earning him the hate of the years to come at the uni department. They had to compete using Word(tm), it was not a technical place. And that thing simply looked like a professional done paper the professors knew from books and conferences.
Tell me about it! I was at a technical place. And while we LaTeX on Amiga users were laughing on MS Word users about problems, we didn't even remotely suffered from: mismatching table of contents, frequent bluescreens, because a 23 pages paper with Excel tabs, and JPGs (of course not reduced in size, of course not saved frequently, of course no backups - "I have no time for that hacker BS, now!"
) brought many of those Windows PCs often over their swapping capacity limits. Doctors and profs were impressed not only by the professional book quality of our papers we delivered, but also about our very nice GNUplot graphics, in contrary to that crude Excel crap.
Which btw didn't change.
The quality of GNUplot graphs, and what [La]TeX produces is still by far better than this crap comes out of MS Office, which is by far not even remote book printing quality.
What changed are the people: They simply just don't care anymore. Even some publishers are not ashamed to sell books look like they were printed from Word directly.
And since reading (whole) books became a characteristics of a small clerisy (I didn't want to put it short by just saying "nobody reads anymore" to be not accused of 'generalization' again) only few people see it's not pure optical, but about reading efficiency.
Within three decades those wordprocessors almost killed the thousands of years old art and science of typesetting.
I had the ST. Both ST and Amiga were glorified gaming consoles and (kind of) sucked at (nearly) everything else no matter what the hardcore fans will tell you.
That's true for the A1000, A500, A600, and the A1200.
But for sure not for the A2000, A3000, and A4000.
The core difference is: The above ones came by default with tight RAM, and without a HDD. To retrofit a HDD was possible, but too expensive. In those days even a small HDD cost at least app. 60..>80% of the whole computer. And for those - as far as I remember - there has been only the choice between a tiny and a small external HDD, coming within its own case, cost more than the whole machine. While even I knew some actually used an A1200 productively with a HDD, it made more sense to buy a larger machine coming with a larger HDD directly instead.
It simply makes no sense to use any operating system without any HDD. It may technically work, but it's pretty pointless. I already experienced that on the
Schneider PC1512 I got for christmas - in the most cheapest version available:
single diskette drive, no HDD. The included
GEM desktop was practically unusable, because ~90% of all time you needed for the constantly change of diskettes (two just for GEM), and waiting for reload/swapping. I experienced the same on my single diskette drive Amiga 500:
Without a HDD any productive work cannot even remotely done efficiently.
That leaves such computers to "bare metal" software usage, only, which for almost all cases means games.
That's exactly why I mothballed my A500 and bought a A2000.
Because this not only came with more RAM (mine also had extended RAM; it was thirty years ago. I forgot, so don't nail me on this: 2 or 4 MB [could it been even 8 MB? There was some switch to be switched when booting] instead of the A500's 512kB) but above all with HDDs.
The A2000 had real SCSI. I had 5 HDDs attached to my A2000 (3 were placed externally naked on my desktop
) (also forgot, but as fas as I remember a 60MB, a 40MB, and three somewhere between 20 and 4 MB, I guess. Anyway way more than enough for those days.)
Those Amigas (A2000, A3000, A4000) were for sure by far not gaming only, and not just really useful machines, but besides the very expensive Apple machines only very few could afford, and the professional Unix machines no private person could afford at all, actually for many years pretty much the top efficient machines. Plus Amigas had the larger community than Apple (at least in Europe/Germany), so more software, more exchange, more reciprocation.
The topic of this thread is insofar not good, while you cannot compare Atari's 1024ST - which was also a very genuine piece of computer engineering indeed; especially its MIDI interface made it still usable for many musicians even years after the ST became unusable for anything else - with "Amiga", and IBM's PS/2.
Amigas need to be distinguished. While technically any software for Amigas were capable to run on either model, their RAM and HDD capacity was crucial about what could be used/done really practically, as I explained above.
You may compare the ST with the A1000, A500, A600 and the (non extended) A1200, but not with the A2000, A3000, or A4000. Those maybe compared with the PS/2, and the first Windows PCs. But that's also no good comparison.
In those days only very few Apps, and almost no proprietary software (except games) was ported to other systems. So PS/2 users - which were almost all in companies - decided first for a certain software they need to use, so for the PS/2 indirectly, since a lot of software used professionally in companies was only available for those.
While Amiga users primarily have been private computer enthusiasts, deciding first for a useful hardware they can afford, and then see what software was available.
Turn it as you like: you can compare railways with ships, and trucks, but you can also say they are uncomparable.
However, with AmigaOS 2.x and the Workbench the Amigas not only provided a somehow unixlixe OS (shell, real multitasking) but already a sophisticated GUI and DE:
(some random screenshot I picked up on the net to be as similar as my A2000's GUI looked.)
I not only
loved Directory Opus, a very powerful twin panel filemanager ("norton commander like" - you can guess one source of my main disappoints on Windows when later I had to deal with this crappy MS Windows Explorer
), wrote some C programs (gcc), and did all my writing with LaTeX on it.
I was the first student at my university presented a home made CAD drawing (MaxonCAD) for construction class, printed on my HP DJ520 (this rock solid reliable precise genuine nice piece of hardware maybe still was in use, if those ***
*** from HP wouldn't stopped production of the cartridges.)
Besides that, as I said, lots of open source software was ported to the Amiga. Not only emacs, gcc and LaTeX.
(Bram Moolenaar originally wrote vim on and for his Amiga; but back then I used emacs - on my Amiga.)
I did my very first steps on the internet with my A2000 while most others were still on typewriters and didn't even knew something like the WWW even exists: email (I forgot the client's name I used, there were several. My U was one of Germany's first universities which provided their students with email addresses, while only a small percentage had a computer of their own at home), ftp, lynx, kermit, remote login on our U's Sun Solaris stations,...
I also had my first webbrowser on the Amiga, for which my A2000 eventually became too slow.
So, sorry,
covacat, with all respect, but no,
the Amigas cannot be judged all as game consoles, only.
And it is no glorification - it was simply really nice computering.
