I know - I was hinting more along the lines of what started the majority of
Amiga's money problems, besides Ali putting 9 bills in hit pocket every year
while the company suffered. ;)
On Sat, 07 Oct 2000, you wrote:
> Jason Straight wrote:
> > Just like the hot-rod isn't for the average driver linux shouldn't
> > necesarilly be for the average computer user. If it works out that way
> > through evolution fine, but I don't think we should push it and change
> > focus from what brought linux where it's at now. Amiga died trying to be
> > something other than what made it popular.
>
> Amiga "died" for several other reasons, mainly because it hasn't
> good administration under Commodore (remember Medhi Ali?), and the ability
> to put out tech hardware upgrades when needed and requested by the crowd
> (it passed a lot of time to have AGA chispet, and when they were available
> they were outdated, AAA+ never even had light) and many other flops of the
> architecture (remember CDTV and CD32?).
> Furthermore also who taken out the Amiga from the market was the CPU and
> GFX hardware: latest Amiga 4000 were with 68040 at 25Mhz, which more or
> less had the CPU power of the 486/33 [but the Amiga 4000 was far superior
> than a 486/33 compatible with Windoze 3.1] But when 486 DX2/DX3/DX4 and
> Pentium were available at lower price, it was hard to push new user to buy
> for more price an old hardware, although the OS was still superior. Many
> other "power" Amiga user (tons of 3D raytracers) passed to intel arch due
> to faster rendering time. A1200 was good sell, but not as A500 of "good old
> days". 68060 cards at 50Mhz were available as accelerated card by 3rd
> party, some years after the Commodore bakrupcy (too late) and were also
> difficult to obtain. Ditto for PPC card from Phase 5 later,
> Also the Motorola no longer developed the 680X0 architecture and that was
> partially the start of the end of the Amiga (Apple did the jump to PowerPC
> and it is still alive, although if it wasn't for the coloured iMAC [seems
> like what did the Swiss company Swatch], also Apple would have probably
> closed, 1 or 2 years ago, but that's another story...).
> Who taken the Amiga later (remember ESCOM), didn't had clear their minds
> too, and wasted a lot of time trying to deciding what to do exactly with
> the Amiga. Not much time later ESCOM (#2 PC vendor in Europe) bankrupcy
> too, and the Amiga passed to Gateway 2000 (1 another year to know who
> should take the Amiga Inc. from ESCOM [remember VISCORP story?]). Two years
> to decide to choose QNX as next microkernel and PPC as CPU. Then after
> decided and make the announce with QNX, they fired the heads of the Amiga
> Inc. (Jim Collas) and announced to switch to a Linux modified kernel as
> kernel for next Amiga architecture, based on Transmeta as main CPU, ATI for
> video card, etc. 1 other year of NOTHING (ah no, a new 680x0 OS release for
> old machine, thanks to Haage&Partners), and Gateway 2000 sells what
> remained of the Amiga Inc. to some private buyers. Now the new Amiga group
> announced the SDK of what could become "the new Amiga OS" for RH, and
> signed the agreement with RedHat too. In the meanwhile waiting for a new
> Amiga, the world is changed...
>
> Bye.
> Giuseppe.
