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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 4:37:27
#161 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@Seer

Quote:

The Pios 1 was made back around 1997, the market was different then, a far better time to get a PPC Amiga off the ground then 2006. Dont really know all the details as to why the Pios never came to be

Actually, PIOS was founded in May of 1996, and the PIOS One was well along by January 1997. At that time, it was based loosely on the PReP architecture plus my own CPU slot design, and targeted mainly at running BeOS and perhaps Linux.

While at the Be DevCon in January, we met with Apple, and they convinced both me and Domeyer (CEO) that we wanted to support CHRP and, by extension, run MacOS. This actually meshed well with the company's (PIOS at that time) business of selling our own Mac Clones (we used UMAX motherboards, which gave us the license, and designed our own CPU cards... Thomas Rudloff did those cards).

We wasted lots of time on the redesign for Mac compatibility, which included a mandatory system glue chip you essentially couldn't get. When we started, TI was supposedly going to make it, but they backed out, and we were left with shakey supplies of prototype chips from VSLI Technology, in a different pinout. We did an upgradeable single CPU board and a 4x PPC604-compatible multiprocessor board, all of which would have been very interesting in a large enough market. Once we lost MacOS, though, the company judged the market too small to support the product. I wasn't even slightly happy about it, and it wasn't the first time Stefan just pulled the plug on me over a product that was "so close". But in retrospect, I can't say they were wrong.

Quote:

but IIRC around the time BeOS made the switch from PPC to X86 (not related but interesting to note).


Actually, it was directly related.

Be weren't really interested in making hardware (despite Joe Palmer's excellent designs), they did it for development purposes, to deliver SMP systems to end users. By the time they were getting out of the BeBox business, there were the PowerMacs with SMP cards from various 3rd parties. Only, Apple didn't document their hardware for 3rd party OS support. Be had worked with Power Computing on the port of BeOS to the PPC-Generation 2 machines. Without that support, Be had no offiical way to support Mac hardware anymore.

Meanwhile, SMP PCs were becoming commodity systems. And of course, Intel came along and, rather than fighting ports, provided support, tech people, perhaps even cash.

Be did the right thing, then. The reasons Be failed had nothing to do with moving to x86; in fact, they would have failed much earlier without the x86 port. But it had much to do with the simple fact that OSs, other than Windows, had become free... hard, if all you do is sell an OS. And as well, that Be totally switched gears, right on the verge of some real success: much of the music software industry was in the process of supporting Be. That only happened with the move to x86. Lots of companies were waiting for the Rev5 release, which revamped the way the audio server worked and added support for multichannel audio devices. Be basically pulled the plug on desktop BeOS first, so much of this stuff never made it out.

That doesn't say they would have survived if they kept to BeOS rather than BeIA. Having done device stuff for years by then, I was of the opinion that BeIA would be a disaster for them... they really didn't get that market. Sadly, I wasn't exactly wrong.

Quote:

Back then, a PPC Amiga would have a larger following and had to attract less "old users" back to the Amiga then in the present day.

In the late 90s, it was still "writing on the wall" that the PowerPC would power (sic) a whole industry of CHRP machines. We all believed it; why wouldn't we -- Apple had been behind PReP, found it wanting, changed around to CHRP. They were 110% behind it, at least when we met with them. Of course, Jobs was the wildcard here -- he would rather have 100% of a 6%-market share (about what the Mac was back then) than a questionable share of a 25%+ market in a few years. Of course, it didn't help that everyone else's Mac "Clones" were faster than Apple's ... PIOS/Metabox actually shipped the first 300MHz systems from any manufacturer, in the older architecture. The new Motorolas were the fastest "Mac" at Apple. And who would have guessed both Motorola and IBM had really, really stupid lawyers, allowing Apple to pull that crap.

After that, the PPC made no sense... it has a little momentum, but its demise on the desktop was inevitable. So there's not just a change, but a schism, between decisions made with 1996/early 1997 knowledge and decisions you'd make about CPUs after August 1997.

At Commodore... personally, I liked MIPS. Ed Helper like PA-RISC. I was, near the end, starting to believe that PowerPC would be the best RISC choice. My new architecture was CPU-independent; I expected to start out with 68K modules and upgrade to RISC once the OS was ported. Sure I was optimistic about Commodore surviving; if I wasn't, I would have taken up Dave and RJ's offer to work at 3DO

-Dave

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syrtran 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 5:07:13
#162 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 27-Apr-2003
Posts: 835
From: Farther upstate than Upstate NY

@umisef

Quote:
Uh, I think you got your timeline wrong.


I wasn't making a timeline, rather it's about a single point in time - the point that Hyperion decided to make OS4 for a new processor (i.e. not 68K). I was pointing out that there were only two "dual-ISA" options, yours, and Phase 5/DCEs. My -only- point was that PPC was really their only option -at that time-.

Actually, as your timeline points out, they could have -started- using Amithlon to port it to x86, but the subsequent public firefight and your "take-down" order(*) would have made it very difficult for them to continue on that path.

And, as far as
Quote:
Because, well, unlike Amithlon, the dual-processor cards can't easily (or deity forbid, transparently) switch between running PPC code and 68k code.

is concerned, you point out in the very next sentence
Quote:
The closest thing to a layer allowing something remotely like it is WarpOS...

that it -is- possible to switch between the two processors, albeit with "hacks". We, as a community, were eventually subjected to alpha OS4 demos on CS-PPC 4000s that -were- running mixed code.


(*) I don't blame you for the "Cease and Desist". As a professional programmer (not in the Amiga market), and as a new (at that time) owner of Amithlon/OS XL (bought before the C&D), I felt much sympathy for your plight. I even removed the QNX partition I had added to my WinXP machine and refuse, to this day, to install OS XL anywhere else. Amithlon was (and is) a wonderful piece of engineering and deserved -much- better treatment from "other" parties.

_________________
Tony T.

People who generalize are always wrong.


1989 - 500 / 1991 - 3000 / 1997 - Genesis Flyer 1200T / 2003 - A1XE

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 5:20:23
#163 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@Hitback

Quote:

Thanks for poniting that out It has always been my opinion that Apple is shooting its self in the foot by moving to X86. Why? Lets face it the Mac is a fashion statement it is for the guy and Gal that wants to say look how stylish my Mac is compared to your PC even thought your PC has the same software and more running at twice the speed. Why would I bother with a MacBook Pro when I can pick up a Dell Inspirion for about 1200.00 loaded with goodies and save about $800.00.
[quote]
You probably wouldn't. I know I wouldn't. But that's got zero to do with the CPU in the Mac, and everything to do with Apple and the silliness of buying a fashion statement. The x86 only makes this more profitable for Apple, since they can buy cheaper parts that go much faster, and they don't have to pay all the development money to build them. No more strugging to keep up, no more paying for CPU development, etc.

Meanwhile, that glitzy Mac is still a glitzy Mac. The people who bought it last year will buy a new one this year in all likelihood; better still if it's performance competitive with the PC. Maybe some people who wouldn't by a Mac will now consider it, since it can run Windows.

[quote]
Apple has to do some very clever marketing if it wants to compete with the LIkes OF DELL, HP, Levon(IBM), Sony and Toshiba. It is a crowed intel market place to walked into and I can't see them coming out alive.

Apple has already been in competition with them. And losing customers every year. I don't why this myth that a different CPU makes you somehow not in competition ever got started -- it has never been borne out in reality. Never. This will shore up Apple's computer business. If it's not enough, they'll adapt or leave it, with is just what they should do.

Quote:

Lets face it the only thing that has kept this company aflot is its IPOD!!

Last quarter, Apple's iPod was about 40% of their sales. The Mac was the rest, including software. Perhaps you don't know Apple that well, but they're basically supplying multimedia software in every area for MacOS X: Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Shake, Logic Audio, Soundtrack Pro, Aperature, etc. These are $500-$1000+ applications; they're in competition here with Adobe, Avid, Cakewalk, Boris, Sony, etc.

Quote:

It would not suprise me if they ditch/sell their whole PC market division to another chinese (like IBM) maker to concentrate on portable devices like the IPOD.

They will, if (as with IBM) their business becomes unprofitable. But will it? Sony still gets a huge premium on their PCs and laptops, versus the commodity stuff Dell and Gateway sell. Apple has this, and OS X (which isn't likely getting licensed for other PCs as long as Apple thinks it sells hardware).

The iPod business isn't perfectly safe, either. Most of the music companies licensing to Apple are not happy with Apple's fixed pricing model, and may well drop the iTunes Store if Apple doesn't come around to their pricing models. As well, if they every stop blaming pirates for all of their sales losses, they may actually realize that legal downloads are partially responsible -- when albums have only one or two decent songs on them, paying $1.98 on iTunes may be far preferable to paying $15.98 at Sam Goody.

-Dave

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Legion 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 5:32:56
#164 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 21-Apr-2003
Posts: 820
From: Fargo, ND, USA

@hazydave

Thanks for sharing your insight and giving us a little perspective here. I was about to launch into a tirade about dead-ends, x86, PA-RiSC, etc... but your comments have vindicated me somewhat.

That said, I think we're forgetting why we even have ANY hardware to begin with: x86 is a) too hot, and b) uses too much juice. Eyetech were trying to market a low power consumption linux board to the chinese, who are going face some serious issues regarding power usage in the near future.

We were very, very lucky. We were "piggybacked" onto this PPC/Linux hardware. That's not speculation, its fact. My sincerest thanks to Alan for putting up the capital.

Regardless, we're still at the same place, as users, which means

1) We'd all like faster hardware
2) We'd all like more Apps.
3) We'd all like to pay less

My suggestion? BUY. EVANGELIZE. With more dollars comes more/cheaper hardware and apps. It's all we have left right now.

_________________
...wait... what?

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 6:10:57
#165 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@Atheist

Quote:

Far be it for me to question a Legend, but, endianess and therefore total lack of backward compatability? Or, at least, an extreme penalty, CPU cycles wise?

There's no compatibility issue. For existing code, you're emulating a machine running 500x faster than any stock Amiga. No problems. For new code, you have to port it anyway. If they did a nice job on the new OS, you'd have a HAL, which deals with endianness easily enough. I mean, MICROSOFT did this -- you can recompile virtually any properly written Windows NT application, even device drivers, and they "just work" (that's an actual quote from a friend of mine who wrote such drivers). This is why NT was at one time on PPC, x86, Alpha, and MIPS. The business model failed (Microsoft was greedy, and did nothing to promote ports to other OSs), but the tech was sound. And the HAL was like 50K of code.

This was planned for AmigaOS at Amiga Technologies. It eliminates porting issues. You have much the same, though not as elegant, with Linux -- most code runs on many different platforms, adjusting as necessary to endianness.

Quote:

The x86 CPU is supposed to be getting way too complicated for it's own good, too, right?

Actually, no. First of all, there isn't "the x86 CPU", there are several: Pentium 4, Pentium Xeon, Pentium M, Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Turion 64, Operton, VIA C3, Transmeta T6000, etc. Ok, Transmeta's not done so well...

Anyway, the rate at which chip technology has advanced has exceeded the problems with complexity -- that's why the x86 has won, it's the one architecture with enough support to keep making interesting advances in architecture, while holding the price of the chips down. I mean, look at AMD -- going to 64-bit for them was a cost reduction! Keep in mind, every x86 is, internally, a RISC design, has been since NexGen first did this (ok, Transmeta used a real VLIW chip and software rather than hardware code translation). The basic lesson here: who cares so much about the ISA? The whole CPU section in an increasingly tiny bit of the chip, compared to cashes -- thus the move to multicore chips.

Quote:

I think that increases in the speed of the RISC PPC CPUs will continue, now that the sales will go through the roof, thanks to xbukz 360 and PS3 and Nintendo's Revolution... The PS2 sold over 100 million units, right?


Well, sure, that'll remain good for IBM. The PPC is winning on game machines simply because the core IBM uses (which isn't a PPC970 or even a "G4", but something simpler) is small and IBM's really happy to do custom work when there's a potential of 10-100 million units per year, and of course, it's a simple chip.

In the Xbox case, it's actually three copies of a simple chip, each of which is two-way multithreaded, but doesn't do out-of-order execution, or various other modern desktop things.

In the case of the Cell processor in the PS3, that's one single-threaded simple PPC (the PPE) in there, and eight specialized, very simple, non-PowerPC single-precision vector processors (the SPEs).

I haven't heard any details on Nintendo's new CPU. Of course, they're the only ones already using an IBM CPU in their current game machine.

-Dave

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Maczilla 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 6:18:41
#166 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 19-Oct-2003
Posts: 206
From: USA

@polka.
Actually, I have heard rumblings about some
incompatibilities between some Mac OS file
system (HFS and HFS+) and the new versions
used on the Intel Macs. I'm not sure about
the specifics, but I read about something
along the lines of having an external FW or
USB device formatted with PPC OSX (10.4)
system not being able to boot up the new
Mactel machines (or perhap it's the other
way around or some other permutation).
This might turn out to be one very inconvenient
way to find out which family of CPUs resides
inside your Mac.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 6:28:36
#167 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

* the x86 is way more common it makes it easier to pirate the OS whit out paying for it


Probably. However, I could make a car that won't work on today's roads, thus making it far more difficult to steal. But that's simply punishing my customers (or ensuring I won't have any) for the chance of piracy. Delivering "yesterday's hardware today" is also not acceptable, and certainly not in the name of piracy.

Apple clearly has plans to prevent MacOS X from running on "regular" PCs. Whether they do this cleverly, or just make it illegal (which might actually boost their market -- you run MacOS X on your PC at home with hacks, but if you want it at work, or maybe just want it to work better in the future, you buy a Mac).

Quote:

* Other systems like BeOS, Zeta and QNX is not big success on x86 just by running on the x86 at end of the day;

Well, BeOS was dramatically more successful, because of x86 support, than it had been on the Mac. It wasn't until the x86 port that they started to get established professional developers, particularly in the music industry, porting to the OS.

Zeta's sold over 100,000 copies, because it runs on commodity hardware. How many copies of PowerPC AmigaOS have sold? Do you have any belief they'll sell 100,000? 10,000?

As for QNX, they flirted with Amiga for awhile, but QNX isn't sold as a desktop OS, it's sold, on several processors, for embedded use. It just so happens that x86 has been growing in popularity for certain classes of embedded use recently -- in a large part because it's just cheap. For that market, all you care about is the cheapest CPU that'll do the job you're after.

Quote:

what make an os depends on what programs you can use, not only boot speed, amigaos covers a minimum thanks to it's legacy support.

What sells a desktop OS are the applications, sure. What sells the applications is the installed base of users. You can hedge this by doing your own applications, as Apple does, but that raises the barriers to entry for 3rd party developers.

Quote:

* The AROS projects shows what AMIGOS4 will look like on the x86 more or less, no direct support, no applications = no users.

That's not even remotely what you'd see with a supported and MARKETED OS on the x86. A tiny open source project with no one behind it doesn't get much support, period. The support initially has to come from the backers of the project, whether it's commerical or open source. That's true of AmigaOS 4/AOne as much as it any other project.

Quote:

* Amitalon + AmigaOSXL has proven that user base in not interested in yet an other AmigaOS emulated on top of some thing else.

I guess you don't have the first clue about Amithlon -- it proved that the user base had rabid interest in the AmigaOS emulated low-level on a PC. The bottom line: the best performing Amiga ever made, period. The reason Amithlon failed is that it got embroiled in a silly legal battle, forcing it off the market. If that hadn't happened, it would have done very, very well. Another example is Amiga Forever.

Quote:

* It's way better for Hyperion to spend there time expanding what AmigaOS can do then port it over to yet a different type of CPU that, has little in common whit the 680x0 or PowerUP CPU cards used.

The PowerUP cards had nothing to do with the 68K, either. The choice today, sure, they have a PPC OS that's been Real Soon Now for a long, long time. They shouldn't rush out and change direction, but they shouldn't have taken that direction in the first place -- it was as obvious back in 2001 or whenever as it is today that PPC was not the answer, and never would be.

It's silly to make bad technical decisions based on some weird "religion" -- don't know what else you can call it.

-Dave

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 7:15:25
#168 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@nzv58l

Quote:

I really do not think that the Amiga needs to be on x86 just to be cheap. I think there are other ways.

You're wrong, it does. At least if it's desktop-class performance you're after. I can make you a cheap motherboard with an embedded ARM or something that could run AmigaOS (ported) and sell for cheap, but than you're not really a personal computer. Maybe a PDA or something.

Quote:

I sort of get the feeling that most that are pro x86 think that if OS4 were ported they could use their own PC to run it. Then when they ran into problems it didn't work then there would be lots of noise about it doesn't work.

Of course you could use your own PC -- maybe. They would do what actually worked very well for Be: they list the hardware they're supporting, and encourage additional driver development. Support a baseline PC (you're not really supporting a PC model, you're supporting, at worst, a baseline chipset, such as the Intel chipset that goes into all those $200 PCs). You're going to find some things that don't run, but that's no less true about most any PCI card you plug into an A-One, eh?

Quote:

There should be two models of Amiga hardware. One a stripped down board with only functional components and the cheapest/most available PowerPC on it. Price it under $200 and thats a sellable machine.


A $200 motherboard might sell, though you're talking about a CPU level that's well below anything sold in a PC for 5+ years. And clearly, they have not been able to make a PPC machine that cheap. Period. Meanwhile, I can buy a PClone for about $200 on a good sale, and that includes hard drive, power supply, case, memory, Windows, etc.

Quote:

The other Amiga hardware should be a bells and whistles. Highest performance Power PC if it costs 4,000 to put together so be it.

That's insane -- who's going to spend $4,000? Getting them to spend $800 in any quantity is going to be difficult. Would you really send $4,000 to a company you don't have any history with, that has no reputation in the industry, etc? Particularly for what's essentially a toy -- this machine won't do much real, useful work for awhile... certainly nothing that $200 PC can't do.

Quote:

That way when you talk to the rest of the tech world, when questions about price occure the first option is the one that is mentioned. When you talk performance the second model is mentioned. Really the second option model would be sold in fewer numbers, but it's there mainly for bragging rights.

But even at $4,000, there's no bragging rights -- there will still be faster PCs. Apple never delivered a G5 that wasn't bested by some PC configuration somewhere (not necessarily mainstream machines, but maybe from a company like Boxx), even when they were rigging the benchmarks. IBM simply didn't make as fast enough CPU. And no one involved had the cashish for building the kind of custom chips Apple built to get as far as they did compared to the x86 machines (system interface chips, memory controllers, AGP and PCI-X interface, etc). None of that's available off-the-shelf for PPC.

Quote:

If C= didn't go belly up, it's course would have had to have been similar to stay alive. Custom chips on the board were a good solution for the older processors, but for the newer more powerful processors it no longer makes sense.

Well, I know exactly what Commodore would have, since I was designing it. There's "custom chip" and there's "custom chip". The era of custom graphics chips was ending when C= was failing. If you look at the PC business around 1990, there were lots of companies doing graphics chips, including Apple, Compaq, and other PC vendors, as well as many other graphics chip companies. By 2000, there were no systems companies making their own graphics in the PC market, and far fewer graphics chip companies. That's because, much as with CPUs, graphics chips became too big a problem for a company doing captive development. If you're competing with ATi or nVidia, you better sell as many chips, or you won't be able to compete for long. Same problem with x86 vs. PPC or MIPS or Alpha or other RISCs.

There was NOTHING wrong, technologically, with the concept of RISC. Every x86 chip uses most of those design ideas today. The problem was, if I have 100x the sales, I can easily spend 2x or 3x or whatever needed to keep my CPU ahead of yours. CPU development isn't just about architecture, but chip technology and process. Intel has had some of the best chip fabs, and some of the best process tweaks, since back in the '486 days (about the time they really started to pull ahead of the 68K). AMD copied them, got more aggressive on new tech (copper interconnects, SOI, strained silicon, etc) and also more aggressive on architecture... curiously, also more aggressive on architecture than most of the RISC people, too. This is what's made the x86 chip world interesting, and RISC, or what's left of it, kind of a yawn... RISC still rules the very high end, and very low end. For example, I'm using 16-bit RISC chips in my company (http:///www.nomadio.net) products. There are tons of choices in low to medium cost RISC chips, in all sorts of areas. Intel and AMD both sell them, for low-end stuff (Intel with ARM, AMD with MIPS).

Quote:

If x86 was the answer, then why is it that AROS is not more popular?

(1) Do you have any evidence AROS is less popular than, say, AmigaOS 4 on PowerPC?

(2) AROS isn't a commercial project: there's no one to push it, to develop apps for it, etc. Last I heard, it's also not ready to replace AmigaOS, as an end-user OS.

Quote:

I agree that we can not just target the ex-Amigans for a potential user base. I believe the state we are in right now is to get ex-Amigans back to help with the work that needs to be done on some of the more critticle applications that need to be developed.

And how do you interest ex-Amigans? These are people who, largely, were attracted to the hottest, maddest hardware and OS on the planet at the time. Who says they aren't still? Even neglecting applications for the moment (because you pretty much have to... I'll be finishing a video later tonight, I couldn't do that on ANYTHING called Amiga, even if I wanted to), what's compelling about any of this new stuff? What's going to ignite their passions? I totally understand the whole nostalgia thing; I spoke at the Commodore Expo in Chicago last summer, had a blast, and I not doubts about why these guys are C64 or C128 fans. But really, an A-One isn't any more "Amiga" than my TiVo... I mean, no place for nostaliga there. If you wanted CPU-nostalgia, you'd put a 68K in it.

Quote:

As far as the remarks about the current owners of Amiga don't know business. All I have to say is that you not only have to know business, but you have to know how to be a success at it.

Uh... that's the same thing. If you know business, you at least can be successful at it. If you don't know it, you can dot all the i's and cross all the t's, but you won't be successful.

Quote:

The old C= didn't do this for Amiga, so why should we listen to someone who failed, I would rather take the advice of someone who was a success.

You should take the advice of someone who succeeded. How about Steve Jobs He's saying "x86" now that he's got his ports done.

As for Commodore, they were moderately successful with the Amiga for a 6-8 years, and they died largely through upper level mismanagement. The US wasn't a good example, but in Germany, the UK, and elsewhere, there were plenty of people who knew how to sell Amigas, and they did dramatically more sales than anyone involved in any aspect of post Commodore Amigaisms.

As for "rather take the advice of someone who was a success", did you have someone in mind? Every company's successful to some extent until it fails, simply because it hasn't yet failed. But what company in the Amiga sphere can you point to and say, today, "they're very successful".

As well, I hope you judge me on my computers at Amiga -- I didn't have anything to do with sales and marketing, or even management, while at Commodore. Everything I've said to or about the current owners/managers of the Amiga assets, post-C=. was simply to offer my advice on how not to make their company failure another Commodore. So far, they don't listen, and they continue to fail.

Some of my startups failed, too. That's one reason I make the attempt to understand how my stuff is being marketed and sold, better than I did at Commodore. Though honestly, we all saw Commodore screwing things up, for years before Commodore actually went under. If you see my film "the Deathbed Vigil and other tales of digital angst", I hopefully made this clear. Failure on the scale of Commodore isn't an event, it was a multi-year process. It'll be no different when the next Amiga-related failure occurs.

Quote:

When they came out with the Amiga, they didn't want to market it as a games machine so they did not sell it at Toys R' Us.

That was the right decision -- the Amiga couldn't have been sold as a games machine. C64s could -- there was instant boot, games in ROM, etc. And even at that, over half of the returns of C64s were due to users who just didn't get it. No way a far more complex machine would have survived that.

As well, it wasn't entirely Commodore's choice. By the time the Amiga was rolled out, Commodore had already dumped K-Mart (partly due to their "no questions asked" return policy), and the mass merchandisers of the day didn't sell "real" computers. Period. A $200 Amiga -- no problem. A $1400 Amiga -- no way. The real problem was that Commodore had already burned their bridges with computer stores, specifically, by entering K-Mart and that ilk with super cheap C64s. So the computer stores were hard to get.

That WAS only the USA, anyway, and Commodore was still very strong in Europe. None of these problems existed, which is why about 80% of Amigas sold in Europe.

Meanwhile, the US company (CBM) was never given the time necessary to fix the problems in the USA. We had had people who knew how: Tom Rattigan, Harry Copperman. They weren't given the resources by the top management (eg, Uncle Irv).

-Dave

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 7:45:40
#169 ]
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

If OS4.0 was complete NOW for x86 and given away FREE, it would die a quick and sudden death, as there would be NO lock-in.

That's just plain silly -- any "lock in" prevents the purchase of the box in the first place.

If you're passionate about AmigaOS, you'll use it for anything you can. That's exactly what I did in the early days: I used it for communications to our VAXen, I started doing all my documentation on it, I wrote some of my own CAD tools, I learned the OS and programmed it. If there's something you can't do on your computer, that's important for those behind the computer to know. It's NEVER a selling point -- better to let them do it. This is why SoftPC is very popular on the Macintosh, has been for years, and yet, hasn't killed the Mac (other forces, perhaps, but not SoftPC).

Quote:

If Apple fail to provide some sort of strong lock-in for there H/W & S/W they will die too.

News Flash: the Mac has been dying slowly for years, with a lock-in. That's because the lock-in is immaterial. Why would you assume that someone going to the trouble of buying a Mac, spending the extra money, putting up that nut Jobs and all the nut jobs (sic) around that whole Mac industry, would dump MacOS X as quickly as they possibly could, if they could run Windows on the same hardware? That's crazy -- you don't buy a Mac if it's not to run Mac software.

Again, this is a myth. It has never even remotely been proven, and yet, it seems to be gospel among some Amiga users, none of whom, I suspect, have ever actually been in this kind of business. It's when your the leader that letting other OSs be easily used is dangerous -- this is why Microsoft was bullying companies to not bundle BeOS, not even allowing PCs to come pre-installed with multiple OSs, etc. If Apple's sold you the computer, it's because you want MacOS, and ONLY because you want MacOS. You're going to run MacOS as much as you can.

Quote:

The moment you can boot OS X on any x86, OS X will be pirated, and Apple H/W will become redundant.

Apple is not allowing OS X to boot on other PCs. Hackers have, with some success, and probably will continue to. This isn't likely to really affect Apple. For one, if you're a pirate, you're not going to buy a Mac anyway. You might steal one, so the fact it's possible to just steal the OS might be good for them.

So, assuming you're only a little bit of a thief, let's say you steal MacOS X, download the hacks necessary to run it on your PC, and run it. Now you're using MacOS, where before you probably wouldn't. If you like it, what are you going to do now? Steal applications? Well, if you're a criminal, again, Apple was't going to get your money anyway, so they don't really lose -- you're just stealing from Apple, versus Sony or Adobe or Avid or Cakewalk or whoever.

So now you either hate MacOS X, and delete it, or you keep it up. Maybe you never buy a Mac, but again, if you're a criminal, you probably don't. If you're honest, you don't have any stolen software -- I don't. If you keep using it, Apple's won you over. Maybe you never buy OS-X or an application. But maybe you grow up and turn honest. Maybe you get a job with honest people and order a Mac for your desktop rather than a Windows machine. Apple wins.

So, I don't see there being a huge problem, unless you think most of Apple's market is to thieves.

Quote:

Dave Haynie has become old and has lost the passion. ,

You silly caveman! I have more passion in my little toe than you'll likely have in your whole life. But dude, I was there for the real thing. How could I possible get passionate about a weak retread. Not to diss the work of Hyperion, but they helped choose the path they've taken, and they haven't produced. They're closing in on taking longer to port the OS to a generic PPC system than Jay, Dale, Dave, Mitchie and the boys did making the original. There's a reason new people are involved in these projects -- there's nothing compelling about it for me, and I suspect, for the other first, second, or third generation Amiga engineers.

I'm really not THAT old. I'm still working every night until the early house (usually 3AM-5AM) on cool projects, more "devices", not desktop PCs. There are plenty of reasons for this, but the big one is simple: desktop PCs are boring. The only system design possible these days is in the chips, and I'm not interested in being a chip designer. The regular PC: boring. Dual AMD 64x2 desktops: pretty cool, but it's all about the chips. The old G5 Macs: boring. The A-One: boring as hell.

I'm doing digital radio controls for R/C cars and robotics: http://www.nomadio.net. You may find it boring, but we lit up an industry that's relatively unchanged since the 40's. No one did digital radio, no one did software upgradeable products, etc. And I was into robots even before Amiga, even before the C128, back in school at CMU..

And I'll still play rock music all night (well, when I can collect a band together), drink you under the table (well, you're probably not old enough for that). I did trade the sportscar for a Prius and a truck.... I have a big place here, and need the offroad capabilities. And one day, I'll have the Prius running under digital radio control

Quote:

at least Carl Sassenrath is still a Rebol.


REBOL runs on the x86 -- Carl must be evil or unpassionate, in your book. At least I'm designing with RISC-based microcontrollers. 100% non-Intel parts!

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 7:58:18
#170 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@hatschi

Quote:

Quote:
Was Dave Haynie really 'lead engineer'?

Yes.

More specifically, I was a project leader, then basically into systems research.

After Bil Herd left Commodore, I found myself the senior engineer in the low-end systems at Commodore.... kind of a shock, really, for a guy three-something years out of college. I led the short-lived C256 project, worked on the A500 for about a month, then took over the A2000 as the only engineer in West Chester responsible for it (though I got help from George Robbins, working on the A500 at the time.. Commodore was pretty lean back in '86, having gone through three sets of layoffs).

After the A2000, I worked on the A2620 with Bob Welland (who later worked at Apple and then Microsoft, kind of a microcomputer industry hat trick), did the A2630 on my own, joined up with Greg Berlin as co-technical lead on the A3000 (along with Hedley Davis (part of the X-Box 360 team at Microsoft, by way of several acquisitions), Scott Hood, Jeff Boyer, and Scott Schaeffer).

After that, I was the lone systems engineer working with the chip guys on new systems. The first was the A3000+, the first Pandora (or "AA", or "AGA") machine, and Nyx, the first and only AAA machine.

Quote:

For more info, have a look on the wikipedia pages:

I didn't even know about the Zorro III page. A friend of mine at work showed me the "Dave Haynie" page on the wikipedia earlier this week.. I hadn't seen it in over a year.

Quote:

btw, nice photo! )

Ok, but here's the real question: what's on the monitor ($800 Hitachi 17").. what's the OS?

Quote:

Luckily, he did not have to care about RoHS, although he was the LEAD engineer.

Oh, that's a good one.. but who else gets it?

-Dave

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Dirk-B 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:07:05
#171 ]
Super Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 1185
From: Belgium

@hazydave

Hi Dave,

So why don't you make for us a nice little device
ala pda or something, that is real cheap too?

If you could do that, what would you put on it and
what would be the best direction software-wise?

Dirk.

Ps: i would like an amiga-radiocontrolled-robot.

_________________
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umisef 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:27:27
#172 ]
Super Member
Joined: 19-Jun-2005
Posts: 1714
From: Melbourne, Australia

@syrtran

Quote:
I wasn't making a timeline, rather it's about a single point in time - the point that Hyperion decided to make OS4 for a new processor (i.e. not 68K). I was pointing out that there were only two "dual-ISA" options, yours, and Phase 5/DCEs. My -only- point was that PPC was really their only option -at that time-.


And there we disagree. AT THAT TIME, nobody at Hyperion had the slightest clue there was any problem with Amithlon. Nor did I, or Harald. Or anyone else, for that matter, with the possible exception of H&P. Also, there wasn't much of a problem with Amithlon itself, just with Amithlon as distributed by H&P. There certainly was no problem whatsoever with the underlying emulation technology (which would have been the part interesting for a hypothetical OS4/x86).

Quote:
that it -is- possible to switch between the two processors, albeit with "hacks". We, as a community, were eventually subjected to alpha OS4 demos on CS-PPC 4000s that -were- running mixed code.


Are you sure there ever was any version of OS4 which ran the kernel on the PPC, but used the REAL(!) 68k processor for 68k code? I am always willing to learn, but unless you can point me at some documentation of such a version, I'll assume you confused "running 68k code in an emulator" with "running 68k code on the 68k processor". And running 68k code on an emulator is what Amithlon already did in 2001, not 2003, when Hyperion first managed to bring up Workbench under their new kernel.

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Samwel 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:33:04
#173 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 7-Apr-2004
Posts: 3404
From: Sweden

@hazydave

Nice to see you here commenting Dave. I really hope you won't be a stranger in future.

About this X86 thing..
Wouldn't a PASemi dual core chip motherboard with PCI-E, DDR-II, USB2, Firewire, Gigabit
and SATA be a good enough computer for Amiga?
If produced by the thousands rather than hundreds like today it could become quite cheap.
Of course never as cheap as PC's. That's impossible I think.

But do Amiga really have to be cheaper than PC? Do we not pay for excellence?

Note that I really do note care which hardware we run on. It's AmigaOS I want!
But I really wouldn't mind paying a lot less than I did for my A1.

_________________
/Harry

[SOLD] µA1-C - 750GX 800MHz - 512MB - Antec Aria case

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CodeSmith 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:47:30
#174 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 3045
From: USA

@hazydave

Quote:
Ok, but here's the real question: what's on the monitor ($800 Hitachi 17").. what's the OS?


OMG, I'm talking with Dave Haynie. OK, deep breath...

Dude, the picture on that monitor is small and grainy enough to be a UFO photo

Given where the picture was taken, could that be an unreleased version of CaOS?

[Edit] Forgot to say, thank you VERY MUCH for disksalv. That program prevented me from flunking one of my college courses, when my A1200 decided to eat the drawer all my project files where in.

Last edited by CodeSmith on 13-Jan-2006 at 08:49 AM.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:47:58
#175 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@Hammer

Quote:

Quote:
Lets face it the only thing that has kept this company aflot is its IPOD!!

I recall Apple’s iPod is just a digital music player like many other digital music players yet Apple is doing reasonably OK.

Apple's doing "reasonably OK" in much the same way that Bill Gates is "somewhat rich", George Bush is "slightly stupid", and Angelina Jolie is "a little bit hot".

Apple sold 32 million iPods last year, 14 millon in the Christmas season. They posted sales of $5.7 billion last quarter. Not too shabby, and a record for Apple. Last Christmas, they also set a record, again based on strong iPod sales. Basically, they're easier than computers to develop, and very profitable.

Quote:

One major difference is MacOS X and its related ecosystem.

Apple did better this year, thanks to cheaper Macs, but the iPod success is primarily non-Mac. But Apple knows the value of being proprietary. iPod rips from CD in AAC will play on a few other things: some Panasonic MP3 players, my DVD player (IOData), but not many. Downloads from iTunes only play on iPods. Apple bundles it as an ecosystem: you run iTunes on the computer, it links you to iTunes Store, buys instantly (your purchase info is logged in), etc.

Then there's the aftermarket... based on the similar size of all iPods, and the expansion connector, there are dozens of devices that plug into iPods, and dozens they plug into. I have a car carrier (FM transmitter and power supply) for the iPod; I have a small boombox it just plugs into.

Other players can be cool. I got my kids SanDisk 512K players. SanDisk makes the flash, so they can offer these cheap. They worked well, we tested and on Christmas, the kids got them. They support MP3 and WMA, maybe some other formats. And FM radio, and build-in voice recording, all for a price well below that of the iPod Shuffle. You can run Napster, but not iTures.

-Dave

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T_Bone 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:50:21
#176 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Sep-2003
Posts: 3043
From: here To: there

@Samwel

Quote:

Samwel wrote:
@hazydave

Nice to see you here commenting Dave. I really hope you won't be a stranger in future.

About this X86 thing..
Wouldn't a PASemi dual core chip motherboard with PCI-E, DDR-II, USB2, Firewire, Gigabit
and SATA be a good enough computer for Amiga?
If produced by the thousands rather than hundreds like today it could become quite cheap.
Of course never as cheap as PC's. That's impossible I think.


Hell, if you can't make better hardware than what's already available cheaper, why not use the better available hardware... cheaper?

How can anything else be justified? "We're making this custom because it's, um, slower, and um, cost more?"

Quote:
But do Amiga really have to be cheaper than PC? Do we not pay for excellence?


Hell, no. I'd pay more for AmigaOS. But what's that got to do with hardware? Excellence in hardware... is "faster and cheaper." Why not let the OS shine on excellent hardware?

Quote:
Note that I really do note care which hardware we run on. It's AmigaOS I want!
But I really wouldn't mind paying a lot less than I did for my A1.


Agreed. I'd rather take what's available now, quickly. But I do want a future. I want something forward thinking.

_________________
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DiscreetFX 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 8:56:26
#177 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-Feb-2003
Posts: 2481
From: Chicago, IL

@hazydave

What would your hope have been for a 2006 Amiga if Amiga Tech had not bit the dust in 1996?

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

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T_Bone 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 9:10:54
#178 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Sep-2003
Posts: 3043
From: here To: there

@hazydave

Dave Haynie makes an appearance and we dont even have the emoticon to greet him!

I'd offer you my wife instead, but I'm afraid she might get mad... well, my real fear is she wouldn't

edfit- oh, the worship emoticon works. Whew.

Last edited by T_Bone on 13-Jan-2006 at 09:11 AM.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 9:14:20
#179 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@Hitback

Quote:

Apples IPod was successful not because of marketing but because they beat Sony by producing the first digital walkman.

Nope. Sony had the first "digital walkman" -- the Minidisc player, and later, the Net Minidisc. Didn't catch on big here in the USA, except for people like me who use them for field recording.

Sony's big problem in this space has been their whole DRM thing. They made the players only, ever, support their proprietary ATRAC format, so only Sony software could make ATRAC rips. Then they limit it to 3 downloads to MD before you have to re-rip, stuff like that. And they were late to the game on "jukebox walkman", which is really what an iPod is.

MD is actually pretty nice -- modern player can give you something like 40 hours of playback on a single AA cell. Not too shabby, eh? And the new ones use some form of UMD media, record uncompressed, lots of useful stuff.

Quote:

Sony, Instead of contiuing the evolutionof its walkman decide tto concentrate on the PS & PS2 they entered the game market and lost the lead on the music device market.


Unrelated... totally different divisons of Sony. Sony's problems with portable music devices have been many, and all self inflicted, and none related in any way to the PS2... well, other then the fact the PSP was groomed as kind of the unification of the two.

The genesis of Sony's downfall in the portable player market was their move into media. As an electronics company, they were just dandy pushing the limits on media, fair use, etc. Once they bought media, the lawyers worried about piracy, and had Sony both lobby and implement protective measures in hardware. This set them way back, particularly because they didn't want it to happen.

Quote:

Right now as it stands apple posted a nice price increace in it's stock- Guess for what? Yeah not PC sales but on it's IPOD growth.

Yeah, though Mac sales were up for the year. That wasn't new -- any time Apple puts out a cheaper Mac, they sell more that year. But with some 32 millon iPods sold for the year, Apple had a good year.

Quote:

Forget Mac OsX as good as it is it will get lost like Beos in the Wintel space.

No, it won't. And much of that is based on the fact Apple WANTS to make hardware, at least right now. Be fought Microsoft, and even with plenty of PC vendor friends, they threw in the towel -- they couldn't have BeOS pre-installed for dual boot.

Quote:

Why? Because business run windows 2003 servers all IBM and HP blade systems are Windows base

Not even relevant; businesses run severs that get the job done. They run Windows, hey run Linux, they even run Apple's server. All of which is good for the companies that are selected, none of which has one iota of impact on the desktop.

Quote:

It is a wintel world and Apple had a nice little nich on the PPC but now it is putting its self behind the 8 ball. Jobs ( and he is creative) is going to have to pull every trick out of the bag to compete in a DELL, HP, IBM, SONY and TOSHIBA dominated laptop space.

No! It's absolutely amazing how stupid people are on this subject. I have personal issues with Jobs, but he's not that stupid. Neither am I. There is historically not one iota of history to suggest that changing the CPU has any effect on the sales of the system in this way. People didn't go after Sun when they started selling low-end Opteron servers instead of SPARCs... to the end user, it's just doing that same job, but faster.

Yesterday Apple sold a Mac or PowerBook that ran MacOS X. It happened to have a PPC buried inside. Tomorrow, they'll sell a Mac or PowerBook that runs MacOS X. It'll be faster than that previous one, it'll compete head to head with current PCs, and it'll raise Apple's margins on the hardware. Other than that, you can't tell the difference.

Do you best -- tell me why this bad for Apple, in any real-world senario. That's not the same as saying it's enough to keep the Mac alive, but IMHO, it can't possibly hurt, particularly when you understand just how badly Apple screwed themselves on the PPC by killing competition.

Quote:

Jobs may suprise us and do this But my money is on that the Mac PC division will disappear and only the Ipod device market will remain. Have you seen the price of a Mac Book? No thanks

Some people buy cheap-ass machines: Dell, Gateway, HP/Compaq. That hasn't put Sony or Toshiba or Alienware or Fujitsu out of the laptop business. At worst, this will make Apple doing exactly what they've always done more profitable and more competitive. At best, it attracts more people to MacOS X -- those who rejected Macs for being slow, those who need a few Windows apps running full-speed, those who want Mac but fear for Apple's health.

Not that iPod was bad this year.. it set records. But you can't do that every year, and this year you're likely to see some messing with the iTunes Store that's helped make Apple so successful. From the record companies.

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Mikey_C 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 13-Jan-2006 9:19:27
#180 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 7-Mar-2003
Posts: 3060
From: Unknown

@hazydave

Thanks for posting Dave, We are honoured to have you here.

I fully appreciate you comments and yes you are right that x86 is cheaper. Unfortunately the die was cast ages ago, Hyperion have done a remarkable job working on what must be a miniscule fraction of finances and resources that you had under commodore.

Yes, there is probably nothing innovative about AmigaOS anymore as you see it, some of us still prefer it, even though it does lack modern features.

it's still a lot of fun.

You started something, we are still using it

_________________
No cause is lost if there is but one fool left to fight for it.

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