29 Sep
2005
29 Sep
'05
3:59 p.m.
At 11:13 AM -0400 9/29/05, Roger Merchberger wrote:
Rumor has it that Tom Jennings may have mentioned these
words:
It's an Amiga 4000, and as such I suspect it is within the 10-year
rule, though it does make for an interesting question.
Realistically, I don't think anyone will object to you talking about
it here. Besides, even though it was "built" in '98, when were the
boards manufactured? I thought they were using NOS boards that
Commodore made.
Eh. Dump the 10 year rule and cut off at 1994.
Sure, but then my Amiga wouldn't be classic anymore. It was built in
'98. Oh, wait, then it still isn't, even *with* the 10-year rule. :-/ But what about the 90's?
Seriously - let's look at this:
When I joined the list, CoCo 3s weren't technically ontopic yet, as
they'd been sold until '92. (Disco'ed in '91, I think I saw one
(still in a RS store) in '93.
When I joined the list, Macintoshes *still couldn't* multitask;
8-bitters could do that since '81-82 (whenever OS-9 was released).
Yet lots of people are still waxing poetic about 68K Macs - I found
them udderly[1] pitiful... much less useful for the power available
than my NT4 workstation. Granted, I wasn't doing photo editing or
typesetting; just the basics.
When you joined the list, Mac's *COULD* multitask (I can't remember
if it would have been System 7.5, 7.6, or 8.0), they simply did
cooperative multitasking, rather than preemptive multitasking.
Furthermore, a 68k Mac was outdated when you joined this list, and
Apple was on either it's 2nd or 3rd model of PowerMac.
[[ dons flameproof knickers... I'm not saying that
Macs sucked, but
I was rather disheartened when I finally had access to a Mac, that
every other sentence I said started with "whaddya mean it can't..."
What it could do, it did very well; but as a general-purpose
computing platform, the OS was rather lacking. ]]
Actually that "lacking" was part of it's beauty, I was always more
productive on a classic Mac because of that "lacking". As you might
guess, I'm typing this on a Mac (a dual 2Ghz G5 running Mac OS X
10.3.9 to be exact), and I for one long for the days of Mac OS 9.
Unfortunately all the new software requires Mac OS X, the only other
advantage for me is that it has Unix underneath, so I no longer need
both a Mac and a Unix box running at the same time.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |