Re: Happy Birthday Apple IIGS!

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

"john" <chris1234@yahoo.com> wrote:

>"Tony Kavadias" wrote in message 
>news:48f8692e$0$18428$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au...
>> On 2008-09-15 19:10:20 +1000, jon <jon@nowhere.com> said:
>>
>>> Then in March 1987, Commodore released the Amiga 500 and blew the GS 
>>> away!!
>>
>> You could never outfit an Amiga 500 with 5 MB of RAM, a 20 MB SCSI Hard 
>> Disk and a letter-quality ImageWriter LQ or LaserWriter NT printer... or a 
>> comparable third-party printer for that matter!
>
>really? bullshit! I had that setup and more in '88 on my A1000....also the 

    The Amiga 1000/500 could be upgraded to support these things, but
in a pretty inelegant and clumsy way. They had to plug into the external
expansion port, and in a "train car" fashion, one device beside the other.
Even something as simple as memory expansion beyond the built-in 512K 
RAM had to be added externally! Compare that to the IIGS, everything 
could be internally added save for floppy drives and CD-ROM.

    My brother (twice!) blew one of the custom chipsets in his Amiga 500
because he accidentally bumped and knocked loose something hooked 
into the external expansion port. And looking inside the Amiga when I've
repaired a few, I remember Commodore's manufacturing and quality 
control was fairly sub par which didn't help.

>Amiga came out in '85 waaaay before the GS

    The original Amiga came before, but not way before. The A1000 was
released July 1985, the Apple IIGS September 1986 (and while that's 
only one year later, it doe in fact pre-date the Amiga 500 and 2000 
by four months; those were the first usable Amiga's). :)

>I'm sorry but a psuedo 8/16 bit machine was no match for the Amiga...

    I'll admit, the Amiga had an edge (that's putting it lightly!) for
animation and multitasking, but otherwise there was much the
Apple IIGS had over it IMHO.

    The IIGS Finder and GUI in general made Workbench look
a child's toy by comparison. The GS's Ensoniq synthesizer ran 
circles around the 4-voice DAC in the Amiga. And its internal
expansion, via its 7 general purpose expansion slots, made it
a more opened and accessible system. It was a small thing, 
but I also preferred the fact the Apple used a two (or three) 
button analog joystick over the one button digital stick!

    Still, for all its greatness, the GS had much of its potential
wasted or untapped because Apple (and ultimately, the 3rd
party market with it) didn't support it, especially in the area of
software. I've recently got ahold of an Atari ST (which I never
really played with before now) and although it lagged behind 
the Amiga and GS in capabilities, I've been blown away by all
the software that was written for it...not just arcade ports of
games, but what they managed to write for it. I've always 
said it, but software is the life blood of the machine. What
was written for the GS that pushed it to its limited was mind
blowing, but there was far, far too little of it. That frustrated 
me, even to this day.

    Don't want to knock the Amiga, I've been playing with
an A2000 (still wish I could find a floppy drive to repair my 
A500 sigh!) and been blown away by some of the demos
and games written for it--I'm talking about even today, seeing
it in 2008! Made me think, what if Apple had originally acquired
the Amiga instead of Commodore, and gave it the Ensoniq
and IIGS GUI. Computing history would be much different
than it is now! Ah well, as someone else said, all these 
points are rather moot since both the Amiga and Apple IIGS
lost the war, and the IBM PC (of all things!) was the winner.

Mitchell Spector