CBM engineer Bil Herd to attend CommVEx 2015

[Iggy]

I honestly never understood the C128.
The C64 focused on graphics and sound.
With the C128, you got a additional processor (a rather slow Z80) and CPM support?
Uh, wtf?
CPM had basically no support for graphics or sound.

Most of Bill's work is like that. Pointless derivations of the C64 that weaken the design.

The C65?
Now that would have been interesting.

Then again, offering my opinion isn't that fair as I always prefered Motorola processors and the Amiga is much more to my liking than CBMs own creations.

[Iggy]

At that time my school was still using CP/M software (we had a couple of Research Machines 380Z computers along with our new, but limited in number BBC Micro computers).  Considering the amount of business software for CP/M, I can see why it was included in the C128.  Also, the BASIC was a vast improvement (Although I still preferred to use SIMONS BASIC in C64 mode just because I was used to it), had extra RAM and an 80 column display.

All in all, the C128 was leap forward from the C64, and yet it remained almost 100% compatible with the software and hardware.

As far as I'm concerned it was a great machine, but it came out just before the big leap into 16bit computing.

That said, I'm drooling over that announced C65 FPGA clone in a lookalike case.  I hope it actually happens.

Hopefully, I haven't pissed off too many of you with the negative comnents on the C128.
Honestly, I'm just not that into CBM hardware. And if I had wanted  a CPM system during that period, I would have built it.

At the time, I was working for a company building systems based on Peripheral Technologies 68K hased boards, so I had already moved into 16/32 bit hardware.

And, since I had a few contacts at Motorola, and I was firmly fixated on the 6809 and 68000, only the Amiga really got my attention.

Guess I have always wanted more control/involvement in my hacking.

Except for scavenging SID chips, I never really had a lot of use for MOS based stuff.

Weirdly enough, having started my computer use during the "you gotta build it yourself" period, I'm actually pretty well adjusted to the current state of Amiga development.

Its in our hands now.

I actually think we have a pretty bright future.

And, as a small community, its pretty neat being able to exchange messages directly with your hardware and software developers.

If I had any desire to attend the California meet, it would be to finally thank Trevor in person for getting involved and hiring Varisys (which I still find weird as I was exchanging mesages with Paul Gentle when all this was still unknown, and I can't think of a better firm to rest our future on).

[Iggy]

Get your self a Valium!, sounds like u need it.

You might having  a point, I have always been more than a little high strung.
I mean, I still can't get over the Wintel platform's dominance, and I saw that coming when some IBM engineers visited our shop and gave us a pre-release copy of Windows 3.0.

An OS with an interface you could figure out just by using it, I could so see our little mystery boxes becoming commodity appliances.

Anyway, benzos give me blackouts, so...

I guess I'll appologize ahead of time for using you all as cheap therapy, then go crank up some Motorhead.

[Iggy]

After that try GEOS 128 with a 1581 or one of those CMD hard drives, and the extra 512K of RAM.  It really wasn't a bad system, for the era.  Oh, how I drooled over the C128 in the magazines.  Right up until I got my Amiga, of course.  

Actually, I did get a chance to see GEOS.
I was a big advocate of GUIs early on.
And I'd have to give Microsoft some credit for that, as my prior experiences with MacOS were frustrating.

The owner and lead engineer at Delmar Company asked me at one point if we should support a GUI, and after my very ethusiastic response he had the first ports of Steve Adams G-Windows GUI running within two weeks.

This was as definately one way we diferentiated ourselves from Peripheral Technologies and StarKits. We never supported FLEX or SKDOS, only multi-user/multi-tasking OS9 68K AND we had the option of a GUI that worked quite well.

Anyway, heck, this is a Commodore thread, so...
So, I should state that while I was always entranced by the platform, I had issues with it as well.

The primary objection to the Amiga at the time (in comparison to what we were working with)?
First, multi-tasking on an Amiga appears to be cooperative rather than priority based.
Second, stability seemed to be an issue.
That is a polite way of saying they were crash prone.
There was some pretty crappy code floating around, and some packages just didn't play well with others.
Third, Amigas are designed to be single user systems. Sure you might be able to work around that, but at a further cost in stability.
Our base system, at $995, was a four user system supporting terminal (yeah, no GUI, but then one of our markets was POS systems).

Anyway, again, I'm throughly off topic.
My apologies.

Maybe I should consider attending this event.
Its being sponsored by people who want us to have a future, and can celebrate the past.

I don't want to appear to be too negative.
After all, the first 6809 based system I got to play with was a CBM design.

At first, their focus WAS business machines (after all, its part of the name).

[Iggy]

Oh Plaz, I'd never try to defend DOS based Window's stability.
I was just impressed at how easy it was to learn.

More modern OS' that can maintain enough conttol to allow you to kill a rogue process are a blessing.

And I still get BSODs out of NT kernel based Windows products ooccasionally.

[Iggy]

Amiga is pure round-robin priority based multi-tasking; meaning that programs with priority 1 will starve programs with priority 0.



This because of the lack of memory protection. Making a cheap machine at that time with a m68k with MMU was not possible.

Thanks Staf,
I knew that, but suddenly I'm being attacked as trying to "rewrite history".
Funny, I was using OS' that had kernel level support for priority based preemptive multitasking during the period.
AND I'm pretty sure I had a copy of Win3.0 before most of the rest of you (as my copy was a pre-release version given to me by IBM engineers).

And please guys, don't mistake my statements as supporting Windows.
It was easy to learn to use, but it had major flaws.