Apple are loathe to break the smoothness of their cases with something so practical as a vent hole
Steve Jobs insisted on the idea of [the 1980 Apple III having] no fan or air vents – in order to make the computer run quietly. Jobs would later push this same ideology onto almost all Apple models he had control of – from the Apple Lisa and Macintosh 128K to the iMac.
Bad as Bernie Madoff
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
It's called lying, and American Law specifically allows partners of the NSA to issue any form of false statement to the public, their shareholders, their investors, or any other non-governmental entity. In other words, once any individual or corporation gets in bed with the NSA, you can never again believe a word they say.
Taking the highlighted section above at face value, logically that would mean that they were legally able to claim "We have never had any involvement with the NSA" when the complete opposite was the case.
While this may come across as smartassery in other situations, I've no doubt that in this case some weasel of a lawyer could- and would- use this in defending a company caught in flagrante with the NSA. This renders *any* company that *might* plausibly be involved with the NSA (including virtually all American ones) as suspicious.
I remember Intel doing something like this back in the days of the 386, except without the energy savings.
Actually it was Pentium [wikipedia.org] which was a precursor for these processors.
Near enough... he was saving mental energy by settling for the approximately correct answer.
The TV is a display, why the fuck do you have a display on your remote?
"Yo Dawg".
You missed a step in the P3 -> Core, which was the Pentium M. Intel was pretty much forced to build it, because power hungry P4's sucked in laptops.
I remember at the time (mid-2000s?) *before* the original Core line came out, at least one article in Personal Computer World magazine extolled the virtues of the Pentium M. They quite seriously suggested it was worth considering for use in a desktop system. (IIRC, there were desktop motherboards that supported the Pentium M, the only issue was that you had to take more care with the heatsink and cooling than you would with a Pentium 4- or something like that).
Really, the Amiga OS nowadays is just a plaything for a few very hardcore hobbyists willing to pay for overpriced, underpowered custom hardware that isn't even directly compatible with the original Amiga anyway. Amiga OS (and the original hardware) was fantastic in its day, and beat the living heck out of MS-DOS and early Windows, but that was a long time ago. Anyone for whom Amiga OS/hardware compatibility was essential or even useful would have been forced to give up and migrate elsewhere by the late-90s at most. For that reason, even if one *could* upgrade it to a modern OS, it'd make more sense just to write a new OS from scratch- the "classic" core would just end up being legacy baggage that would please the Amiga obsessives because they could call it Amiga OS, but have little real world use beyond muddying the design.
(Sorry, didn't want that to sound like a dismissal of the genuinely innovative Amiga OS, but things have moved on too far now).
Also, the rights to the various Amiga and Commodore IPs (names, hardware and software all separate) have been split up, passed around like a bad game of pass the parcel, sublicensed and disputed; I won't go into the details because (a) I can't be bothered and (b) I'm not sure myself!
But... yeah. Technically, last time I heard you can still buy a "modern" AmigaOne and run the new versions of AmigaOS on it.
(*) Though that may be for values of "active" comparable to the rate of flow of glass in medieval windows. And yes, I know that's possibly a myth.
(**) To be fair, this is mentioned on Slashdot at regular intervals, so it's possible that many of you are aware of this anyway.
The rights to the Amiga name, to manufacture the hardware and to the OS
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2710941&cid=39268663
The H.A.M. (Hold and Modify) demo showing 4096 colors was pretty impressive at a time when most PCs were stuck with 256 colors
HAM was around almost two years before VGA debuted (with the PS/2 in April 1987)! (*)
The downside was that it was hard to use for animated graphics, since the colour of most pixels were modified shades of the one to their left, meaning one had to take into account surrounding pixels when moving an object to avoid miscoloured streaking. Few action games used it, though I'm still convinced more games could have exploited HAM if the problem had been analysed methodically and restrictions on the use of base colours and general shading worked out to minimise artifacts and keep calculations workable.
Possibly this wasn't really considered because in Europe (where the Amiga was popular), most 16-bit games were also written for the Atari ST (***) and this would have made them harder to adapt. Hence most used the regular 32-colours-from-4096 or occasionally, the sort-of-64-colour "halfbrite" modes.
(*) AFAICT the best widespread PC adaptor around when the Amiga launched was EGA (i.e. 16 colours from 64). IBM *did* apparently have a graphics adaptor comparable to VGA in 1984, but the card alone was four times the price the Amiga cost when it launched the following year(!)
(**) HAM gave 12-bit colour using only 6 bits per pixel. One could either choose from 16 "base colours" (chosen from a palette of 4096 RGB colours) or choose to modify the red, green or blue component of the pixel to its immediate left, meaning that it could take up to 3 pixel positions to get an exact value; this led to fringing, which could be minimsed by choosing the base colours wisely (and by dynamically changing the base colours on every line with software assistance).
(***) Apparently there was a program for the Atari ST that gave it a software-assisted 512 colour display, but I don't know how restricted *that* was; apparently there were timing issues.
I was long gone by the C65 time but heard about it. I was under the impression that this was an attempt to keep the engineers busy while they looked for someone to buy the company. The person designing the C65 was a chip designer so it may have been even worse off then my bunch of miscreants were in 84.
Yes- Dave Haynie, who was still there at that time made a comment a while back that pretty much confirms this, saying that the C65 (which he didn't think was a good idea either) was essentially driven by one guy and that "it was strange times at Commodore near the end"
Anyway, thanks for all the interesting feedback!
Let me clarify: it might have reducing the pricing pressure that resulted in the low-end Amiga models that we actually received. The A500 and A600 would no longer have been Commodore's entry level computer models. And as such, with more upward flexibility in pricing, they could have had better specifications.
The Amiga 500 had a bloody great specification for its time. The Amiga's problem later on was that C= rested on their laurels too long and didn't invest enough in developing it until the PC had caught up (even if the latter's architecture and OS was still horrid) and the Mega Drive and SNES matched it for 2D parallax gaming.
In particular, the A600 might have come with a faster processor, more memory and a full keyboard.
As I mentioned, the A600 was (AFAIK) meant to be the A300, a cost-reduced budget machine. If it had been something else it wouldn't have meaningfully been the same machine. More importantly, it only really existed due to the past success of the A500 years previously; any high-end "A600" in your alternate past-future wouldn't be analogous to the one we saw, except in name!
Speculating as to what the A600 might have been therefore isn't just pointless, it's meaningless; like asking whether Germany would have won WWII if the Roman Empire had never existed. Europe- if not world history- would likely be totally different, a state analogous to Germany might not even exist, the politics would be totally different, and it's unlikely that the Nazis would have risen in *that* place at *that* time in that situation, so even WWII itself wouldn't have existed though other conflicts would have.
Perhaps. But one reason why such a series would remain successful would due to software momentum. Remember, Commodore's super-budget computers were really popular in places like central Europe. If the Amiga doesn't have a large base of software written in Hungarian, but the 8-bit series did, do you think that they'd be more apt to purchase a used A500 or a new C512?
They probably wouldn't have been able to afford a new C512. And (if it was cheaper but less capable as implied), C= would have been foregoing many people who bought- and *were* able to afford- the Amiga in Western Europe (making it the most popular computer of its era) for lower-value sales in Eastern Europe. And I'm not convinced that they wouldn't have preferred a used A500 unless the C512 was really close in spec.
Anyway, this is all getting rather academic and speculative, so we'll just have to disagree on this one.
We made over a Billion dollars, whether obsolete or not.
I'm not sure what aspect of my comment this relates to, so I'll just say that (assuming you *are* Bil Herd and not an imposter!)
there wasn't any disparagement towards the C64 or C128's success (or any other Commodore machine's) intended. It's simply that I don't believe that releasing the C65 (i.e. a semi-new 8-bit machine) would have made any commercial sense by 1991, regardless of how good it was.
Then again, since your article on the 1985 C128 refers to that machine as "one last 8 bit computer", it's possible that I misunderstood what you meant anyway.
Oh, I know, the Amiga lasted longer over there too...basically because of the anti-console bias that Uncle Clive encouraged with his advertising and the UK government encouraged with their duties and tariffs on US/Japanese machines to protect Uncle Clive from the likes of Commodore and Nintendo.
Hmm... because Commodore didn't advertise like that in the US?
Also, you say "I know the Amiga lasted longer over there too" then give one of the reasons as "duties and tariffs on US/Japanese machines to protect Uncle Clive from the likes of Commodore and Nintendo". Er, that'd be Commodore that made the Amiga, right?
As I said elsewhere, Nintendo gave the impression of not being that bothered about Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.
Tape? TAPE? Why weren't floppy drives popular? Over here the good games were on floppy!
Because they were bloody expensive. I'm aware that the US market was pretty much disk-based by the mid 80s, and I guess if you factor the cost of a disk drive into being an essential item, it'd explain why the NES seemed so much cheaper.
Yeah, tapes were ******* horrible, but they were cheap.
I had an Atari 8-bit that *did* have a disk system because Dixons (retail chain) were selling them very cheaply, and it was bloody brilliant. I later got a program that transferred most of my tape games to disk and I *really* wish I'd bought that earlier, but that said... disks were expensive, and tapes weren't.
Yep. And again, while you were playing Dizzy, Americans were playing Ultima, Wizardry and Earl Weaver.
Never played Dizzy myself at the time- it was never released for the Atari 8-bit computers for some reason- and didn't like the look of it when I tried it later on, but I picked up a *lot* of good budget games. The likes of Ultima were available on import, and later on via UK distributors, and then there were full-price (by UK standards) games like Mercenary that presented one with a wireframe world to explore, and was later distributed in the US.
And would have raised its BOM costs.
Yes I know, because I was the one who first pointed out that reduced manufacturing cost was the entire rationale behind the chipset's development(!) (See this post earlier in our discussion).
Note also in the post that you just replied to, I said...
but then it'd have just been a redesigned C64 and probably not have had the manufacturing cost savings.
In other words, I'm not claiming that C64 compatibility would have been a good move, just that the only way to ensure the C16's success in the US would have defeated the whole point of the exercise!
Commodore was a victim of their own success with the C64 in that respect...
But the C16 did best in less affluent countries (did well in Mexico).
I know that too, but how much of that success was due to it being sold off at a very low price? Did they continue manufacturing it (including the C116) for those markets after it had flopped in North America and the initial stock had been sold off?
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
