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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watmum!cdshaw
From: cdshaw@watmum.UUCP (Chris Shaw)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.micro
Subject: Re: Amiga vs Mac
Message-ID: <255@watmum.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 21:39:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmum.255
Posted: Fri Aug 16 21:39:37 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Aug-85 05:27:05 EDT
References: <8883@ritcv.UUCP> <26700024@inmet.UUCP> <3241@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Reply-To: cdshaw@watmum.UUCP (Chris Shaw)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 41
Xref: watmath net.micro.mac:2397 net.micro:11494

In article <3241> eric@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Eric Lavitsky) writes:
>In article <26700024@inmet.UUCP>, bhyde@inmet.UUCP writes:
>> 
>>  "The Amiga?  That's the machine that one ups the MacIntosh right
>>  ben hyde, cambridge
>
>Eh?, you'd better get your facts straight. The Amiga will have 20+ 
>packages available upon release - I've seen many of them. How many
>did the Mac have? 2...3? All I can remember are MacPaint and MacWrite -
>care to refresh my memory as to the other 20?
>
>Eric

This is a bogus comparison. At its official release date, nobody had seen a Mac
except for a few developers. (I think). 

At the Amiga's release, thousands of people will have seen it, touched it, etc.
The "real release" in September is a marketing ploy designed to get the Amiga
all the advance publicity one could want. The fact that Byte had an article
in August indicates (given publishing deadlines and a lack of a "last minute"
air to Byte's reporting) that the machine could just have easily been released
in May or June.

Of course, that would mean that the public would discover bugs galore
in the software, and Commodore would have to promise up a storm about forth-
coming software. 

I'm not saying that this is all a bad thing, this ploy of Commodore's.
In fact it's quite intelligent. I just wish that the public at large (or at 
Usenet in this case) would not fall into the trap of making nonsense 
comparisons. Face it, Apple won this race in February 1984. No matter how you 
slice it, the Mac has a humongous head start, and a huge installed user base.
No nonsense about number-of-software-packages-at-release is going to change
the fact that the Mac has (at least) an order of magnitude more packages now
than either the ST or Amiga.

And no, I don't own a Mac.

Chris Shaw    watmath!watmum!cdshaw  or  cdshaw@watmath
University of Waterloo
In doubt?  Eat hot high-speed death -- the experts' choice in gastric vileness !