#NT
1. First, DEC is definitely banking on NT to propel its Alpha chip into the
market. I have no idea about DEC and Commodore talking. The Alpha chip looks
like it will be pretty expensive from Commodore's point of view.
2. Contrary to other responses (Paul Idol's I believe), IBM and Microsoft have
recently announced their intention to create a version of NT for the PowerPC
chip. As a side note, I find this bizarre behavior on IBM's part since they're
running an ad right now that says "N"ice "T"ry, slamming NT vs OS/2, yet
they're now intent on it being ported to PowerPC!? Do they not intend to
support OS/2 down the road? And then there's the OS that Apple and IBM are
jointly developing for the PowerPC as well. Highly confusing. I guess it's
just IBM covering all bases.
3 & 4. Before we start thinking that NT might be "coming to an Amiga near you",
realize that it is HUGE, and contrary to "the Amiga way". The Amiga OS is
compact, very efficient, and can run on machines with relatively little memory.
NT (right now) takes 60MB of hard disk space at least, and really requires 16MB
of RAM to run. Hardware similar to the Amiga OS! I think we really have to
ask ourselves what we would like the Amiga to be. I think some Amiga users
might say "don't make the OS huge, but it would be nice to run some of the
other applications out there." That's a VERY difficult thing to deliver. So I
think it's key to look at what we want. The original Amiga intention was an
affordable creative machine with a state-of-the-art OS design that could run
with very little (256K back then) memory. Do we really want Commodore to move
away from those goals? We must be careful of what we wish for – we might just
get it!
Looking forward to your comments….
Paul.