Mac Vs. Amiga: A New Perspective
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It was only because Apple managed to attract Adobe and some of the other early developers of commercial DTP, illustration and other graphics applications to the Mac that the system was at all successful. Due to the WIMP based OS, which we all know they copied from Xerox, it allowed such applications to be intuitive for the first time.
The Amiga was far more advanced and could of handled anything like the Adobe applications, Freehand or QuarkXpress better than the Macs of the time, but due to extremely bad marketing decisions for the original A1000 this all failed to happen, and the big named design developers completely disregarded the Amiga on the whole, and only really noticed it as an Animation tool in the beginning.
Any good business will know that business customers will always be worth much more than home users, regardless of the numbers. Commodore completely aimed most of their market at the home user, which made the Amiga appear less capable and not such a serious machine compared to the Mac. Businesses therefore avoided it without question.
If only Commodore had aimed the Amiga at the same business markets as the Mac at the very beginning, Adobe Photoshop might well have ended up an Amiga application, and the Amiga might have been as prolific in design studios and the DTP marketplace as the Mac was. And the Amiga might have weathered the storm and still be here in a current form today.
As always, it was the bad marketing decisions of Commodore that failed.
It was only because Apple managed to attract Adobe and some of the other early developers of commercial DTP, illustration and other graphics applications to the Mac that the system was at all successful. Due to the WIMP based OS, which we all know they copied from Xerox, it allowed such applications to be intuitive for the first time.
The Amiga was far more advanced and could of handled anything like the Adobe applications, Freehand or QuarkXpress better than the Macs of the time, but due to extremely bad marketing decisions for the original A1000 this all failed to happen, and the big named design developers completely disregarded the Amiga on the whole, and only really noticed it as an Animation tool in the beginning.
Any good business will know that business customers will always be worth much more than home users, regardless of the numbers. Commodore completely aimed most of their market at the home user, which made the Amiga appear less capable and not such a serious machine compared to the Mac. Businesses therefore avoided it without question.
If only Commodore had aimed the Amiga at the same business markets as the Mac at the very beginning, Adobe Photoshop might well have ended up an Amiga application, and the Amiga might have been as prolific in design studios and the DTP marketplace as the Mac was. And the Amiga might have weathered the storm and still be here in a current form today.
As always, it was the bad marketing decisions of Commodore that failed.
commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
Okay, this accusation gets tossed around a lot, but it's far from the truth. It's true that Finder designer Bruce Horn (a former Xerox alum) did of course use ideas from his time at PARC when creating the Mac user interface, but claiming that it was "copied from Xerox" because it borrowed some of the essential elements of a GUI is ignoring the fact that the huge majority of the Mac's UI innovation was in adapting the GUI into a full-fledged operating system.
The Xerox Alto used its GUI as an interface into the Smalltalk programming language, not as an interface for an OS; you can see a screenshot here. Claiming that this is what Mac OS was "copied" from is like claiming that MS-DOS was "copied" from, say, Apple Integer BASIC because they both use a keyboard-input, command-line interface. It's like claiming that The Dark Side Of The Moon is a rip-off of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band because the Beatles invented the idea of a concept album before Pink Floyd.
Bruce Horn actually wrote a full essay about this misconception; I highly recommend it. You can read it here.
What about the stories about Apple visiting the Xerox offices where they saw and used the Alto, and copied the ideas? I've seen documentaries that detail all of this and interviewed employees from both sides.
BTW, bad example using MS-DOS, because Microsoft/Bill Gates did in fact steal that too! They put in a bid to provide an OS for consideration, to be used in the new IBM PC. But they only had a few days, which was not long enough to write a whole new OS, so instead they stole the whole commandline OS and just renamed it to get the contract to write the OS for the IBM PC.
BTW, bad example using MS-DOS, because Microsoft/Bill Gates did in fact steal that too! They put in a bid to provide an OS for consideration, to be used in the new IBM PC. But they only had a few days, which was not long enough to write a whole new OS, so instead they stole the whole commandline OS and just renamed it to get the contract to write the OS for the IBM PC.
commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
As noted in the essay I linked: yes, Steve Jobs and some Lisa team members did visit PARC and got a look at the Alto. They borrowed some of the ideas for the then-current version of the Lisa software. Bruce Horn joined the Mac team from Xerox and began to implement the Finder, using his experience at PARC as inspiration, but making a lot of his own innovations in adapting it to a proper OS rather than a glorified programming environment. The Lisa team got a look at his interface, said "okay, we'll do that!" and adapted much of it into the Lisa Filer. Neither of the two bear much resemblance to the Alto Smalltalk interface beyond the essential GUI elements (mouse, menus, windows.)
Depends on what you're referring to. You're right in that MS-DOS was essentially a CP/M workalike, but Microsoft wasn't really the one doing the stealing, at least in that instance. They got the contract from IBM to provide an OS for the PC and saved time and effort by buying the rights to 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, an already-existing OS for 8086-based hobbyist computers that had been designed to be easy for CP/M programmers to adapt to, and adapting it to the PC hardware. Microsoft's done a lot of things that neither I nor anyone else will defend (such as the instance of actual interface theft when they cranked out Windows 1.0 after being seeded with Mac prototypes as a third-party developer,) but this was one occasion where they really weren't being particularily underhanded.
Regardless, my point wasn't whether or not MS-DOS was wholly original; my point was that it's silly to say that one piece of software is a wholesale ripoff of another because it borrows some of the basic UI conventions.
M$ didn't technically buy the rights to the software until after they had reworked it, presented it to IBM and got the commission though. So it was all very underhanded. But you have to give them credit for ingenuity.
As for Apple. You could argue that the work Bruce Horn did whilst employed by PARC on the Alto was the intellectual property of PARC and Xerox, and therefore his "copying" of these ideas was illegal. Without which the WIMP system wouldn't have been developed further. Something that ironically, and you pointed out above, M$ got into trouble for by copying the Mac OS WIMP environment for Windows 1.
It'ss funny how someone can get away with copying the ideas from one company, taking the intellectual properties as a previous employee and developing them, but when another then tries to do the same to them they don't like it and sue. Double standards if ever I saw them.
As for Apple. You could argue that the work Bruce Horn did whilst employed by PARC on the Alto was the intellectual property of PARC and Xerox, and therefore his "copying" of these ideas was illegal. Without which the WIMP system wouldn't have been developed further. Something that ironically, and you pointed out above, M$ got into trouble for by copying the Mac OS WIMP environment for Windows 1.
It'ss funny how someone can get away with copying the ideas from one company, taking the intellectual properties as a previous employee and developing them, but when another then tries to do the same to them they don't like it and sue. Double standards if ever I saw them.
commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
And I would argue that companies being able to claim their employees' ideas as their own intellectual property is a travesty of IP law that still hasn't been properly addressed.
But A. my whole point was that the difference between the two was that the Mac team actually made many of their own innovations while borrowing some basic ideas from PARC, whereas Microsoft actually did a blatant, wholesale (albeit poor) copying of the Mac interface with Windows, and B. I never said I think that it should have been illegal, and I've never felt that Apple's lawsuits against imitators were justified; I just think it was cheap and underhanded on Microsoft's part.
I'm not going to defend everything Apple has done in this regard; my only point was that the Mac interface was inspired by the Xerox Alto, not copied from it.
We can at least agree that they were all as bad at each other in the beginning, and in fact all companies developing OSs were guilty of similar at the time because it was all still developing at such a fast rate.
Its logical that this is the case. The only productivity of a company comes from its current employees. If what they develop isn't viewed as intellectual property for that company then what is the company paying that employee to do? They pay for the time of that employee to develop things for that company and so everything they produce will be their property as the employee agreed to it in their contract. It is the same for every industry and has to be, or an employee leaving could close a company down over night if they could take all their work with them and retain rights to it.
Its logical that this is the case. The only productivity of a company comes from its current employees. If what they develop isn't viewed as intellectual property for that company then what is the company paying that employee to do? They pay for the time of that employee to develop things for that company and so everything they produce will be their property as the employee agreed to it in their contract. It is the same for every industry and has to be, or an employee leaving could close a company down over night if they could take all their work with them and retain rights to it.
MAC's were always into DTP, even back in the Amiga days. Much so thesedays, where most book Publishers still use MAC's for their DTP work.
There is no real new perspective comparing MAC's to Amigas thesedays, as the MAC uses Intel DUO CPU's which just smoke Amiga in every way.
However, if you all go back to the roots, it's all summed up like this from the early eighties onwards, & really is no different today.
MAC's = DTP
IBM = Sage & Word processing
Atari = Sound
Amiga = Graphics + DTP + Word processing + Sound with added hardware
Amiga isn't even in the game thesedays other than a bit of a retro fun.
Don't forget to pay tribute to the Amiga for Big Box films such as Jurrasic Park, Babylon 5 & deep Seaquest DSV etc. Now when you consider these films were made long after demise of C= themselves, nothing in the industry could achieve the smooth fps of the Amiga at the time.
If you can't see PinBall Fantasies looks terrible under any Emulation because of the incapability to smooth scroll, then you don't fully understand & appreciate where I'm coming from RE the Amiga & we haven't even discussed true pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Definitely Amiga FTW.
Kin
There is no real new perspective comparing MAC's to Amigas thesedays, as the MAC uses Intel DUO CPU's which just smoke Amiga in every way.
However, if you all go back to the roots, it's all summed up like this from the early eighties onwards, & really is no different today.
MAC's = DTP
IBM = Sage & Word processing
Atari = Sound
Amiga = Graphics + DTP + Word processing + Sound with added hardware
Amiga isn't even in the game thesedays other than a bit of a retro fun.
Don't forget to pay tribute to the Amiga for Big Box films such as Jurrasic Park, Babylon 5 & deep Seaquest DSV etc. Now when you consider these films were made long after demise of C= themselves, nothing in the industry could achieve the smooth fps of the Amiga at the time.
If you can't see PinBall Fantasies looks terrible under any Emulation because of the incapability to smooth scroll, then you don't fully understand & appreciate where I'm coming from RE the Amiga & we haven't even discussed true pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Definitely Amiga FTW.
Kin
@Hell_Labs. LMAO! true mac fan justification.
Gee Three fo' lyfe! *throws up gang sign*
True computer nerd justification. You know I used to have my PC in a broken eMachines case, front plastic smashed off, chassis too warped to put the door or panels back on. My DVD-RW was propped up on a stack of CDs, and you had to be careful not to pull out the IDE cable when you sat down. Surely, it doesn't matter how well built your computer is. It's just fine to have a Ghettoputer. Then again, we're computer nerds. i.e the unwashed fat people that badly need a shave and don't go out much. What would we know.
disk drive? nonstandard. GPU? chips on it are standard, nothing else. You do realise parts have to be designed by someone, right? The factory noesn't have a "make a newer model" button.
Makes a hell of a difference. Computers work better if they haven't fell apart after a couple of years, and with an iMac I don't have to crawl underneath the desk and pull a Tower case out to plug in a cable.
Also, say I want to work downstairs with it, know what I do? Unplug power cable, wrap mouse round keyboard, carry downstairs. PC?
unplug phone,
printer,
ethernet,
vga cable,
monitor power cable,
mouse,
keyboard,
speakers,
speaker power cable,
tower power cable.
Then I wrap the keyboard and mouse up, then the speakers, take them down, come back up, lug the monitor down, come back up, grab huge ass tin box, attempt stairs without falling arse over tit, put on kitchen table, break table from weight of huge ass box and monitor, cry.
That's weird, because my iMacs PSU board has an apple logo and copyright date on it, no other manufacturer notes, and so does the DVD drive. Both use nonstandard connectors.
Err, so does every other brand of computer. Manufacturing is not designing.
You don't even bother researching the things you claim.
Design is a good thing. Having a computer that doesn't use up 1.5 foot square on the desk alone, then 1.5x0.3x2 feet on the ground is a good thing. PCs are a huge pain in the arse.
I love it when people get so wound up they have to dissect a post to try and justify their arguments. BTW, who cares if it lasts more than 2 years. By that time Apple will have released the next over priced version of OSX and the iMac will be out of date and will need to be replaced completely to run it.
And why would any sensible person be moving a computer from their office/study to the kitchen? That is what laptops are for!
You not heard of an "all in one" PC?
SkydivinGirl
Retro Girl
OK everyone, I think this thread has served its purpose and has become a bit of a troll fest. Therefore, I'm going to close it. I'll let one of the other mods re-open it if they think this is not the right decision.
Thanks!
Heather
Thanks!
Heather
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