@thread

Back in the day Amiga was sold as a games system, fast effecient, with multitasking audio visuals.

When PCs were black and green and bleeped they were still SOLD as business machines. They had the latest office software.

They had Word Processor, spreadsheet,database in back and green and dos tools - that was all they needed to sell to a business.

Here Mr business use a word processor to type your invoice, use a spreadsheet to calculate your costs and see your profits,

This will make your business easier and better managed - buy it.

Millions business bought it for their work.

What does Amiga have for a full fledged industry standard office suite ?
A few office programs that were not compatible with industry standards like doc/RTF.

Just games and lots of apps.
The Amiga was seen as a colorful toy, thank Amiga marketing.
The C< Marketing could not make Amiga be seen as business class computer as it would compete with their bread and butter - PET business computer.

While we all gloated at the pc specs and preached all how great Amiga was, the world listened, noted and leapfrogged Amiga in hard and soft technology with a vengeance.

we still have not learned.

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@itix

Who had the zoom gadget first, AmigaOS or Mac OS? I don't really know much about pre-BSD versions of Mac OS.

That page is a walk down memory lane! I've used a few of those UIs.

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Calling Amiga great is just an understatement. Nothing could touch it in the 2nd half of the 80s. CBM did a lousy job marketing it and keeping up the momentum and the technological advantage as the management did not have a philosophy or a "culture" the way the late Steve Jobs described in an interview. They only cared about money, and not necessarily making money selling computer products. In the States it was even worse; not only Amiga was snubbed from the retailers and shops from the beginning (they had already made their mind that selling crap PC compatibles was the only way to make money) but also from many software companies. In the end, consumers in USA were buying terrible game consoles for gaming and PC compatibles for awful Wordstar and Lotus 123 type "serious" applications. Things in Europe were a bit better but still the parent company underperformed in every case.

Gateway, a wintel slave in every regard up to 1997, suddenly tried to join the overoptimistic trend of late 90s, yet differentiate from the likes of Dell and HP, and bring (or at least entertain) non M$ consumer products. Gateway didn't feel it was risky, if all went well traditional powers such as M$ would loose ground and Gateway would have invested in a diversified portfolio with products for the "new era", if not they would just negotiate better terms and prices from M$. Just before the clouds of the dot-com bubble started looming (people knew or felt it by early 2000, insiders maybe earlier) Gateway took the easy way out and "succumbed" to Micro$oft's pressure. There were no conspiracy theories etc, everyone in Amiga world knew about it as much as they knew about Micro$oft's ethics and tactics with other companies historically.

Quote:

Workbench 1.x had distinctive look to other graphical operating systems at its time (which were mostly monochrome). Interestingly, at later times, when other operating systems were getting more colours Workbench lost some (see 2.x screenshot).

Well, as other systems were getting faster graphics adapters, allowing better resolutions, more colors, the Amiga well... didn't get anything faster or better for that kind of screens...

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lets be honest. microsoft monopolistic (oem) practices may not be perfectly ethical but as tramiel said "business is war". there were other platforms that have suffered the same consequences of ms polithics as amiga and atari but survived. others have died. amiga is one of them.

when i was buying my first hard drive for my 1200 in 1994 (!) in an amiga shop in berlin iirc, it was apparently so tricky to install it even for a technician he was that it took several approaches. while doing it he has shown me imagine running on a pc magnitude times better. he was all for it. someone wanna blame microsoft for that?

sentiment is one thing, but fanboyism seeking to blame an outside enemy instead of own actions or objective circumstances is just what it is, namely sick. part of the looney amiga scene of the nineties was just that: feeling superior for no reason why forging insane conspiracy theories, something thats always more convenient than the boring reality of the situation. its fun to see that this attitude is exactly what have survived and even moved to ng platforms as it looks like. which is actually a blessing, because genuine amiga fans may stay addicted to amiga in the sense of what it was wothy of instead of trying to rewrite history.

Last edited by wawa on 03-Sep-2013 at 12:30 PM.

@toRus

perhaps Microsoft finally killed the remainders but mainly we have to blame Commodore and its management (I ask me what they managed?). They got a juwel (Amiga) and had no clue what to do with it. They were years ahead of competition (hardware) but used this to invest not in it (till it was too late). AGA was "too little too late" and they were even forced by the sales department to use it (it was already ready for one year). Instead they published the "A600" who finally ruined the company. The bankruptcy was the result of mismanagement and arrogance and the result of doing the wrong for years.

I read that they had the best-payed management in the whole branch but a underfinanced development department. Makes really sense for a technology company to invest the money in management and save money on the development ...

Last edited by OlafS25 on 03-Sep-2013 at 12:41 PM.

@OlafS25

Microsoft to buy Nokia's mobile phone unit nokia could but next to go way other have gone



here other one on the way out http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23940171

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@mcbone

The MS nokia deal is a school's book example of the tricky MS methods. Driving a company close to ruin (in this case by installing a CEO of choice who does the according actions) and then takeover what is left for a bargain.
Sorry about Nokia, always liked their mobiles...

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@Zylesea

Do you see a similarity between that tactic and the 2 fired Gateway employees who *cough* ended up pursuing aspirations with what became Amino?

#6

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@Zylesea

Yeah sure, cuz it was MS plan from day 1 to make Windows-Phone a complete failure so they could purchase that allready falling giant at rock bottom price !!!

In reality:
Nokia made a bet on WinPhone after they ran out of other options.
Didn't work.
Sold the (soon to be) deficit part of their company to the only bidder.


Will this work out for MS ? Guess that depends on wether Apple prices the new 5C to replace the (plain) 5 (same price as now for a 4s) or to replace the iPod touch.....

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@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @Zylesea Yeah sure, cuz it was MS plan from day 1 to make Windows-Phone a complete failure so they could purchase that allready falling giant at rock bottom price !!! In reality: Nokia made a bet on WinPhone after they ran out of other options.

MeeGo/Maemo and Symbian were quite some options. MeeGo pretty advanced and why on earth should Symbian not be able to do all the modern things, too? My Symbian/S60 system is doing al the stuff I want (mails, web, navigation, games...), actually It is pretty capable. If that system wouldn't have beed declared dead I am sure there would be many 3rd party developers and nice system advancements offering all the fancy stuff that is available for iOS or Android.
And why not choosing Android. Or even better: Make the OS an option. The current Lumias have nice hardware, why not offering Android _and_ WP8 for it? Let the customers descide what they want.
But no, MS dictated Nokia to dump all alternatives and go for WP exclusively. The problem is taht Nokia felt to be in the weaker, defensive position where that was where MS actually was. Nokia had the hardware and actually they had systems (Symbian, MeeGo,...) they weren't in deliberate need of another OS, they were in deliberate need of cash. And thus they sold themseves to M$. Now they got the receipt for that deal.

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@wawa

While I agree with part of your post (re: the blame game) I couldnt help but to find this part amusing:

Quote:

when i was buying my first hard drive for my 1200 in 1994 (!) in an amiga shop in berlin iirc, it was apparently so tricky to install it even for a technician he was that it took several approaches. while doing it he has shown me imagine running on a pc magnitude times better. he was all for it. someone wanna blame microsoft for that?

Seriously?
It was childs play to install a harddrive into an a1200. Plug in drive, partition with HDToolbox, format partitions. Easy as pie. A person has to question the practices of said "technician".

Quote:

Nokia made a bet on WinPhone after they ran out of other options. Didn't work.

Didn't work ? really ? From what I see it was starting to work... I guess Microsoft wouldn't have bought them otherwise.

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@fishy_fis

Quote:

Seriously? It was childs play to install a harddrive into an a1200. Plug in drive, partition with HDToolbox, format partitions. Easy as pie. A person has to question the practices of said "technician".

If it was a 2.5" drive. If it was a common 3.5" HDD, that was a mess. In the end I ended
having such large drive outside the box with cable passing through the A1200 case.

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@wawa

Quote:

when i was buying my first hard drive for my 1200 in 1994 (!) in an amiga shop in berlin iirc, it was apparently so tricky to install it even for a technician he was that it took several approaches. while doing it he has shown me imagine running on a pc magnitude times better. he was all for it. someone wanna blame microsoft for that?

I remember taking an Eyetech External Zip Disk enclosure along to a local IT shop in the mid 90s wanting to buy a Zip Drive and check that it fitted before I bought it. The shop owner was so jittery and kept saying, "It was designed to fit inside a PeeCee." i am glad my Dad was with me or I might have said something I would have regretted. I didn't bother to tell the owner that I was going to be using it with an Amiga, his little brain would have exploded

The mass commercialisation of PC components and the rise of PC World and its ilk have given us some staggeringly misinformed and stupid IT sales assistants I'm just sad I was only 7 years old when my parents bought a computer from Evesham Micro. The conversation between the sales assistant and my mother went something like this,

Sales Assistant: What sort of games would you like to play on it?
Mum: Have you got anything where a little man collects treasure and kills spiders?
Sales Assistant: Sounds like you would need a Atari 1040 STF as it features Gauntlet 2.
Mum: Ok, where do I sign?

I don't even remember seeing an Amiga 500 in the shop that day, but I wish we could have bought one with the 1MB expansion instead of the ST. Mum was not given the choice that day and it comes down a lot of the time to what item the shop has most stock of or what item they get the most commission for selling Eyetech couldn't sell me a Zip Drive for the same reason, they had gambled on the LS120 Super Floppy Drive outselling Zip Drives and hence could only sell me the external case and told me to buy the actual device elsewhere!

When Lemmings 2 came out and my friend showed me it running on his new A1200 the sound was leaps and bounds better than my Atari ST version and I was an Amiga convert from that day on (I also saw 'Walker' running in a Video Game shop around the same time which was amazing). It took me another year to convince Mum and Dad that we needed a new computer, by which time Commodore had gone bust but it was still well worth the purchase.

Last edited by BigD on 04-Sep-2013 at 09:37 AM.

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@itix

Quote:

itix wrote: @Leo In my opinion Workbench 1.x look had more personality than grey 2.x theme. It is not beautiful but it is practical.

IIRC, the reason for the grey WB was that at higher resolutions (high resolution meant professional) sharp lines caused a flickering effect because of the Interlace mode (Does "Flicker Fixer" ring a bell?).
Grey was introduced to reduce the flickering by reducing the contast and so to pretend more professionality.

Quote:

itix wrote: Here is the page where my screenshot was linked from: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/operating-system-interface-design-between-1981-2009/ ...

Hmmm - I followed the link and found this:
"Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windowsamiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more."
What the hell is "Windowsamiga"?
An Amiga running Windows?
Or what?

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@asymetrix

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Dandy
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@asymetrix

Quote:

asymetrix wrote: @thread Back in the day Amiga was sold as a games system, fast effecient, with multitasking audio visuals.

Hmmm - don't know where you grew up, but here in Germany the Amiga was certainly NOT sold as a "games system".
I can very well remember the advertising spot where they showed the work with Dpaint V and the slogan: "Amiga - Hast Du keinen - kauf Dir einen!" (Amiga - if you don't already own one - buy one!).

DPaint is not necessarily what I would call a game. From my POV it rather is a productivity software...

Quote:

asymetrix wrote: When PCs were black and green and bleep ed they were still SOLD as business machines. They had the latest office software. They had Word Processor, spreadsheet,database in back and green and dos tools - that was all they needed to sell to a business.

Once there was a time where we also had all that on the Amiga platform.
Maybe you want to have a look at the list of old productivity software that is just being compiled at http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=33816&page=3, posting #37...

Quote:

asymetrix wrote: ... What does Amiga have for a full fledged industry standard office suite ? A few office programs that were not compatible with industry standards like doc/RTF.

That's the wrong wording for this question. Not "What does Amiga have..." - AmigaInc. is dead from my POV.
The question should rather read instead: " What does the Amiga USER have...".

And now the situation is different. At least for me - as I have an Amiga Office suite:
FinalOffice 97.

Part of this suite was FinalWriter - and this could at least read and write RTF format.
So exchanging documents with the so-called "industry standard"was no problem at all.
I cannot think of a reason or format to exchange "database documents". But some Amiga databases can be queried with the SQL language (SQLite) like e.g. Oracle databases...
Just the spreadsheets remain - but I have a weak remembrance that there also was a solution available (online?), but as far as I ermember it just worked in one direction (either just Amiga to PC or the other way round - can't remember right now)

Quote:

asymetrix wrote: Just games and lots of apps. The Amiga was seen as a colorful toy, thank Amiga marketing. ...

Not here at my end - see above.

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@wawa

Quote:

wawa wrote: ... but as tramiel said "business is war".

Not in itself.
It is the "human factor" that makes a business to degrade to war...

Quote:

wawa wrote: ... when i was buying my first hard drive for my 1200 in 1994 (!) in an amiga shop in berlin iirc, it was apparently so tricky to install it even for a technician he was that it took several approaches. while doing it he has shown me imagine running on a pc magnitude times better. he was all for it. someone wanna blame microsoft for that?

Yeah - I know such Amiga dealers!
Back then we also had such an "supportive" authorised Commodore dealer back then here in Cologne: Helmut Proxa.
He really dared to praise a 6000 DM bog standard 386 PC (C=) with the standard mono "Beep!" and a Hercules compatible monochrome graphics card as industry standard.
I was just looking for a cheap way to do CAD at the time and had heard about the Amigas superb graphic abilities.
And he really was one of those idiots that told their customers that the "Amiga is just a better gaming console".
In the face of so much concentrated expert knowledge I decided to check myself - and came to the conclusion that the Amiga was the better choice.

Quote:

wawa wrote: sentiment is one thing, but fanboyism seeking to blame an outside enemy instead of own actions or objective circumstances is just what it is, namely sick. part of the looney amiga scene of the nineties was just that: feeling superior for no reason ...

Hmmm - I just felt that the Amiga system was superior in some aspects - not that I was superior...

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Dandy
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If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@OlafS25

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: @toRus ... Instead they published the "A600" who finally ruined the company. The bankruptcy was the result of mismanagement and arrogance and the result of doing the wrong for years. ...

While I agree with the second part of the quote, I always thought it was their refusal to advance the Amiga technology. Commodore preferred to invest in their (dead) x86-PC branch instead...

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Dandy
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If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)