#Open Letter to CEI
In his post "Open Letter to CEI", Mark Manes urged the likely future owners
of the Amiga technology to build a laptop Amiga and finish AAA. That's good,
but not nearly enough. Whoever is the new owner of the Amiga should read
everything they can get their hands on by Carver Mead, Silicon Prophet, and, in
his words, "listen to what the silicon is telling you." The first hardware
priority should be sub-micron chip designs rendered by top foundries. This
power-hungry battery-eating NMOS stuff should be completely abandoned — _ALL_
the chips in the Amiga should be fast CMOS. Commodore committed a grave sin,
in my opinion, by buying MOSTEK and then letting it wither away and die on the
vine, instead of using this once powerful, talented company to its best effect.
Had they not been so self-centered, greedy, stingy and short-sighted, we could
have had laptop Amigas by 1988 or 1989, and AAA by 1992! If they had even kept
pace with the rest of the industry, let alone foster a little innovation now
and then, the Amiga could have completely led so many fields, from high-
resolution displays to digital signal processing, instead of saving a few mils
by using cut-rate technologies and factory-second ideas.
Of course, it's useless to speculate on "what might have been" now, but I
can't help it, and the more I think about it the angrier I get.
IMO, the top three of the Amiga's "Secrets of Success" were (and are) its
amazingly flexible, versatile and (most importantly) multitasking operating
system; the fact that it has _both_ a point & click _and_ a command line
centered interface; and the co-processor chips. Of these, the first two were
constantly pushed by Amiga users. Remember ARP, the AmigaDOS Replacement
Project? AREXX? CrossDOS? These and hundreds of other improvements and
innovations were written or demanded by thousands of talented Amiga users,
programmers and developers and by the programming staff they managed to hang on
to (saints all, if you ask me). But the design of silicon chips is not
something for talented amateurs or even the largest Amiga developers. It is
very capital-intensive, requiring at least as much vision, perseverance and
courage as money. Sadly, Commodore fell short in all of these, and in this
area we users could not make up the difference.
-=SIGH=-