151–160 of 198 posts
An Amiga1200 on a 14Mhz processor could boot to desktop in 1.5 seconds...
A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have m…
I expect that it's because in order to have correct proportional scrollbars, it requires you to know the exact height of the entire scrolling area (or have decently good heuristics for them, which is not as much simpler a problem than you might think), which is an expensive thing to require of a scrollable area. The more content the system can handle, the more expensive that is. It's a big thing to ask of a heterogenous collection of layout code.
Even today there's some scrollbars that aren't as proprotional as they seem. emacs, for instance, seems to be using some cheating heuristics rather than being precise. Under normal coding or text editing usage you might not notice, but if you fill a buffer with a lot of very differently-sized text you may find the experience of scrolling around is less slick than you might expect. Browser scrollbars can also behave strangely while the page is loading, as I'm sure everyone has experienced even if they haven't noticed. In that case it's perhaps more obvious why a smoothly-scrolling, totally-correct scrollbar is a surprisingly hard problem in the general case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I rewatch B5 every few years. It still looks great with some exceptions (Vorlon planet killer looks like it didn't get much time).
A couple of years ago, I watched the whole of Star Trek TOS, TNG, DS9, and then Bablyon 5 one after the other. So I have to ask whether you're using a modern TV and perhaps what your media source for B5 is. Because, frankly, most aspects of B5 pretty objectively haven't aged well (the elevator scene is one exception), and the FX renders are especially bad, at least from the DVD box set. I fully believe it looked incr…
I've watched B5 on CRT and various LCD. The station monitors obviously aged poorly, but a lot of ships still looked pretty good. Minbari Sharlin, White star...etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I'm personally bit horrified with is that "Unix" is the end all of OS design and so on. With some fundamental designs going back to 70s... Like everything being text. Which seems quite a mess in current world with multimedia and increased networking. Yes we have spend decades hacking to get it to work... But maybe more options and different designs would enrich us lot better. And really we do have layer that can…
Yes, it's not either/or. The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API, and as far as the web is concerned everything in userland operates as a thin-client. The OS is only of interest locally. By the mid-90s I was furious with both Microsoft and Apple for setting computing back by at least a decade. You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was bui…
Because cheap commodity harware, a single Intel CPU controlling everything, won out over an expensive custom multi-chip solution.
Every Amiga model was a new model, with large amounts of engineering effort put into it, until eventually the platform just couldn't keep up with how quickly PCs were dropping in cost.
Sure in 1989 an Intel x86 based system was a joke compared to an Amiga, and it was a joke in 1990, and 1991, and 1992, but it was less of a joke every year.
When it all began PC's didn't even have anything that could charitably be called sound capabilities, but year after new cards were released, there was massive competition, at first at the high end, but then sound cards got cheaper and cheaper until one day Microsoft demanded that for a computer to be Windows Certified it had to just include one, and it was up to OEMs to figure out how.
Meanwhile Amiga didn't benefit from that technological explosion.
Same thing happened for graphics.
Same thing happened for networking.
Same thing happened for hard drives, and cd-rom drives, and types of RAM, and literally everything else.
Technology has often been one step back two steps forward, going from mini->micro people complained about the same thing, and going from PCs->Smartphones, it happened again. Remember early smartphones / PDAs? They had a maximum process limit, in the low double digits! Storage that was wiped out if the battery died! Everything ran in the same address space!
And remember the first 5 or so major versions of Android? It wasn't exactly a pleasant system to use.
But it got better.
The thing is, all in one custom hardware solutions will always, at first, beat out general purpose computing. But those custom hardware solutions are expensive, and slow, to engineer. Now if you are Apple and you can manage to find economies of scale to do everything in house, great!
But Amiga didn't have that scale. They had custom in house everything, which, and they were competing against not just Microsoft, but literally every other consumer PC hardware manufacturer on the planet who were in a fight to the death to drop prices on DOS/Windows PCs peripheral by peripheral.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever got us the Internet was worth it. To generalize, it's fine to have a variety of components, as long as the interface between them is roughly standardized, and the innovation can come in the components. That we can have a Playstation and an iPhone use the same network is a good thing, and they can do whatever they want with the rest of the stack. A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had a…
Not always islands, if you had a modem and a phone line. Pre-Internet were increasingly numerous BBS systems, from big one’s like AOL and CompuServ to medium sized one’s like GEnie and many tiny independents. Instead of remembering URLs you had lists of phone numbers (the smaller one’s requiring long distance calls when those were still expensive) for your little modems to dial. My Atari ST (a contemporary of the Ami…
A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have m…
It’s even weirder when you realize how much more resolution we have now. A favorite implementation of mine was 4dwm on SGI. You could middle-click on the trough and it would go directly there, rather than the normal paging by left-click. Still try to use it everywhere and am disappointed.
On Windows you get the same functionality with Shift+Left Click. You also get to see which applications use Qt since it isn't implemented there :-P.
I very badly wanted an Amiga as a kid, primarily for the Video Toaster which included Lightwave. It was out of reach financially, but also on its way out with the Commodore corporate problems. My parents drove me to B&H Photo in Manhattan to take a look at one, but they were pretty honest about it being near the end of the line for Amiga, sadly. The closest I got was a subscription to Amiga World and a NewTek magazin…
We had to load up the entire box of like 60 floppies of Toaster software, the Amiga itself and drive to some hole in the wall in St Augustine Florida to have one of the last remaining Amiga gurus to help us fix the machine. He put a new hard drive in it, but we got like 40 floppies into the Toaster software install and it failed. The dude HAD the software on site but told us it would be wrong for him to use his own floppies to do the install. We asked him if there was ANYTHING he could do. He eyed the twisted pair network card we had and said, "I could be persuaded for that". We weren't using it... as far as we knew, it was just another BNC on the back of the computer case. So, he lowered his "morals" and we got our box fixed. Great times.
A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. I should have realized it could be worse. With the modern era's "mobile first" UX regime, we now have m…
> A big "Yes" to proportional scroll bars. I didn't have an Amiga, but rather an ST. The ST also had proportional scroll bars and for years, I could not understand why the major platforms (Windows, MacOS) did not. It was a pet peeve that really bothered me when I would sit down to use someone's Mac or PC of the time. Windows has proportional scrollbars: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030731-00/?p=43...
My light experience from a long time ago is it also takes quite a bit of code to implement this on Win32 relative to other platforms. Your link could be used as evidence.
Meanwhile I was hired to build PC clones for a few hours everyday. While I was there he would argue constantly about the superiority of the Amiga vs. the PC and though I knew he was right (486 PC's had just hit the scene) I would argue right back about the fact the PC's were winning due to the velocity of change in hardware, storage, video, etc.
Anyway we got to the point with it that his wife started yelling at both of us to cut the crap, so not wanting to piss her off since she signed the checks I shut up and let him drone on.
As Christmas approached we were selling PC's 10 to 1 over Amiga's and his anxiety about not moving the Amiga's hit the roof. About a week prior to Christmas I came in one day and started building the PC's on order (about 30+ on order) and he was forced to help me with building them out.
He was pissed, completely off his rocker angry, and started verbally hammering me beyond what I could take. I finally decided enough was enough.
I turned to him and I said "I know one thing the PC can do that the Amiga can't do." And taking the bait like the fish he was, sez to me "Nothing can beat the Amiga". I sez, "There is defintely one thing it does better", and he SHOUTS "WHAT?"
Sez me, "It makes money!" and then I turned to the stack of nearly 200 remaining Amiga's sitting in the shop shelves and pointed at them and laughed long and loud.
He fired me on the spot.
Not exactly on point for this article. But a great story in the timeline of "our thing". I should mention that I did own a Commodore 64 and the Amiga before I switched to the PC. I loved them both and if it wasn't for the C-64 assembler module I would not have built the companies I created years later. The 6502C was the best learning chip ever!
2 centavos...