Amiga hardware superiority

[stefcep2]

One thing that I'd like to add is that Commodore's machines were really just the barebones framework that people could expand with the use of 3rd party hardware.  In fact the best hardware that ran on Commodore's machines was usually made by third parties like GVP and Phase 5.  (Even a lowly A500 could get a 68040 CPU upgrade).  There's a few considerations with that: if Commodore brought an A4000 with a 68060 and chunky display card, its unlikely that third parties would've bothered, this saved Commodore a lot of R and D dollars,  and it let people upgrade as and when they wanted. On a professional level, even though Commodore didn't provide networking solutions out of the box, movie studios managed to network dozens of Amiga's as render farms.

The other point people have emphasised is lack of memory protection.  This has become more of a consideration now than it was at the time.  At the time, every one knew that a single rogue task could bring down the OS, that in theory it wasn't very secure etc, and there was no multi-user support.  But it was just a peripheral fact at the time.

The user reality was that AmigaOS was very stable-in fact at the time, it was Windows 95 with its myriad of third party hardware that even with its MP was more known for crashing. And most Win 95 users had a single account they logged in as admins, and often without a password!

Programmers on the Amiga learned how to program within the limitations of no memory protection.  As for the users, look at all the software, artwork, music, video documents etc that were created on Aminet.  They wouldn't have bothered with Amiga if it crashed as frequently as the lack of MP might suggest.  Hell at one stage I'd say 90% of the software on people's machines were hacks, cludges, and cracked.  Yet it all still worked, and worked very well.

 IMO, people are revising history with things that are more important today than they were back then. At the time, lack of MP was an irrelevant consideration for the vast majority of users, and I can honestly say that I knew no-one who bought a PC with Win 95 beacsue it had MP and the Amiga didn't.   It might matter now, but for most it didn't matter then.

[stefcep2]

This makes no sense to me, why would u buy a cheap machine that had no proper expansion bus and then expect this(yes i know the side slot is technically zorro,and i know expansions were available(costly), why do you think the big box machines has zorro slots.You just bought the wrong thing.AGA was not great,but it was a far cry better than ecs.ecs was dog dirt slow.
all the big box amiga's had gfx card capabilities at the time.
common sense would of dictated to sell the 500 and go with a 2000 or better.even then used 2000's were pretty cheap.

I see this mentality thru the years with 1200 owners also.. they buy the cheapest machine  thinking they are saving $$,then whine about the lack of gfx card expansion and other shortcomings.the cheap machine is not always cheap if u care to expand it.You get what you pay for.but all water under the bridge these days.

I agree.  

Commodore catered for two markets: home users (A500, later A1200) and pro users (A2000, later A3000, later A4000).  This is exactly what Apple did when Jobs took over: Apple had a gazillion models, but he streamlined their product line into just two: Home with the iMacs, and Professional tower units with the G3 Power Mac.  But Apple had a marketing department that made all that unambiguous.  Commodore didn't.  

This and the fact that Amiga had some of the most tight-arsed users in the history of computing, who didn't want to upgrade that 7 year old 1 meg A500, and cried when they couldn't get an AGA upgrade for it.  Hell most A500 I see on ebay are stock 1.3 machines, people didn't even bother to upgrade the OS.

[stefcep2]

Didn't you once slam my Phase-5 processor/rtg expansion equipped A1200 as a "frankenstein" rig ?

I did.  

And with a PPC CPU your machine literally has a brain transplant in it.  Which didn't do much more than a fast FPU-  until Os 4 came out.  Ok so maybe its not a whole brain then, maybe just a cerebellum perhaps.  And the RTG card worked on a different bus-a set of eyes from a different species communicating along a whole new visual pathway.  Yep "frankenstein" seems apt.

[stefcep2]

Can you explain how a second processor that, whilst not a 68K, is in no way attached to the original hardware except via the regular trapdoor edge connection signals qualifies as "frankenstein" ?

How it connects is irrelevant.

The PPC is not a 68K.  The CPU IS the brain in a computer.  The PPC is a foreign brain, inside a foreign body, connected to, communicating with and powered by original pathways, analogous to the peripheral blood supply and peripheral nervous system.  Frankenstein all over.

[stefcep2]

It is if you are trying to insist that it makes the hardware "frankenstein". It's about the most relevant factor there is.

I disagree and still do.  And i'll paraphrase it:

The way the hardware connects is analogous to transplanting a foreign organ- in this case the CPU (ie the brain) and keeping it alive and communicating with the main body by pre-existing structures (ie the peripheral nerves and blood supply).  I'd imagine this is how Dr Frankenstien might have transplanted the brain, and this is how modern organ transplants work.

It isn't? I was robbed! :lol:

Well yeah, its stating the obvoius but it need to be done.  What you wrote initially i read as being analogous to saying: "If we ignore the fact that we've put a new (or second brain) into the body and kept that brain alive and communicating with the host body's blood and nerves, then its not a Frankenstein", which ofcourse is ignoring the very thing that makes it a Frankenstein the first place!

You already said, pre-OS4 (not to mention MOS and ppc linux), it is implemented as a co-processor, not the CPU and to be fair, it's not a bad analogy. 68K code gets the PPC to do some processing for it. That processing can be just a couple of functions in an-otherwise entirely 68K application. Or, it can be pretty much the entire application, but it is still launched by the 68K and control is returned when it exits (not to mention any time it does a system call).

Well thats why I called it a cerebellum. The PPC had autonomy for many lower-order functions, but ultimately decisions are made by the higher order cerebrum (or 68k.)

I notice you studiously avoided commenting on the SCSI script processor. Lots of  accelerator cards have those. They are given a list of instructions by the 68K and they go away, do their work and return. Viewed implementation terms it's clear there's not a lot of difference between how they operate and how the PPC does in a 3.x environment, other than the fact the PPC is capable of doing rather more varied things than talking to SCSI devices and transferring data to and from memory. Unlike the very fixed-purpose SCSI controller, it functions, essentially, as a Turing-complete general purpose co-processor.

So is the question you are posing to me :"Why don't I regard Amiga's with scsi controllers Frankenstien's since i regard a PPC+Permidia A1200 a Frankenstein?

i don't know enough about the scsi controllers, other than that DMA ones are able to transfer data independently of the CPU.  But as you say (and once again this is the point we are talking about), the scsi controller is  something that has a single function, and doesn't actually do anything with the data itself other than moving it in and out of memory.  It doesn't process the data, its not a brain, it won't affect the decision making "personality" therefore behaviour of the beast.  Without  a brain transplant, we don't have a Franeknstein's monster, we just have someone with an organ transplant.

I think the analogy works pretty well.