Re: What would you tell Commodore in early 1980's?
- From: buchty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rainer Buchty)
- Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:23:56 +0000 (UTC)
In article <56d7bf99-4797-459f-98d9-1899fbbfbaa1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Murray <adric22@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
|>
|> I was also thinking that I would tell them to embrace standards like
|> IDE, Ethernet, and PCI as early as possible, rather than sticking with
|> SCSI and proprietary bus standards. (thinking of the Amiga products
|> here)
You are mixing up things here.
(1) IDE/SCSI
IDE was no standard. Not even in the PC world. IDE appeared somewhere
mid-1980s together with 80286-class PCs and it was just one thing: crap.
It took IDE years if not more than a decade until it reached the capabilities
of SCSI.
So I wouldn't tell Commodore in the 1980s to design in IDE right from the
beginning. It wasn't there yet and later it wasn't mature.
(2) Ethernet
I don't see where Commodore failed to embrace this. A2065?
(3) PCI
PCI appeared on the end-user marked in 1993 and introduced features to the
PC world which were already common within Zorro. It therefore wouldn't
have made much sense for Commodore to wait 8 years...
But they could've used VMbus.
Still, the *bus* is not the problem. It's the BIOS. And I think this is
the reason why Apple finally switched over to x86 -- because they see
that they need easy access to PC graphic cards to not fall behind
significantly and/or pay through the nose for not-so-timely non-x86
adaptations of the video card BIOSes.
|> In fact, I might even take a trick or two from Apple, telling them to
|> embrace the standard hardware designs of the PC since their open-
|> design would probably be an unstoppable force anyway.
The problem with the PCs was not the open design per se, but IBMs failure
to forget patenting the BIOS. *That* opened the market for all these cheap
clones where any other platform required licensing to be cloned.
|> The Amiga was certainly a good platform, but one has to admit it had
|> certain flaws compared to the Mac and PC especially for customers like
|> schools and businesses. Perhaps a model of the Amiga that was more
|> like a Mac, with networking capabilities would have been more
|> successful in those markets?
Mac used mainly proprietary networking in the beginning. AppleTalk, anyone?
What made the Amiga unbearable for any office use was the lack of a proper
70Hz mode. The Atari ST is hell to type on. I think I never disliked a
keyboard more than the one on my Mega ST. But it had a flicker-free 640x400
mode and a good writing program (Signum), hence it made its way into more
than one office.
The Amiga would have otherwise been *ideal* for office/school use as it had
standard interfaces (RS232, LPT, SCSI). It would've been better, though, to
add a standard CVBS output for the 15kHz signal instead of forcing people
to use that unobtainable 23pin SubD connector.
|> Anyway, those are just some of the thoughts I had.. what would you
|> tell Commodore to do in order to stay competitive and profitable in
|> the computer market if you could go back to the early 1980's?
I'd bring a list of all programming tricks with me so that we already
have all that nifty demo coding stuff 5-10 years earlier.
Just compare stuff like "Choplifter", heck, even "Fort Apocalypse" and
compare that to e.g. "Hawkeye".
Show Commodore right from the beginning how to use the borders, how
to use FLI modes, any $d011 trick for that matter, sprite multiplexers,
digital voices, even simple stuff like playing arpeggios.
Imagine showing some late C64 demo to the crowd of 1982 who was used to
VCS2600-style graphics and sound...
I'd say that would've given Commodore some more momentum and maybe
shifted the introduction of other platforms by one or two years, eventually
revising certain design considerations.
What made the Amiga competitive in the beginning, its custom chips, later
became its Achilles heel -- especially since Commodore failed to force
programmers to use just and only OS calls (or at least some sort of
BIOS calls) to these chips. Otherwise it would've been no problem to at
a later stage put a new video or sound card into the system and just use
that w/ no change at existing software.
So if there's one thing I'd tell them is to provide a seamless upgrade
path right from the beginning by forcing *everyone* to use nothing but
defined APIs instead of poking in the hardware.
*That* would've secured there path as demonstrated by Apple who went from
68k to PPC, then changed the OS backend to BSD, finally switching from PPC
to x86.
Rainer
.
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