I've talked a lot about future Amiga developments over the last few months, so it's time for a change...
As many regulars will know, I'm involved in CGI programming, Internet conferencing and electronic publishing. At work, I use a PC equipped with Windoze 95 plus various items of software needed to do my work. Everyone in the office also uses Win95 machines, though we have a Windoze NT (Not Tested?) server locally and a Sun web server running UNIX which is located off-site. Nothing special, just a pretty typical set-up for a small Internet development office.
My office machine is supposed to be around 10 times faster than the Amiga A4000/030 I use at home, though you can't tell in practice. The machine seems to enjoy swapping large amounts of memory for trivial things like pulling down a menu or changing a window, during which the machine cannot be used. Admittedly, my machine seems to be one of the worst offenders in the office, but the simple fact is that while swapping you are helpless and can't do anything until it has finished. If it happened occasionally, I could probably put up with it, but it happens a lot... often with little warning. Very frustrating. The machine crawls through operations, even loading simple applications takes an age which is particularly annoying when you need to show someone a file quickly and then have to wait several minutes for the damn thing to load.
As part of my work I regularly have to pull files off the NT server, which is actually located barely one metre from my office desk. Micros**t has thoughtfully provided NT with security features, as you would expect for any professional office system which is exposed to the outside world. When I access a file on the NT machine, it will ask me for my password and then allow me access. As a nice feature, it will remember the password and supply it again when I next access, so I don't have to waste time supplying the password every time I take a file or save an existing one on the server. However, in reality the NT machine will perform one of the following options:
On particularly bad days, the machine's user has to e-mail the files to me, though I had to actually take a floppy disk and physically copy the file to disk then transfer it to my machine. "Where do you want to go today?". Apparently to the next office desk with a disk to get the file you want...
Admittedly, Windoze NT is almost an adequate OS and I can see why Micros**t want to ditch Win95/98 and move everyone to NT, but our server uses a 233 MHz Pentium II with 48 Mb RAM and is still underpowered! If I could just understand what is soaking up all that power...
But we don't just whinge about the hardware and OS, particularly when Micros**t produce a fine range of inflexible, underpowered and overblown office software. Out of all the wonderful Office programs I use, Excel is actually moderately good, though it's quite hard to see how even everyone's favourite monopolistic crudware company can screw up a spreadsheet. Word is famous for being the program which succeeded in mangling my 10000 word dissertation with odd characters, printing several pages of work without page breaks and taking several minutes to load a simple text file. Plus it kept loading Netscrape whenever I highlighted a URL in a document and succeeded in linking several non-URL sentences to the world wide web - which even bemused our resident Word guru who was using it at the time. I've even had to reinstall Office because of several crashes. Our resident Quality assurance man bad-mouths Word on many occasions, as do most people in the office and so Micros**t software is only used when no alternative can be found. It's amazing we get any work done at all!
At home, the Amiga is a real joy to use. Okay, the Amiga isn't perfect. As an example, drag a large file from your hard drive and drop it to a floppy disk. Now repeat with another file... oh, you can't because the workbench is copying a file? *grin* But seriously, the Amiga offers a highly powerful platform - easy to use, flexible, efficient, elegant. I word process files using Wordworth, produce images using Photogenics, create web pages with MEmacs and AWeb-II, program, play games, do work and multitask in comfort. All that from a machine design which is five years old, using processor technology which is even older, running an OS which hasn't been developed in about four years.
Why is it so hard for certain other OSs to beat that? I honestly don't know why a machine, cast aside by various owners and neglected for so long can still beat machines running the latest operating systems and applications using what is pretty much state-of-the-art technology in the industry. All I do know is that I'm glad I own and use the Amiga, and that it has made it through the tough times so that it can stand up and show the industry what a real OS can do.
My thanks to those coders out there who write patches and installers for old games. It's so nice to be able to play some of my old favourites again, like Xenon-II and Tower of Babel. But what I really would like is someone to get Midwinter working on an Amiga A4000/030. During the summer I loaded it up on my dusty old A500, sighing with not-so-distant memories of the disk drive grinding away, the blurry TV screen and slow speed. It'd be great to round up the inhabitants of Midwinter Island once more, with 68030 horsepower to speed the fractal landscape along...