10 Jun
2004
10 Jun
'04
7:06 p.m.
On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Doc Shipley wrote:
I figured it would :)
Is it too much
to ask to have products designed by people who are not
insane?
Nothing personal, Sellam, but that sort of statement drives me nuts. After reading this and the post about the A1000, it
looks like you're
expecting to be able to set up a machine you know almost nothing about,
as easily as you would a machine of the type you've used all your life.
Kinda. But that misses the point of my rant (which may not have come
across so well) which is that these are two very closely related models
yet Commdore chose to introduce just enough difference between models that
interchanging something as simple as a video cable was an obstacle to
overcome. Contrast that with, say, the old Atari 8-bit series where each
model used the same cable type for peripherals, video, etc. Or the Apple
][ which maintained backward hardware compatibility all the way through
their last ][ model (//gs). It's just brain-dead to introduce design
variations like that, both in an engineering and business sense.
To coin a phrase, that doesn't compute. The
Apples are simple and
obvious to you for the same reason Windows is simple and obvious to most
people - they're *familiar*. Even with an unknown model, you have a
good, *educated* feel for the design philosophy. To expect that kind of
intuitive understanding of an Amiga or an Atari (or an S/390) with
little or no experience is what's insane.
C'mon, an S/390 is a tad bit more complex than an Amiga. But ultimately
I'm comparing my experiences with other equivalent era machines. For
instance, the first time I ever set up an Atari 800 system I just plugged
everything in where it seemed it needed to go and it booted up. So just
what was the "design philosophy" of the Amiga? Require the purchase of
separate video cables when you upgraded?
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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