Devoid Zone
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Devoid's Computer Ramblings is where I talk a little bit about my computing interests. Those consist mostly of the
Amiga computer, altho I use a Thinkpad and OS/2 a lot as well.
BrowserWatch
demonstrates that Netscrape and MicroShaft are not the only browser makers.
is a brave attempt at a shareware web browser
for Windoze. They claim to be working on native OS/2 and Amiga versions as well.
I have been an Amiga user since 1985, having owned an A1000, A2000, an '020 board and flicker fixer for the 
2000, then an A3000. In 1995 I bought an A1200 from someone who gave up on Amigas and went Win.
I recently got a 40 mhz accelerator for the 1200, then put in a math chip. It's reasonably fast now, and the environment is still so much easier to use than anything I've used on Intel.
Before Amiga ownership I was a commodore type, having Vic-20's
and C-64's.
I also bought an AT&T UnixPC nee 3B1 in 1993. This is a cool box which originally sold for $10,000 in 1984, the same time frame as the Apple Lisa. Since SL/IP connections came along I've neglected the Unix box and used the Amiga almost exclusively.
Much of my own ramblings on the Amiga have been deleted in favor
of linking you to 
Udo's Compleat AMIGA page.Udo has created the best general information page about Amiga in the webverse.
The Amiga started out being perceived as a Game machine.
This was because it had 12 bit colour and 4 voice stereo sound.
This was 1985. Remember WordStar and VisiCalc? Lotus 123 was the
HOT new program that was taking over the universe. Real computers
didn't have colour and sound. Macs had two-bit black & white with
mono sound. Well, today the Intel boxes are the game machines,
and are sold as such. How strange.
The Video Toaster finally put the
Amiga into mainstream video professional conciousness.
I got my second Thinkpad recently, a 365X. I have OS/2 Warp and Geos
on it. Warp makes a good internet connection, pretty stable, and the P100 with 40 megs of ram makes it finally useably fast.
Hey,Caldera are giving away a modern dos, as well as selling Linux. They bought the Dos086 that Digital Research developed and Novell ruined and gave away to Corel.
Caldera is a new company owned by the former Novell guy. He ruined Novell by trying to become the Microsoft competitor. Kind of like Borland did to themselves. Corel was the beneficiary of both of those Hara-Kiri attempts and now they have given back the Digital Research assets.
The
BeOs were looking like the true
alternative system [I wrote a while back], but now with
Apple's apparent intent to destroy the PPC as a general purpose
computer system I am not so sure.
Motorola recently demonstrated (1997) the fastest
desktop PC yet designed, the StarMax
6000, which they now will not build due to the Apple
machinations. This would have made a BeOs box to blow SGI's so
far into server space that they wouldn't have even been able to
spell digital media.
It now appears that a port to Intel platforms is the only real chance for BeOs to thrive. What a shame, as Be was originally designing dual processor RISC hardware upon which their OS would run. The very first BeBox was actually designed to use the Hobbit risc chip from AT&T. When this chip was canned and the PPC became the designated hitter in the anything-but-Intel campaign they switched to a dual PPC setup.
This link to the PPC BeBox may still work: BeBoxhad considerable cool hardware which Mac clones lack.
PIOS are working on a PPC box
designed to run BeOs as well as a PPC AmigaOs clone. The
prospects for this machine after the cancelling of other CHRP
boxen is unknown as of October 1997. Oops,
PIOS seems to have failed to get their PPC box working. How
this could have happened to Dave Haynie is difficult to
understand.
Alert! In October 1998 I got a BeBox! A
genuine dual 133 BeBox with 64 megs of ram and a 7 gig drive. I
just discovered that Leo Schwab works for Be now, so I have taken
one of his early Amiga anims and converted it to gif-anim format
with MainActor.
The MindEYE Visual Music System(formerly MindLight) is back after a 10 year absence! This Amazing device has been resurrected after years of uncertainty in the Amiga world and very few new machines having been sold. Perhaps the "multimedia" hype of the past few years with Pentium slugs has made this video computer system understandable now.
Another scruzan is using the mindlight and visual aurals
system for what is really intended, commercial light show type
stuff. Techno Light and
Sound is it.
Go to my Amiga links page here or just
go straight to The Amiga Web Directory
There exists a text editor called VIM, for VIsual iMproved. A better VI in other words. I use it on Amiga, OS/2 and pcdos. It comes with BeOS also. It is free ware, with a reference to an orphanage in Uganda to which to make a donation if you wish to show appreciation. Just a little study of VI macros makes a lot of tasks much easier than with any other editor. Of course I use Gui editors as well. Like writing this right now.
The Obsolete Computer Museum is a fine place to visit.
The Vintage Computer Festival is a Northern California event which is kul for old computer geeks also.
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name: compute.old.shtml created: December, 1995 Last modified on Monday, 31-May-2010 11:08:51 EDT |