----- Dave McGuire wrote: That was the Amiga !! All hail for Jay Miner !! Too bad Atari lost out on this, I think they deserved to build this, but you know how shifty Tramiel was :) =Dan -- http://www.vintagecomputer.net/ragooman/

That's very interesting! I look forward to seeing the results of your investigations. ________________________________ From: "Curt @ Atari Museum" <curt at atarimuseum.com> To: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tue, January 26, 2010 2:05:02 PM Subject: Re: Atari/Commodore hybrid, was Re: General religious wars (was Re: Editor religious wars) Atari already had the Amiga, paid for and financed its development from March 3, 1984 through June 29, 1984 with $500,000 long before Tramiel was ever in the picture. I even have a photo of the Warner Comm. owned Atari check to Amiga that Dave Morse cashed. Atari was already well into development of project "Mickey" a high end game console that would use the Amiga chipset, I even have copies of the actual wirewrap board. In court, the judge asked Dave Morse to present the June 84 CES version of the Amiga, Dave Morse lied on the stand and said it was taken apart and used for other revisions... of course we all now know that is a complete lie, as Dale Luck brings that unit to the Vintage Computer Fest shows each year. I have most of the court documents right up to the sudden request to settle out of court. The settlement details are private and sealed. My suspicion is someone within Commodore, still loyal to Jack Tramiel, tipped him off about the CES unit still being in existence and that evidence was presented to the Amiga lawyers and then they immediately wanted to settle out of court. Essentially the June 84 CES proto would've proved that Amiga had made significant progress on the design from the Jan 84 CES model, that progress made the machine workable and of course sellable to Commodore... which meant all of that progress was due to Atari's investment into the machine from the $500,000 and therefor Atari now held a stake in the machine, despite the company paying back the money to Atari the day before the June 30th deadline whereby Atari, Inc (Not Tramiels Atari Corp) would then have access to all Amiga chip data and materials to use according to the terms outlined in the March 1984 contract agreement (which I also have) all of this occured just days before Atari was sold to Jack Tramiel. Jack knew nothing of the Amiga-Atari agreement, if it wasn't for his son finding the cashed check from Amiga in Atari's files, they may have never have known... ...this is all going to be revealed in full detail quite soon, its been over 500 pages of documents and has lead to a massive research project that myself and Marty Goldberg have been working on for over 6 months. Curt Dan Roganti wrote:

They aren't accusations, they are Dave Morse's own words, under oath in a court of law. Here a small sample of just a small piece of his testimony (I don't want to spill all of the beans, but here is some just to show that what I'm saying is fact) http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/amiga/dmorse.pdf Curt Lance Lyon wrote:

Hmmm. Mac OS X Preview doesn't like that PDF at all. It says the format is invalid. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- #include <std_disclaimer.h> ------------------------------------------------

That could be. I don't know if Preview handles those. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Everything! Is my! Delusion! -- "Dead or Alive 2" --------------------------

On Jan 27, 2010, at 6:10 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: What version of OS X? 10.6.2 seems quite happy with it. TTFN - Guy

On 1/27/10 8:03 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: works on 4.2 (469.5) of Preview under 10.5.8 (PPC)

----- Martin Goldberg wrote: I'm not referring to any timeline. I was only saying how Tramiel has a reputation ignoring engineering advice. He has a lot of cost cutting tactics as a businessman - some good, but also some bad = such as slashing valuable personal in the engineering staff. Although I feel Atari lost out, I would shudder to think what Tramiel might have done afterwards to Jay Miner's design just to make it cheaper, that's his MO ( I know this is hindsight). He may be famous for the early Commodore success, but Commodore was still successful without him--thanks to engineers. If he was so remarkable, how is it that the Atari ST was just a mediocre design ( I know this just another religious war - but open your eyes for a minute). Thankfully, we were privileged to see Jay Miner's achievement as Commodore succeeded without a hatchet job on his design. =Dan http://www.vintagecomputer.net/ragooman/

----- Jim Brain wrote: =Dan -- http://www.vintagecomputer.net/ragooman/

I agree... Same with Atari - the design of the Atari 2600, not managements handling of it was what made it such a success. The Atari 800 computer and it is chip architecture, again, is what made is such an incredible computer, management had nothing to do with it, in fact, when you look at Warner-Atari handling of the company, they crippled Atari's efforts at making the home computers more serious in features, software and peripherals, on the video gaming side, more capable designs were created, but infighting caused Atari to pull back the reigns for fear that the game systems might conflict with the home computers. Atari stupidly went after cost reducing and price lowering their computers instead of dropping their low end computer - the Atari 400, making the Atari 800 the low end computer and then coming out with a higher end system (perhaps 80 columns, more memory and maybe in a different package with professional detachable keyboard) and then clearing the low end area to allow the video games - even an advanced system, to occupy and then there wouldn't have been overlap or conflict. Its the products, not necessarily the management that make them successful for the most part. Curt geoffrey oltmans wrote:

Where is he saying talent was driven away from the company? If anything, he took a lot of the talent with him. On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 1:29 PM, geoffrey oltmans <oltmansg at bellsouth.net> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Dan Roganti <ragooman at comcast.net> wrote: Warner/Atari Inc.'s contract was simply for licensing the chip technology, allowing Jay and company to also continue on with their own full computer designs and license it out to whoever else they wanted to - or even sell the company to who they wanted to, which is something Morse wanted. So the implication isn't really valid. The lawsuit was also in regards to this - full access to the chipset. It was Shiraz's design, and it was following the same "power without the price" methodology they did back at Commodore with the vic20 and C64. At least according to them. Although the ST's main competitor wound up being the Amiga, it was actually promoted as a cheaper full color Macintosh (hence the Jackintosh). Never would have happened anyway, per above. Marty

I think one thing in particular that the Atari ST had an advantage with was the addition of the hard disk/dma port. It made adding a hard disk a lot cheaper. Hard disk controllers on the Amiga were astronomical. On Jan 29, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:

That was without a doubt its claim to fame to be sure. When I was a teenager I worked at a music (and computer!) store. The Atari ST was starting on its way out when I first started, but we had quite a few of them. On Jan 29, 2010, at 10:20 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:

At 10:20 PM 1/29/2010, Cameron Kaiser wrote: What is this, 1987? Amiga realized the importance of MIDI. I still have my pre-release handmade dongle that RJ sent me. Commercial MIDI adapters were pretty cheap, which satisfied the tiny fraction of the market who wanted MIDI. - John

On Jan 30, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: I've seen this too. STs seem to be generally known as "music computers" by less-technical people who were around during that era. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

With built-in MIDI, it was easy to make it a huge success between musicians. This is one of the (few) biggest mistakes of the Amiga

On 30 Jan 2010 at 17:51, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: Honestly, what did in the ST for me was the terrible, terrible keyboard. I tried everything, including aftermarket bootster springs to make it halfway usable. Yes, later (and rarer) "business" versions of the system (e.g. the TT) finally used a decent keyboard, but by then, it was too late for me. By comparison, the keyboard on the lowly Atari 800 was pure luxury. --Chuck

Not only the 1200XL but also the 800XL and (I believe) the 600XL. It was a great keyboard!!!

I remember I was working for Entre Computer Centers as an on-site full time computer support engineer at Colgate Palmolive on Park Ave, across II's in New York.... there was only 1 huge problem with them, the only monitors that could be used on them were these new versions of Sony monitors, and they weren't fully available yet and it took like 7-10 days before they arrived. The 3 exec's that were getting the Mac II's... it was hilarious, they wanted the computer sooooooooooooooo bad, that even without monitors, they wanted them installed in their offices and those machines sat there for like over a week - monitorless until the Sony displays arrived... I remember powering up the first Mac II and to see the Mac OS running in full GORGEOUS color was really breath-taking, ah the good old days when I used to actually get excited over technology... Curt Teo Zenios wrote:

Thats actually been messed around with over on Atariage.com where some guys were wiring a SID into an Atari XL/XE system... Dave McGuire wrote:

Mind you, I like ANTIC and POKEY, though ANTIC more than POKEY. I have issues with player/missile graphics, but the palette and graphics modes more than make up for those, and so do display lists. You can get something like display lists out of a VIC-II, and if you really work at it a few extra colours, but you'll bind up the 6510 something fierce for something that ANTIC gives you for free. POKEY does have a distinct sound which is in its own way unique and pleasant, but SID really was unmatched for the time. People have already said the Amiga, but I'm not sure if I buy that. Agnus is clearly ANTIC-inspired, but I don't really see much SID-like about Paula or Portia. If anything, they act more like POKEY. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Don't be humble ... you're not that great. -- Golda Meir -------------------

Well, the GTIA/CTIA is actually the Player Missile Generator, it is also the converter to take the digital data from an Antic and generate video signals, it also handles collisions and produces keyboard key clicks -- those are its basic functions. You need the ANTIC is the companion to the CTIA/GTIA, in fact the functions original were meant to be combined, but the cost of going past a 40 pin package were too expensive at the time, so the functions were separated. ANTIC is a DMA controller besides handling graphics displays and text modes as well as one of Atari's most power features, its Display List. Pokey was meant to handle analog controllers and keyboard input. It also was the systems sound processor. Digital control was handled by a standard 6532 PIA (Parallel Interface Adapter) Curt Cameron Kaiser wrote:

On Jan 26, 2010, at 12:54 PM, Dave Caroline wrote: This same problem happens all the time today...people assuming that "more gigahertz" means "faster processor", even when it doesn't. It's funny. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Z80 guy in my early years (I still hack around with them today, http://www.neurotica.com/wiki/Z80_SBC_1) and mostly ignored the 6502 due to the lack of registers. I could never deny, though, that some hard-core 6502 guys could really work magic with that architecture. Oh the creativity that existed in those days. It only really seems to survive today in the embedded systems world. In my first participation in an actual religious war...Years ago, I used to refer to 6502s as "RRSC"...Reduced Register Set Computing. =) -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 26 Jan 2010 at 13:31, Dave McGuire wrote: I remember the "Sweet 16" 16-bit arithmetic package. I was surprised with what some hard-bitten folks could do with the RCA 1802 or even the Signetics 8X300 bipolar microcontroller (?). But then, even the 8080 felt brain-dead when compared to mainframes. And the AVRs and PICs feel the same way when compared to the Z80. After awhile, you can get used to anything. --Chuck

On 1/26/10, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> wrote: The 6520 and 6522 are the PIA and VIA, respectively - parallel I/O and timers, not processors. There were tricks one could perform with the 6502 since it had alternating fetch and execute cycles, so by doing something else with the bus during the right portion of the clock phase, you could design a board to "do twice as much" at 1Mhz, but I don't think the 1541 did that. It did have a pair of "processes" in its firmware - one to talk to the host and parse DOS commands, and one to perform low-level "tasks" (move the heads, read/write buffers, etc). -ethan

Dan Gahlinger wrote: Ultimately that depends on what you're doing. If you're doing something that can be easily split across multiple CPUs (e.g. matrix maths, raytracing, some types of image processing), then a multi-core CPU beats an uber-GHz CPU almost every time (or at least has the potential to). Best case, you're looking at around (cpu_speed * number_of_cores) equivalent on a single-core CPU (less a bit for the threading code). If you're single-threading then your quad-core 3.2GHz uber-CPU is only going to work as well as a single-core chip of the same speed (although if the OS has a multithreaded kernel, it might push some of the grunt work of OS management / HW interfacing onto a spare core). Take a look at some of the fairly new "GPGPU" concepts -- nVidia's CUDA for example. A typical GTX200 class GeForce chip has ~192 cores running at 1.7GHz, and can easily run rings round most modern CPUs (within certain limitations). It's mainly intended for e.g. running the same (or a very similar) operation on a ton of input data in one go -- things like raytracing and games-style (particle engine, visual effects, etc.) algorithms tend to work well, as do brute-force password-cracking engines (!), as proven by the likes of Elcomsoft... -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

On Jan 27, 2010, at 10:57 AM, Dan Gahlinger wrote: Well to be fair, IDE didn't exactly replace SCSI. ;) And, interestingly, it's starting to look like SCSI drives will still be produced after IDE drives are no longer being made. Ok, here's where I have to ask. Why does everyone get all excited about BeOS? I ran it for a while and I thought it was a pile of crap. What was so great about it, from your point of view? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Jan 27, 2010, at 12:07 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Ok...so what do you like about BeOS? -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

Seems to me that one of the bragging points about BeOS (and even moreso when you consider the dual CPU BeBox) was the multithreaded nature of the apps and OS. At the time it came out ISTR that they claimed none of the other desktop OSs did that quite as well. I can't really say one way or the other, but I do remember being impressed with it when I first played with it as well. ________________________________ From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Sent: Wed, January 27, 2010 3:25:41 PM Subject: Re: General religious wars (was Re: Editor religious wars) I like the interface, and I like the unique nature of its kernel. It feels very much like a cross between the Classic Mac OS and POSIX, and given Gassee's history, that sort of makes sense. That occupies a sweet spot for me which is why I'm so fond of Power MachTen. I have to admit I don't find it insanely useful, but that's because BeOS on the PPC suffered badly thanks to Apple, and all the BeOS and Haiku development that matters is x86. So whatever things I've wanted to use on it I've had to build myself (lynx, perl, ...) Fortunately it comes with a MetroWerks compiler, and thanks to Classilla I am *intimately* familiar with that compiler's quirks :) I put some more RAM in it (which had the strange effect of breaking SheepShaver, which couldn't handle the extra memory, I guess) and did some twiddling, and it's up to where I like it and tinker with it often. So, I guess you could say I like it because it's different and odd, yet still workably familiar. I like OS/2 for much the same reasons, although interestingly I don't know how many BeOS fans like OS/2. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters. -- Ambrose Bierce --------

On Jan 27, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Philip Pemberton wrote: Indeed. FireWire also uses the SCSI command set, as does FibreChannel and IBM's SSA. There are lots of different transport layers for SCSI that aren't called SCSI. Since this industry is filled to overflowing with people who talk without knowing what they're talking about, this has the unfortunate side effect of many people thinking that SCSI is somehow "dead". -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On Jan 28, 2010, at 11:38 AM, Ray Arachelian wrote: I'm pretty sure *all* SAS controllers can be attached to SATA drives. If I understand correctly, SAS is a superset of SATA. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

thats more of a lie. and it was not a lie. it's an unfair comparison. If you load up an amiga game today, sure, maybe it can't compete with the movie-scene cut-scenes of todays games, or 3d or whatever. but a lot of them hold their own. its a fact that a specialized chip dedicated to a task will do that task better than a general purpose cpu trying to do the same task. again, I mentioned, there is a receding line of performance gains as the general purpose cpu speed goes up, but I think it's a very long line. Babylon 5 was done entirely on amigas, that's not a small feat, so what you say isn't entirely true. the complexity is available, the ability is there, to an extent. that being said, there are c64 games that to this day look better and play better than modern games. there's just a certain look and feel to them. Dan. _________________________________________________________________

On Jan 27, 2010, at 12:47 PM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: That increase in complexity hasn't really changed the ease of programming for decentralized systems much. We've *sorta* moved back in that direction with GPUs, hardware RAID controllers, IP-offloading network controllers, etc, but they (especially the latter two) are usually only found in very high-end systems. Programming them isn't really any more difficult, and in some ways it's actually quite a bit easier. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

On 1/26/10, Jim Brain <brain at jbrain.com> wrote: Most likely. That is a slick design - saves on expensive dual-port memory. There was also only a single drive mechanism to fiddle with in the 1541. Design improvements aside, that may have helped shrink it down to a single processor. One thing I do remember is the story that some "damn connector" was in short supply in the PET era and that part of the mandate from Jack was that the next drive "better not use that". I never heard for certain which exact connector it was - could have been the IEEE-488 cable connector or the PCB connector - either way, no cables or no boards means lost sales opportunities. -ethan

On 1/26/2010 1:25 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: I doubt it. The job queue and such on the IEEE drives could only handle 1 drive at a time. According to Jim Butterfield, it was the IEEE488 24 pin "centronics" (or whatever they are called) connector. Note the PET itself didn't use the connector, opting for the simpler2x12x3.96mm connector. According to Butterfield, Belkin ran out of the IEEE cables at some point, which angered Jack to no end. He was not set up to produce cables, and he didn;t like being held up by a supplier. Jim

On 1/27/2010 8:45 AM, Philip Pemberton wrote: Most likely. I have Belkin on the brain for some reason. Jim -- Jim Brain, Brain Innovations (X) brain at jbrain.com Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times! Home: http://www.jbrain.com

On 26/01/2010 17:54, Dave Caroline wrote: True, but on an original 6502, the clock rate is only 1MHz. The 2MHz version is a 6502A :-) In fact the 6502 was part of the inspiration for the ARM chip. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York