave10 demos to see it in action yourself.

As for all this talk about the "soul" of the Amiga (it is really silly), the only soul the Amiga has is what is put into it by the person handling the mouse and keyboard (or joystick if you like).  Amiga computers and its 1.3 to 3.1, or 3.9 OS are fantastic for their time and remarkable in that they are still used today by many people for what ever reason, but they can't be seriously compared to modern hardware and OSes because they lack so much that has been created over the last 15 to 20 years.

Enjoy Amiga hardware and the OS for what it was and still is and don't try to make it into anything else.  I have had as many as 25 Amiga computers at one time, so count me as one of the faithful fans, but it does not diminish my ability to realize and appreciate the strengths and uses of other hardware, software and OSes.  I don't have to run down Windows, (which I really don't care for much) or MacOSX, or Linux, just to justify why I like to use Amiga computers and its OS.

Anyone trying to convince another person which hardware or OS they should use solely on its merits is wasting their time, because everyone is going to use what they prefer, no matter what anyone else says to them.