I have dug through every bit of my AMOS documentation, and Francois Lionet thanks almost everyone from the doc writer to the girl who made coffee... I have never seen the name Lee Bamber in there!
I actually only registered on this forum, because this thread struck me as being seriously problematic when it comes to facts...
The Amiga was designed and developed as a console by the US company Hi-Toro(Later renamed itself Amiga)). To pay for the development of the Amiga, they designed and produced peripherals for other consoles... When the money ran out, both Atari and Commodore was interested, and by virtue of putting down the money up front, Commodore bought the company, changed the name to Commodore-Amiga inc. and finalized the design for the Amiga... Every Amiga since A1000 was designed in Germany, because Commodores german designers were masters at cutting costs...
AmigaDOS was based on Tripos, and rewritten and further developed by a company named Metacomco...
>yeah but think about it the 68k processor is far superior
>to the x86...
Agreed! For the time it was cheap and powerful, but had serious flaws which would haunt every other version of the 68k line...
>thought ya funny thing about it is the 68k was a test
>processor from AMD, which was taken over by Motorola...
Ahem... Havent been able to find anything on this, but according to all sources I could find, it was a completely homegrown Motorola project.
>i'm still shocked at what can be done on those old
>machines, i mean take my A500+ for example.
Agreed... Still use my own Amigas!
>It currently runs the factory default 68080 27Mhz
>processor
No! Motorola never made such a chip, and the a500+ never came with a 27MHz chip... Commodore was in fact ridiculed for releasing an upgraded A500 without increasing the processer speed.
>Mwhahaa, and just think 68k processors are 32bit MISC, >which also allows for very complex operations
No, it's a 32bit internal/16bit data/24bit address CISC processor...
>Kinda cool to know that the 68k baby is what was put in
>the NES,SNES,Master System,Mega Drive and Mega32x,
>god couldn't be a more versitile chip
Actually the NES/Famicom used a modified 8 bit MOS 6502 chip, somewhat similar to the ones used in the Commodore 64. The SNES used a 16bit native/8bit emulation 6502 compatible WDC 65c816 chip similar to the one in Apple II. Master System used a Zilog z80 processor. In reality the Megadrive and mega32x are the only ones using an actual Motorola 68k chip.
>hmm, amiga was so kool when it was british, but then when >epson bought it, it went down hill
It was never british and Epson never bought it!
>Erm... Gateway bought Amiga from Commodore,
No. Commodore Business Machines went bankrupt in april 1994, and the final liquidation was performed almost a year later, where German PC producer ESCOM bought majority of the assets, mainly the name, 8/16/32bit designs, patents and intellectual property and software associated. ESCOM set up a subsidiary named Commodore and moved the name and 8bit assets into this company together with their stores in holland which were now named Commodore. ESCOM had decided to rebuild themselves as Commodore and had decided to use Holland as a test market. Then after about a year ESCOM itself went into liquidation, and Gateway 2000 (Now just named Gateway) bought the AMIGA name, 16/32bit designs, patents and intellectual property and software associated. The management of the dutch subsidiary planned and executed a management buyout and signed contracts with Fujitsu and ICL, but after another 6 months, they also went into liquidation and was bought by dutch computermanufacturer Tulip Computers which are the current owners of the name and 8bit assets.
>the actual design was German (cause thats where Amiga
>themselves started and we're bought out by Commodore back
>in i think '85 might have been '86)
No... See above!
>IBM Designed the 8088 processor which is what even the
>current Xeon and Optiron processors are based upon ...
No, Intel did that themselves... When it came to Integrated microcontrollers, IBM had nothing that could touch Intel.
Intels had signed crosslicensing agreement with virtually all semiconductor companies since 1975, such as Harris, Fairchild, Advanced Micro Devices, Texas Instruments, national and others...
>i can't remember how it all began exactly if they both >simply bought the design to make or if AMD broke away from >Intel
AMD was started in 1969 by employees from Fairchild Semiconductor group,
>but however it happen'd - they've both been around since
>the very first 8088 chip,
And longer even... from before the first microprocessor!
>and if i remember it was intel that redesigned it and
>named it 8086 ... however as IBM were basically the ONLY
>computer developers at the time, design - building -
>distribution for the western business world (and quite a
>bit of the easten in the mid-80s) different versions of
>the processors were used depending on the situation.
Not true... If You search through the history of computing, You will find litterally tens of companies with semiconductor fabs both in the US and abroad in the late 70's.
>AMD kept up quite well with intel who developed newer and >faster chips right up until Pentium...
They didn't have to keep up since they had signed cross licensing agreements on all 8/16bit products... They just corrected intels errors and started production...
> if anyone remembers the earli 90s when Intel came out
>with pentium. They released this processor which ran at >half the speed of the fastest 486 processor (Dx4 120)...
>worked on full 32bit floating point processing unit, >whereas the 486 still was a 16/32bit cross breed with the
>Maths Coprocessor built in as a seperate layer.
The Pentium era marks the time decided to withdraw from the crosslicensing deals in order to make more money and not just hand over their technology to the competition.
>AMD were unsure on what the chip actually had, so making a
>copy kinda was killing them
No, the original K5 had cost next to nothing and was comparable to the Pentium... However the company NexGen had developed a CPU named NX586 which was roughly 25 percent faster than the pentium... The only problem was that NexGen was fables and was running out of cash fast, so AMD bought them and the NX586 became the K5 that we know...
>IBM bought a chip designer from sweeden called Cyrix, >NexGen (probably THE worst chips in the world ever) tried >thier hand) WinIDP also attempted.
No, Cyrix was always a Texas, USA company and never owned by IBM... However, it did sign crosslicensing agreements with IBM and Intel just like the other fabless semiconductor companies(see list above).
>which is probably why i '97 it came as the largest shock >especially to Intel when AMD released thier own version of >the Pentium2 called Althon
AMD had done what they knew worked... They didn't want to spend money on research and development when they could buy the Athlon design from DEC.
>Not being phazed Intel released thier secret weapons,
>Pentium3 and Celeron
Actually the P3 and Celeron came first...
>ya'll know what is going on today ... Pentium5
>(Northridge) vs Althon2 (Candyland) is about to begin, and
>it is quite obvious that Intel has lost because they
>refuse to drop thier prices, even with the backup of
>Microsoft if their processors in the X-Box.
No... Intel produce a better product, even though AMD's are faster clockcycle for clockcycle...
>As far as Windows goes ... 1.0 was a ripp off of XTree
>Gold, which everyone just kept using XTree Gold as well
>erm it was free hahaa
Actually, according to a memo from Bill Gates himself presented in the DR-DOS case a few years ago, it was based on the Apple GUI!
>Windows 2.0 (the ledgendary OS!) if you've ever used it
>you'll notice right away that it is MacOS 1.0 - not even
>the colours were any different, i mean how stupid was
>that!
They are not graphically alike, but when You only have 2 colours available, it was dificult to make the colours different from the ones used in the mac
>That aside you still needed to be a freaking genius to use
>the blasted thing hahaa
Yes, I never understood why they even released the bloody thing...
>Windows was the only GUIOS on the IBM Computer for almost >12years, i mean no wonder they gained a monopoly
>it wasn't until the Internet got a little more cheaper and >popular in the earli 90s that Unix the community OS was >developed.
Ahem... OS/2, UNIX, GEM etc... There were several GUI's, and MIcrosoft even released one for Xenix, their own Unix derivate...
UNIX started development in 1969, and had a GUI in the middle of the 80's...
>I hope the processor the Amiga uses is at least as
>powerful (which cant be that hard) as the current
>Intel/AMD processors.
The only real choices are x86, POWER (either PowerPC or Power4/5) or ULTRASPARC...
>Hey did anyone know that 2 of NASA launch pads still use >Amigas for all thier calculations?
Actually they have 5 Amigas handling telemetry data from satelites... Nothing to do with their launch pads I am afraid.
