CompuServe Thread

Not so pointless really! Buy an Amiga in the first place because it's the best machine! Too bad not everyone knows this. Because not everyone knows this, inferior machines become the de facto standard resulting in two things. 1) An abundance of all kinds of software available for the lesser platforms that is not available on the better platform. 2) A great likelyhood that one's workplace will be predominantly inhabited by these lower order things. In my case, my work environment is populated with Mac heads therefore for work compatability I need a Mac. I might add that my Amiga 3000 with AMax is a better Mac than most of those hideous little boxes we have at work. I ]t's a sorry state of affairs but as far as tax accounting software goes, there's nothing on the Amiga that compares with products available on the Mac. What's even more sorry is that there are certain types of software available in abundance for msdos machines that is scarce even for Macs. For example, I'm in education and I'm responsible for test and survey scoring. Have you seen any software for the Amiga that does scoring with drivers for bubble sheet scanners? All of the software available from the agencies that want these tests can only be run on msdos machines. Frankly, I'm amazed that my Amiga handles all of this so gracefully. Being able to operate as so many different things adds to it rather than takes away from it. I can be operating these different systems and still be using my Amiga. It sure beats having the clutter of a number of boxes and I can think of these other platforms as being subsets of the Amiga. What's more, because of this expandability, I'm real close to having the powers that be convinced to buy an Amiga at work. I don't think they would even be considering it if it weren't able to assume multiple personalities. Why a Toaster box is o.k. and an Amiga isn't….. I just don't know. It does irk me a bit that the Amiga is the Rodney Dangerfield of the computer world. But [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] I've found that there are some hidden benefits. When I'm using a Mac, there's often some numbskull standing over my shoulder telling me to select this or that, pull down such and such a menu, or hit some key combination…. even when I'm the one that introduced them to computers to begin with! They just can't shutup. Some kind of compulsive need to tell you how you should be doing what you're doing. Firing up an Amiga shuts most of them up pretty fast. – Richard

That's a good one. I had a little difficulty at first with this myself. Fortunately, I don't have to do it too often as my Soft PC usage is limited to a few specific tasks and all the necessary files are on my Soft PC hard drive. First off, I have a syquest removable drive, which I highly recommend and especially to anyone using Amax, with several cartridges formatted as Mac drives. On one of these Mac drives, I have Soft PC which sets up a Dos Hard drive. My Dos hard drive has about 20 megs which is enough for my PC use. There may be a way of hooking up an external PC drive or of getting the Mac external disk drive to read PC disks. I'm not really sure on that score since I found three other ways of doing file transfers. My first method was with a modem dialed to a friends PC while in Mac emulation. You can download directly to the Mac Hard drive. You can also use CrossDos to read the MSDos formatted disk on the Amiga and transfer the files to Amiga formatted disks, then fire up Amax and use the file transfer utility to copy the files from the amiga disk to the Mac. You could also go from Amiga disks to Mac disks with MAC2DOS. The other method I used was to hook up a Mac at work to a PC with Maclink plus. Hope this helps. – Richard