On 6/1/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
The rest of it, yeah, but not networking and
hypertext. By "not" I
mean that those are not thing that were groundbreaking with the Amiga.
The Mac had Hypercard and the Amiga never had any decent networking
until long after it was introduced.
That's true. I shouldn't have lumped networking into that list. My
only excuse was that I was into networking Amigas long before most
other users cared about it. I remember debating with the
comp.sys.amiga.networking crowd as to the desirability of SANA
(Standard Amiga Network Architecture) drivers for 3rd-party
non-ethernet networking hardware, long past the point that it should
have been a no-brainer. The "problem" was that AmigaOS didn't come
with TCP/IP, so most users didn't care if your network widget talked
SANA or not - it didn't _have_ to interoperate to be useful, and some
of the more vocal users (luddites) decried the complexity of SANA and
the associated network stacks.
At the same time in the DOS world, all networking was add-on, and the
Mac had out-of-the-box networking, but it was a closed network
standard (Mac to Mac only). TCP/IP took a while to trickle down from
Workstations to Micros.
-ethan