Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!hubcap!disd
From: disd@hubcap.UUCP (Gary Heffelfinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Mr. Pournelle is brain-dead.  News at 11:00.
Message-ID: <3060@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: 26 Sep 88 20:08:21 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Lines: 43

Well, we'd always suspected it, but now it has been confirmed.  Witness
the following, reprinted without permission from "Chaos Manor" in the
October 1988, Byte ragazine:

Comments within []'s are mine.

     "The game of the month would have been F/A-18 Interceptor from 
      Electronic Arts for the Amiga, but there was a problem.  Once in a
      while someone gets lucky and gets to play the game, but most of us
      can't get past the crazy code-wheel 'security' system.  It's far
      more complicated than the game itself [sure, Jerry].  I might even
      prefer copy protection, except that Electronic Arts is the outfit
      that had a scheme for the Commodore 64 that caused the machine to
      bash its disk drives out of alignment [true].  Heaven knows what
      they could do to an Amiga.  [Hmmm. And just what are you implying
      here, Jerry?]  We'll tell you more about F/A-18 Interceptor when
      when we can find a cryptographer to help us with the code wheel."

Geez!  How tough is it to spin a few wheels?  Annoying, maybe, but
rocket science it is not.


In addition to the above burbling, he continued his unfounded statements
about how the Amiga is not stable enough to recommend to unsophisticated
users.  Maybe, but I think he's underestimating the average computer
user.  A writer friend of mine, knows nothing about CLI, but he get's
his work done just fine on the Amiga using Word Perfect.  No loss of
data in the year or so that he's been using it.  (Though, I admit that
we had a close call. :-)

To his credit, he did make the following statement:

"I did notice that at my party people stood in line to play with the
Amiga."   

That tell ya somethin', Jerry?



-- 
Gary Heffelfinger   ---   Employed by, but not the mouthpiece of 
                          Clemson University.
---===      Amiga.  The computer for the best of us.     ===---