Actually, for once that _wasn't_ really a rant against Apple, merely a
prediction that forces not entirely within their control will compel them
to stop making hardware. That being said, however...
> There is nothing like a former Apple lover scorned
Me? Nah :) I didn't like them much even when they worked properly.
> (why don't you have
> similar venom for Commadore?)
Good lord, nothing but nothing in the history of computing ever has or
ever will approach the sheer paint-blistering rage that Amiga users have
(or had, back when it mattered) for Commodore. Again, see Usenet,
1993-94. Apple merely took a decent product and messed it up slowly.
Commodore took a better product (sidebar: whether the 3-year old A4000 in
front of me is better than anything produced by Apple to date is
controversial, although I would insist that it is; but it shouldn't be
remotely controversial that the A1000 circa 1985 beat the technological
pants off Mac circa 1984 both hardware and software-wise, even if it had
the butt-ugliest desktop in Christendom) and abused it horrendously, again
and again, for reasons that cannot be fully explained even by greed. And
they worked very hard to screw over probably the most dedicated userbase
that any platform ever had (some would call it "cultish and embarassing"
[I enjoyed Dvorak's observation that the remaining Mac userbase, now that
a similar siege mentality has infected that platform, is becoming shrill
and irriating in precisely the way that us Amiga users always were --
sending hate mail to computer magazines at the drop of a hat, etc.]). And
they opposed and demoralized a fantastic bunch of engineers, including the
late, sainted Jay Miner of Atari 2600/400/800 design fame, engineers who
worked unpaid hours, sleeping under tables and building over company specs
against direct orders (there is some famous story about some component
necessary for preemptive multitasking costing $5/unit, so management
decided it was a useless expense; the engineers put it in anyway, thus
putting the machine 12 years ahead of the Mac and counting). And they
screwed over their dealer network. And they screwed over their
developers, even the developers with religious levels of devotion to the
platform. And on and on, year after idiotic year.
No, Apple pales by comparison on any axis of stupidity, but anti-Commodore
venom displayed in public just looks weird (see above) since most of the
history in question was below the radar of mainstream computing. It's one
of those "you had to be there" things. Also, it's a little bit moot now.
(Sidebar 2: although I note, via email still drifting into my old U of
Manitoba account, that the rights to the Amiga have changed hands yet
again, with the previous German owners selling them for a healthy $30
million (having paid $7 mil last year) to some little American startup
apparently staffed by some of those fanatical Amiga engineers from the old
days. And I haven't checked it out yet, but there's _still_ an Amiga
store here in town that seems to contain new software. The endgame of a
platform's death can evidently be very, very long, which should be of some
comfort to Mac users.)
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu