Re: All this fuss about Backward Compatibility

[ds_spenc@alcor.concordia.ca (Doug Spence)]

My apologies for bringing up 'ancient history' (a two-week-old post) but 
I've been extreeemely busy with school work, and I figured someone else 
would've questioned some of the contents of this post by now.

Nathan Mates (nathan@visi.com) wrote:

:    Well, it's highly ironic that these people show up, since the
: chipset that let the Amiga do its graphics was first marketed to
: *Apple*, not Commiedore.

Do you have any documentation to support this?  I had never heard of the 
Amiga chips being 'marketed' to anyone prior to some of Commodore's 
attempts to do so.

: This was after Apple had been bitten by the
: public's rejection of the Apple III, which Apple blamed in part on the
: technological prowess of the A3. [A computer that doesn't work and
: needs to be dropped on the desk is a _far_ more realistic reason, not
: to mention the trying to shaft the A2 'emulation' mode in the A3]

:    Apple chose the technologically safe alternative of making the //e
: only an incremental step over the ][+, adding in 16K more memory,
: lowercase, and support for 128K.

So does this mean the Amiga chipset was marketed to Apple somewhere 
around 1981?  That would be pretty hard for something that didn't exist 
yet, but some people DO try to sell vapour.  (Hi Toro wasn't even founded 
until 1982, methinks.  A prototype Amiga was running at a 1983 CES with 
the chips in breadboard form.)

: The chipset was sold to others, who
: developed the the Amiga line. [Apparently this chipset takes params in
: 6502/etc little-endian format, while the 68000 is big-endian, which
: caused a number of quirks for Amiga democoders.]

Um...  The chipset was NOT sold to the people who developed the Amiga.  
The chipset was designed by the engineers at Amiga Inc.  Most notable 
among them was Jay Miner, often called "the Father of the Amiga".

I can't argue with the little-endian thing, as I don't know about that.  
When I find the time, I'll check my old Amiga hardware manual.

[Stuff about Macs chopped]

: Nathan Mates
: --
: <*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
: # What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
: # Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
: # think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  -R.A. Heinlein

Sorry to yak about something that's off-topic for this newsgroup, but as 
an ex-and-current Apple II user, user of Amigas since the days of the A1000, 
and possible budding computer historian ( ;) ), I felt I had to point out 
my doubts about what had been posted.

Doug Spence
DS_SPENC@alcor.concordia.ca