Submitted by A few weeks ago, Novell and Red Hat jointly fended off a patent infringement suit thrown their way by a patent troll. The patent in question more or less came down to the concept of virtual desktops – and thanks to Groklaw, several people helped in finding cases of prior art. The most interesting one of all? A carefully restored and working Amiga 1000 demonstrated to the judge and jury.
When this court case was first revealed back in 2007, Groklaw asked its readers to help in the hunt for prior art, and later still, Red and Novell asked the community to do the same. The Amiga was one of the most often mentioned cases of prior art, and it turns out it played a major role in turning this case in favour of Novell and Red Hat.
Someone actually came forward with a carefully restored and working Amiga 1000 from 1986, which was demonstrated to the jury as a case of prior art. More cases of prior art were presented, but having a live demo of 1986 hardware sure played an important role according to Groklaw, who has access to the court documents.
The owner of the Amiga 1000 was delighted his machine played such an important role. “Apparently my habits of being an eclectic collector of historic computer gadgetry and my work in restoring a 1986 Amiga 1000 system to its multi-screen, muti-tasking glory as prior art evidence for a Red Hat Linux patent fight paid off,” he said, “My Amiga killed a troll!”
Even 24 years after its original release, the Amiga still manages to leave an impression. Jay Miner would be proud.
Really cool that the Amiga has saved the day. AmigaOS is still one of the most advanced pieces of software out there … sad really, because it is 26 years old.
Edit: They now work. When will we able to edit the title?
Edited 2010-05-15 09:07 UTC
It’s pretty cool that using an amiga helped fend off a patent troll and I respect that. It might be the last useful thing the amiga ever does, and it certainly is the first useful thing it did in the last 15 years.
However calling AmigaOS “the most advanced piece of software out there” is displaying a scary disconnection with reality.
Total quote FAIL.
“one of the most” is what I wrote and that is still true. Many areas in AmigaOS have not been surpassed by any other OS. (want a example? Sure thing: Driver installation/removal, just copy/delete a file to the driver directory)
Yeah. Now your problem is that I used (and developped on) an amiga until 2001 so I know that you’re pretty much full of shit.
I had to play around with my system files, and to do some hardcore troubleshooting all the time to do the most trivial things. What you describe is some kind of ideal situation that never held true in practice.
Oh, and I can’t remember the last time I had to install a driver in linux.
And lastly even installing drivers on windows is easier than copying a file into the drivers directory… Because you don’t have to locate such a goddamn directory at all. It just knows where to install itself.
Edit: I know you said 2001, but Amiga was well dead by then (Commodore folded in 1994). After 1994 the Amiga ceased to be up to date. If you were developing for it in 2001, then _of course_ you were used to the improvements to general computing (in Windows/Linux) that had happened since then.
—
That was computing in the ^aEURTM80s. It was not limited to just the Amiga.
Did you ever install a driver on Linux in the ^aEURTM80s?
Edited 2010-05-15 13:49 UTC
In the case of amigaos it was computing in the 8Os, the 90s and up until 2001 when I stopped using one.
Anyway, how does it helps the case that “AmigaOS is one of the most advanced piece of software” despite being 26 years old?
Considering that the first public version of the linux kernel was released in 1991, I’m pretty sure that no one ever did.
Edited 2010-05-15 13:52 UTC
“In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.”
Did you ever install a driver on Linux in the ^aEURTM80s?
*shudder*
I was being sarcastic given that the parent was not comparing like for like.
Well they don’t say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit for nothing…
The thing that kind of “ruined” the classic Amiga design was the necessity of slapping a new graphics system on top of the existing graphics libraries, what we called retargetable graphics (RTG), and there were several different systems for this and it was a mess. A similar situation occurred with audio and the quick development of CD-ROMs and harddisks.
Had Commodore managed to do RTG themselves for the OS3.2/4.0 plans back then, then only the CPU transition to PPC would have been problematic. Dealing with RTG could indeed be troublesome, but it was at least fixable by hand. I wouldn’t dare to do the same on a Linux system.
As for the remainder of the system: If there were program problems, fire up SnoopDOS. It was a simple program, capable of probing what the system was doing, so you very quickly could determine, what a problem was, when a program wouldn’t start and did not provide any error feedback.
And yes, you could then indeed copy new libraries or drivers into your library directory by hand for the program then to work, all without rebooting or requiring special maintenance/sanity-check/packager tools.
It just honestly checked for the existence of the files and didn’t have to speak to Mr. Registry or update some system database repository to reflect the system state using recovery consoles or emergency tools. It didn’t need to sync anything or check anything for corruption on a higher than file system level. It just took the files it could see and ran them. If it couldn’t load a file, there was a failure, usually detectable by SnoopDOS. Simple.
The third party tools that existed were mostly for disk damage recovery.
You could in fact build your own special AmigaOS disks from scratch for special purposes in a couple of hours, just using the CLI or Workbench or a third party file manager like Directory Opus and then build your own startup sequence to see if you could optimize boot time. I did this a lot.
That, I have yet to see in any other modern operating system.
This is because AmigaOS3.x and below is really simple and to learn every corner of it, takes a few days, from a modern perspective.
Of course if you were to build a new OS, you would not directly model it on AmigaOS, because it’s an insecure single user operating system. But some of its principles of simplicity is a fantastic inspiration for systems that are yet to be seen. We really need them to show up.
Multi-user OS is a kind of overkill. Big-white-box PCs are moving out of fashion. People prefers personal(single user) laptop/netbook nowadays
Except of course, Commodore was not going to PowerPC at all. They were going to PA-RISC instead, and it was the collapse of Commodore which led HP to instead take their next-gen PA-RISC technology and bring it to Intel, which turned it into Itanium. Unlike Intel, which viewed the technology as a way into the big-iron market, Commodore was viewing it as a way to recapture the glory they had with the 6502, a solid 32/64-bit cheap CPU that can run on anything, much the same as ARM became.
While the “Going PPC” route did come to be, it was not what Commodore had planned, not even on the radar. Where they were going was far more interesting than that.
You’re going too wild here.
I doubt C= can be somehow related to PA-RISC fate.
Itanium is not PA-RISC next-gen technology. Not even close.
“full of shit”? Why do you use such wording, instead of arguments? And who gave score of 4 to post like yours? Probably a Linux & Windows honchos, not liking Amiga was doing stuff 10 years before they either existed, or started to find out there is more to the personal computer, than monochrome display
The architecture either allows it, or not. And Amiga resembled kind of QNX architecture – simply put driver was a task, not kind of system/kernel hard-coded crap. Good luck with your I-don’t-have-to-reinstall-Linux-driver systems …
You were developing on an Amiga? It had to be few lines of Amos Basic, no? Your arguments are completly laughable – so you had a problem to locate a directory? What about scripts, what about installers? Any person claiming that tonnes of files for Windows drivers are architectural win, because “he does not have to look up god damned directory”, lives in twisted reality and does not deserve to call himself a developer ….
You don’t really play with non-mainstream hardware then I take it. Good for you, but don’t think it’s the same for every case. Things can get really messy if the driver exists as open, but is not part of mainstream -want an example? dgap.
Given your use of “fail” I wonder if you were even alive when the Amiga was still relevant.
The internet taught me well. (I am not a native speaker and I just go with the flow and I am pretty sure you cannot attach an age to my English.)
So you weren’t born when the Amiga was around, then…
Not that you are one to embellish either.
Windows Vista/7 still don’t handle multiple screens as well as the Amigas did 24 years ago. Many programs or games can lock up when alt-tabbing. There’s no visual representation of programs underneath others, and as is the case with the human brain, a clear visual representation makes a UI more intuitive and functional.
As far as functionality goes, yes, I’d say that the Amiga’s layered screens system is more advanced than Windows 7, and perhaps also X’s. Just because it was coded decades ago doesn’t automatically mean it’s inferior. It had access to fewer hardware resources, that’s all.
Edited 2010-05-15 13:24 UTC
The Amiga^aEURTMs graphics hardware is still ahead of the game. Not in power, but in design.
The IBM reference platform, and GPUs on an IRQ bus is the worst possible design hacked together by IBM without any consideration for the future.
IBM gave the industry a retarded monkey, and the industry strapped rockets to it.
Remember to put this in perspective — the first consumer 2D/3D graphics cards started appearing in 1995. Over 10 years after the Amiga.
10 years in computing is an age. Ten years ago we were using Windows 98 / NT with 32-128 MB of RAM.
We are amazed at the realism of graphics produced now, but that^aEURTMs only been possible after enough money was thrown at an inefficient and inappropriate design. The success of the IBM PC put the graphics industry back 10 years. Had we started with the Amiga and gone from there, films like Avatar would have come out ten years ago.
I have yet to see any innovation in the graphics space that isn^aEURTMt throwing more horespower at the problem.
At one point in time, the amiga graphics hardware was in some ways more advanced than the PC stuff.
But actually the PC hardware was simpler. Less capabale but simpler and ultimately able to scale up to do much more interesting things.
The amiga hardware provided clever ways to achieve things with the available tech at the time but it had no future. I’m pretty sure that if commodore alive and was able to continue the amiga they would have went the same direction as the pc hardware.
A lot of the things that the amiga guys invented were because nothing similar existed. They were probably much more pragmatic than people believe and would have abandoned their various proprietary technologies and used industry-standard equivalents such as PCI instead of zorro.
As far as graphic chips are concerned they’d either have went a similar direction to what we have now (ie stop with the raster-based tricks and just use a simple, plain framebuffer and have a dedicated, flexible processor able to render anything in it), or more likely they’d have stopped doing their own graphics hardware.
A lot of the things that the amiga guys invented were because nothing similar existed. They were probably much more pragmatic than people believe and would have abandoned their various proprietary technologies and used industry-standard equivalents such as PCI instead of zorro.
Actually, the Amiga graphics chipset had a lot in common with the Atari 8-bit graphics chipset.
Actually, if you’re familiar with both PCI and Zorro hardware (and I am, having made cards for both buses), you would swear that the PCI card is merely an updated Zorro card. The design principles of the PCI are taken straight from the Zorro specs.
Because Jay Miner worked on both.
It’s the main reason I went straight from the Atari 8-bit to the Amiga when I decided it was time to upgrade to 16-bit.
Not according to its designer.
Jay Miner Speech (1989).
Questioner: “Is there anything that you would have done differently to the Amiga before it was released that you hadn’t already told us about.”
…
Jay Miner: “Also I probably, in hindsight, I would’ve designed it with pixel graphics instead of bit-plane graphics. They’re a little more standard and versatile now, it turns out. The bit-plane graphics allow you to move data around much faster because you have less data to move… if you have very few bits per pixel… which was the case of the ’64 and the early Amiga, we went mostly with four bit-planes, five bit-planes, three bit-planes which means four/five bits of information defining each pixel. But they were arranged in bit-plane fashion so we could move 16-bits at a time with the computer rather than moving three or four bits at a time if they were pixel orien… Well, now with memory the way it is and computer designs the way they are, moving 16-bits of a single pixel, to define single pixel, is more efficient in terms of high colour quality and lots of colour definitions. So I would’ve… In hindsight I would’ve done that differently.”
Kroc, you are right. And I don’t know, if you even know, that AAA chipset was done, when Commodore went under. But not only that – AAA was being regarded as “last of its kind”, and Dr. Ed Hepler did Hombre chip, which integrated GPU into CPU and allowed parralelism. In 1993? Isn’t it a little bit funny, that now Intel and others are doing the same, and are calling it an revolutionary idea?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
The amiga screen system was nothing more than a clever hardware trick that is not really even possible or useful anymore in this day and age.
Yeah, windows 7 sucks with its lack of virtual desktops, but why are you assuming that I uphold windows 7 as the be all end all of operating systems? I’m really more of a linux guy.
And in linux, it would be prefectly possible to reproduce the amiga’s screen (aka desktops).
You know why no one does? Because it’s useless. Switching from a destkop to another is useful. Having a pager or gestures or compositing based mosaic effect to do so is useful.
We have many more useful ways to manage desktops on modern hardware than that cute yet ultimately worthless copper-based hack on the amiga chipset.
I can think of a lot of uses^aEUR”like how every desktop manager (Windows, OS X and Linux included) deals so badly with resolution switches. I want to play a game in a different resolution and then switch back to my desktop without all my window positions and sizes messed up.
The Amiga allowed you to slide the game down and show the desktop beneath^aEUR”when both were at different resolutions. That^aEURTMs a big deal that we could all really do with in OSes that are complex enough now to warrant it even more so than the simpler Amiga.
Think of all the hell people have had to go through fighting with X. If Amiga^aEURTMs hardware was the reference platform then Linux would be in a _much_ better place than it is now.
The fact that different resolutions could be displayed on the different screens was a hardware trick that was only physically possible on CRTs. And only on fixed frequency CRTs at that, ie TVs and old fixed frequency monitors.
Multisync CRTs precluded playing with raster effects to mix different frequencies in different parts of the screen.
That was a cute hack but it had no future.
Nowaday you could achieve the same effect if you wanted by scaling up the lower resolution desktop to fit on the screen, making it a “low res” desktop. You can’t physically mix and match different resolutions on a LCD, you know?
Edited 2010-05-15 14:14 UTC
Screen hardware was still emerging at that time, there^aEURTMs no reason not to believe that had Amiga been the No.1 hardware platform to dictate the future then TFTs would have been designed differently with the necessary resolution switching built in (all modern TFTs have built-in stretching capabilities) and I^aEURTMm sure as heck that any TFT with a suitably complex enough controller could achieve raster effects during the ^aEUR~scan^aEURTM.
Think beyond just the hardware we have now _because_ of IBM, and instead at the hardware we could have had without IBM. There^aEURTMs no way to say if it would have been better, but it would have been ever so different^aEUR”and that^aEURTMs interesting.
Edited 2010-05-15 14:22 UTC
I suppose you could fake this with a graphics system that did the resolution downscaling for you in software- it would know what the actual resolution of the screen was (say, 1680x1050x24-bit), scale other-resolution material (or windowbox it), and always output a 1680x1050x24-bit signal. On the plus side, it would never flicker while switching resolutions…
Don’t troll with Amiga or Amiga will come after you ^_^
0wned by Amiga 1000!
So, does this finally settle the “Well my dad^aEURTMs Amiga is better than your dad^aEURTMs Atari” debate, started in the ^aEURTM80s?
That debate ended for me as soon as I showed my friend the Amiga in question
The only thing the Atari ST(e) beat the Amiga in was also the same thing that caused it to suck more. That was that the OS was so simple a freaking monkey could figure it out (actually the guy who sold me the Atari Mega STe said that very thing!)
The original Atari ST was spanked in so many reasons by the Amiga.
This is coming from someone who has had an Atari Mega STe, Atari TT030 and Atari 1040 ST.
I now also have an Amiga 4000
The real slap to the face was that basically the Atari 8-Bits crushed the C64 in capability. But the tricky part was that Jack Trammiel had been head of Commodore when the C64 was made, and then he took those same philosphies of making computers over to Atari when he took that over and made the Atari ST.
The guys who made the atari 8-bit mostly went over to Commodore / Amiga. So really my true fandom is of the Atari 8-bit / Amiga.
It’s just at the time I hadn’t known about all that. Which is why I finally eBay’d an A4000, and I’ve put a Radeon in it, and network card
I should test the workspace switching on my TFT, I’m pretty sure it worked last time..
I miss a picture in this article
If some party brings a lawsuit for patent infringement, but the suit is dismissed because prior art is discovered by the defendant, the plaintiff should be subject to a counterclaim for legal fees because they did not perform due diligence.
What do you think?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_diligence#As_a_concept_in_civil_li…
Edited 2010-05-15 10:51 UTC
It is most likely the troll knew what they were doing and was just trying to make a quick, easy buck off the system. I’d think this is less a lack of due diligence, and instead more accurately a case of willful fraud. Where are the authorities who should be cracking down on obvious cases like this?
On the other hand, considering how easily prior art was found, the US Patent Office was clearly not exercising due diligence in its duties. It would be nice to see a lawsuit brought up against them. Maybe something like that would put a damper on the whole practice of patent trolling.
If remembered for nothing else, this is probably the proudest moment for the Amiga. Validation to all those people who have owned and supported the Amiga, and securing its rightful place in history.
I hope more patent trolls can be shut down using the Amiga as prior art.
Well done to the original Amiga designers, you got it right first time
What if some troll finds out who now owns old Amiga patent for this tech? This practically means troll can buy it and sue again for this and win. Or, what if this patent is already in possession if trolls?
PS: I am assuming that Amiga patented this, please someone tell me this is not the case!
Even if they patented the feature in question, it would be expired by now anyway.
Gateway bought the Amiga back then. And IIRC, Gateway is now owned by Acer. So it is Acer, who owns those patents, if they do exist. I don’t know much about Amiga related patents, but I do remember two-button mouse was a patent by Amiga, or so was the saying.
…throughout recent history. I think products tend to be “ruined” by the tendency to make things more complex than they need to be. At least that is my experience with software development.
Something starts out clean, simple, solid vision… then slowly morphs into some monster over a period of several years until someone says “let’s do it over!” Then the cycle begins again.
Often the question “what can we do to improve our product” is thrown out there when it isn’t needed… when the customers are perfectly satisfied with the current product.
I know I am getting off-topic, but the arguments above about how advanced the Amiga was vs. some near-equivalent products today just sparked that thought in my mind. Really, what innovation has there been since the 80’s with the interface? With the general functionality?
Yes, hardware gets faster, rendering is prettier, but all the basic paradigms are still in place and a “computer” is still just a bunch of programs running on hardware accepting input and producing managed output.
Nothing really changes and in that sense the Amiga is still as good as anything out there today. The old uVAX I developed on was “advanced” in that sense as well.
Every OS has some unique (well, I suppose some don’t) way of handling a problem that might be tackled differently by another OS. Sometimes that way might very well be OBVIOUSLY better (more streamlined, more efficient, more effective somehow) but in general there can be several ways to implement shared libraries, or file/directory management, or what-have-you, but in the end we still have shared libraries and a need for file management.
This is also why when someone tries to patent something silly like “oh I invented borders that are 3MM wide around a UI port – I call it a narrow border” (yeah I made that up but you get the idea) is just so ridiculous. And then to file suit over it. Ugh.
Sorry for the wide-ranging rant. I am going out geo-caching. Have a nice weekend!
[edit: oh, my totally missed point was that complexity does not equal innovation or even superiority… it’s just more complex.]
Edited 2010-05-15 17:06 UTC
I don’t understand why the Amiga had to be “carefully restored” to work. It’s not like they’re vintage cars and you have to work on them for weeks to get them going. The poster of the Groklaw article seems to be surprised that somebody got a computer as old as an Amiga working. (“…someone coming forward with a *working* Amiga, believe it or not..”)
I’m posting this using a 1987 Amiga 500 (seriously) – and I didn’t even have to carefully restore it.
zOMG! Screenshot!
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, but if you want a screenshot, here it is:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/2646/a500osnews.png
That’s my Amiga 500 browsing (tabbed browsing, of course) both OSAlert and the Groklaw article. It’s only 16 colours, but what can you expect from a 1987 computer?
How did you manage the 692×482 resolution with more than 4 colors on an A500?
Overscan and 3.0 ROM. Overscan goes up to 720×482, but 692×482 is the maximum size I can get on an NTSC 1080 monitor. It’s possible to get the same overscan using 1.3 ROM, but 4 colours is the maximum – unless you use a fancy copper rainbow program, like in this WB 1.3 screenshot:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/images/2187/1_2174.png
Prior Art – the number one way to shoot down most any patent. Had anyone bothered with this type of research back in the 1880’s Edison would have gone down in history as a patent troll instead of an inventor.
Lesson – Never trust an “inventor” who once worked as a patent clerk. Right Sir Joseph?
Actually, IBM licensed Amiga GUI technology from Commodore for it’s OS/2 operating system. For that, Amiga got arexx, an IBM scripting language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#Future
This is like the 3rd time you have posted that. AREXX did not come from IBM, and REXX was not a closed proprietary language, there were many 3rd party vendors which developed REXX interpreters in the 80s besides IBM.
Claiming there may be AmigaOS tech in OS/2 is pushing the limits of belief.
So I am “pushing to the limits” when I claim that Commodore got AREXX from IBM, in exchange for Amiga GUI tech? I showed you this link before, and I show you the same link again now:
http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/OS2Warp.html
“With Microsoft no longer doing development on the user interface, IBM was faced with creating this themselves. In this timeframe, a deal was made with Commodore. Commodore licensed IBM’s REXX scripting language for inclusion in their AmigaOS, and IBM took many GUI design ideas from the AmigaOS for their new GUI.”
So am I trolling, or what? Why do you dismiss this link, every time I show it to you? I have made up this link? It is a fantasy from me? I am lying? Or, is it you that is the troll, when you accuse me of twisting the truth – despite I showed links to backup my claims?
According to this guy below, Groklaw is an IBM FUD web site. The guy is trying to sell the IBM Mainframe emulator TurboHercules.
Groklaw who reported on IBM vs SCO case, is actually an IBM marketing channel. The founder of Groklaw, PJ, is an IBM FUDer and downtalks SCO and tries to make IBM look good. The result of this Groklaw site, is that IBM has gained lots of cred among open source people.
Ironically, IBM always was the evil company, until Microsoft took that role, but now MS has started to behave better. And IBM is getting back the role of the big evil company. IBM was the company that once started with FUD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt#Definition
Now IBM vs the Mainframe emulator TurboHercules has started to draw attention. IBM has released 511 patents and promised not to sue any companies. But Turbohercules has been sued!
Groklaw defends IBM vigorously on this and are using foul play. For instance, the TurboHercules founder is explaining his side on the case, and his comments are deleted – for everyone else except him. If he logs in to groklaw from another IP adress, his comments are deleted. But from his own IP adress, he can read his comments. So he believed that everyone could read his explanation, but groklaw is censoring him in a very sneaky way!
Start to read from the bottom and try to judge yourself about Groklaw. You should listen to both sides, not only IBM side.
http://ibmvshercules.com/
I’d mark this guy down as a troll if I hadn’t already posted in this thread. So I’ll just call troll on him in the reply. There’s no FUD at Groklaw – they exist to put down FUD. They are not in any way associated with IBM, and cover much more than just the SCO case. Every article is backed with actual court documents. While PJ can be a little biased (towards FOSS), you can still look at every document and make up your own mind.
So you mean that he has not been censored at Groklaw? And you mean that IBM do not try to stop him from selling the IBM Mainframe emulator? Have you read his blog, starting from the bottom? No? I suggest you do it. Lest you call him a liar.
Abusive trolls have always been censored, whether they be for or against Groklaw. PJ runs a clean blog, and doesn’t allow direct attacks, swearing, or politics. It’s one of the refreshing things about it – it’s not /. by any means.
As to the emulator, IBM doesn’t care about the emulator itself. When a fly-by-night company comes out and tries to sell it to IBM’s customers as a way to “shaft IBM”, you can expect IBM to be a little more perturbed. Also, said fly-by-night company was making wild and baseless accusations against IBM as the documents prove. A letter for IBM is not the same as being sued or even attacked.
You’re a troll, or brainwashed by that guy’s blog. Look at the FACTS, not the rhetoric of one guy trying to make a sleazy buck off a FOSS project they aren’t even involved in.
So I have been brainwashed by this guy who is sued by IBM? You claim that PJ, founder of Groklaw, doesnt allow abusive or foul language on Groklaw? But he used no abusive languange, he has shown what he posted on his blog. It was only his side of the story. But you mean we should only listen to IBMs side of the story, not his side? Do you consider that fair? So what are the facts in this story, could you state them? Maybe you have misinterpreted some “facts”?
I mean, it is obvious that the Mainframe software emulator is a severe threat to IBM’s Mainframes. Otherwise IBM would not sued him. You can emulate a Mainframe on an x86 server. One modern x86 cpu is 5-10x faster than a Mainframe CPU. The Mainframe CPUs are dog slow. That is why IBM is afraid of TurboHercules. Because it will reveal how slow the Mainframes actually are.
What made the Amiga so good was not only it’s OS, but how well it was integrated with the computer chipset. That end up making a very responsive system, that was able to manage multiple applications (windowed or fullscreen) with only 7.16 Mhz. Something the likes of Apple and IBM were not be able to imitate until years later and using 3-5x the processing power (i386, 68020/030).
I still remember the first time I saw a Mac Plus (comparable hardware/software to the A500 I had) in the university… “I can’t do anything while formating a floppy or copying files on a disk? … What a pile of crap.
The problem was that for the most part, except some fairly good apps, that is pretty much all that the Amiga had going for it: it could format floppies in the background.
Most people do stuff with their computer, other than formatting floppies. Which is why the amiga flopped: lack of good applications.
Most people at the time had no problem using mac, and the big name apps looked like someone had put at least 10 minutes of thought into their design. Whereas for the most part, most Amiga apps looked like a five year old had vomited crayons all over them. Commodore’s only value proposition was that it was (initially) an inexpensive powerful computer that someday may do something. While Apple and the PCs were more expensive computers, maybe slightly less powerful, but that could do useful stuff (read apps) right then and there. The “does right now” always trumps “someday may do”
I loved my amiga back in the day, but it did not have the catalog of apps that DOS had, nor it had the same user friendliness the mac had. It was a great geek machine, no doubt. But the geek market is pretty small…
Edited 2010-05-17 20:38 UTC
DOS? Are you kidding? Amiga has high quality, fast and enjoyable software back then.
Any legal person want to add to the case, about what happend when a patent is found not valid cause of previous work like in this case? Do it get revoked?