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and when they were available they were outdated, AAA+ never even had light) and many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.
