Opinion Article : Amiga DE a Good Idea, Poor Execution

[greenboy]

I don't know doody about coding. But I do understand the tiered definitions of what real time is. QNX programmers in-house and third-party write code in a variety of languages including c to build real time applications. This requires expertise and an operating system that is designed for real time in the first place.

...There are some fields where non-real time OSes can be used to do jobs where true real time performance/exactitude/guarantees are not strictly needed, and especially responsive light-footprint OSes (such as MorphOS) can compete in those niches. But one thing is for certain: it isn't the language so much as it is the skill, experience, and expertise (and understanding) of the programmer that determines the best way to do this for any given project. That extends to choice of hardware as well.

QNX considered something along the lines of Tao's approach when they were in the pre-design phase of QNX6 (Neutrino) but decided that skilled OEMs etc would be better off with POSIX compliance, memory protection to meet the expanding sophistication that embedded/infopliance/industrial was beginning to demand, and a microkernel and OS services that were tailored especially for various platforms to have the potential to wring the best performance and real time guarantees they could for all of these.

For developers and OEMs this isn't quite write once read anywhere (but it is very close!). I'm convinced QNX made the right decision for its existing customers, and the many more they continue to garner.
 
 
<--greenboy---<<<<
coordinator & facilitator-at-large
Phoenix Developer Consortium
 
 

[greenboy]

Wayne Hunt : The problem is, as Bill McEwen admitted to me about a year ago (the last time we spoke), Tao's Intent was "not nearly anything resembling the level of completeness or usability that Tao had presented to us in the beginning".

Once Amiga Inc (then Amino) screwed the pooch bigtime with public and in-Phoenix botched non-negotation with Dan Dodge of QNX (their intended partner), they then DID NOT DO THEIR HOMEWORK when choosing Tao. Perhaps this choice was forced by hurried desperation.

OK - even at that time any relative newbie like me could go to Tao's website and see almost immediately that Tao product design wasn't going to be able to support heavy server use or multidigitalinterenvironmentaleverywheritis (ironically everybody was oohing and aahing at St Louis Gatway2000 at renderings of donut-shaped servers that the Bold New World would be served up by) - But Tao didn't even have MP! Not only that, there was no good way to design it in, nor was there any intent {;} to ever get MP, as Francis Charig unequivocally pointed out after much BS and waffling and posturing by Amiga Inc, as people pointed this slight overlooked item out on various forums!

Whether Amiga Inc knew all along and was hiding this (those of us in Phoenix surely understood the importance of it), or whether it was another B&F blunder that any newbie user with a little research could figure out in a few hours, this made Tao's product unsuitable for a great majority of the AI-STATED plans of the time.

And as we merrily traipsed along with our leaders of cummunity watching many publicly evident 180-degree changes of gameplan, you might realize that people who were not so infatuated with the potential of Tao were not all that surprised. And Phoenix lost a lot of ground during this time in Amiga circles, and QNX lost a lot of inertia for a desktop (also due to phase5 going under as well), and many Amiga-community developer potential followed the boingless pied piper with the ever-changing tune - who was always willing to tell them whatever it took to get them signed to a ridiculous first-draft license that probably never got within a parsec of a legal consultant and which was a disaster unto itself, and then later replaced in shakey manner with a wall of NDA and SDA.

Well, history makes for strange bedfellows... Microsoft?  MICROSOFT??? Hel-LO?!?! The company that everybody in Amiga Inc used to tout as the way NOT to do it, the evil enemy, the highest satan in computing??? Sheesh!

And thus history is NOT written... And so the world may deflate. Because for what was promised, Tao was not suitable. It sucked, and did not blow ; }