| [Forum] Any interest in Zorro cards? | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 16-Dec-2001 01:32 GMT by Ian Stedman | 147 comments
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I am currently toying with the idea of designing a Zorro card for the Amiga. What would the interest be in a card with the following:
10/100 mbit Ethernet, 2 X High speed serial ports, 1 X ECP/EPP parallel port & IrDa?
There is some preliminary information on my website
I am also looking at the possibility of adding a Zorro to ISA bridge and making the card work in Zorro 2 and Zorro 3 Amigas.
Are there any other features you would like?
If you are interested, please email me. If there is enough interest I will look at making some prototypes and if feasible, a short production run.
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| Any interest in Zorro cards? : Comment 136 of 147 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Dave Haynie on 19-Dec-2001 07:11 GMT | In reply to Comment 130 (Sandals):
>-Um, buy the same argument I can claim that BeOS's first attempt was with PPC
>-hardware and it too failed, which is why they moved to an Intel platform. So
>-what does that prove? It proves that BeOS failed on PPC and on Intel. What's
>Did you pay attention at all what was going on during that time? The reason
>they switched from PPC (Namely Apple Macintosh systems) is because Apple closed
>the hardware specs off from third party developers and refused all attempts at
>negotiations with BeOS to continue development, so they were kind of forced
>into the 80x86 market.
This is true. By this time, Be had already killed off their own hardware. I was out at Be in January of '97, I saw Joe Palmer's followup to the BeBox, and as cool as it was (and it was cool), it made some sense for Be to give up on the hardware, at the time. After all, they wanted success in software, and an OS is a hard-sell if you're also in competition with the same HW companies you expect to have selling your OS. This is the reason Amiga, Inc. isn't getting into hardware, either.
At the time, it really looked like there would be an open PowerPC platform, based around the CHRP spec. Be was getting all kinds of help from Power Computing, who obviously saw BeOS as a better thing to run on their hardware than MacOS.
>BeOS was enjoying considerable success until Apple screwed them over, a lot of
>Mac people were dumping the underpowered, underfeatured, slow MacOS and >switching to BeOS.
But it was only a developer thing. There were few apps actually released, the OS was changing in bit ways, etc. Apple cancelled MacOS licensing in the late summer of '97, and that's when Be hit their first major roadblock. All of the PPC750 (what Apple calls "G3") machines from Power Computing, Motorola, etc. were CHRP compliant. None of Apple's were, and in fact, the hardware was closed, so you couldn't just power BeOS to it. That was the real snag, and what led Be to port to x86. And that's where they finished BeOS, and were on the verge of real success in the desktop music market when they pulled the plug. The sad reality is that technical success, then success with developers, is not yet commercial success. They basically paniced at that point, and really couldn't find any place to quickly make real money on BeOS.
>-market. However, the first lesson is that it's much harder to move into the
>-mainstream hardware market then it is into the software market. Take careful
>If Be had control of the hardware to begin with they would not have had to >close down.
Be's closing down had nothing to do with control of the hardware -- these things happened years apart from one another. Of course, a little fortune telling about the whole Apple move would have left them better prepared for the move. Their lack of a HAL or similar platform porting strategy is what really kept them off the G3 Macs -- Be wouldn't port there, but if was possible to do without the kernel sources (which it wasn't), someone would have, using the Linux sources. The x86 move was complicated by the fact you have so much HW to support as a drop-in on existing PCs. They should have become aggressive about getting BeOS pre-configured PCs into the hands of fans.
But the bottom line is they simply ran out of money and ideas. They really were about to win the high-end piece of the audio software market; half the companies in that market had announced products, the other half were clearly taking notice. They all pulled out when Be announced the jump from BeOS to BeIA. And that was, IMHO, a stupid move as well, since especially back then, x86 wasn't a great platform for embedded systems like "information appliances", even if you neglect the questionable validity of that market segment for a minute. It has since improved a bit, and will get better still if Transmeta stays healthy, but that's too late to help Be.
> -note that Be's hardware department closed far before the software department
> See reasons above.
See what I said. Be's closing of HW development was a strategic move, and no one had a real problem with it, it was the right decision for them at the time. If anything, Apple's rapid move away from open systems is an indication that it was all too successful. Motorola has spent $90 million or so on their new G3-based CHRP systems, due to launch that fall. When I saw these running MacOS 7.6, back at Apple in January of '97, they were widely regarded as the fastest MacOS machines Apple had seen. Power Computing, UMAX, PIOS (later Metabox), etc. were making faster hardware than Apple already, this was yet-again faster, and cheaper to make. Then you add in BeOS, and I really think Apple paniced, as their reason to exist was fading with the improvements in open PPC computing.
> -did. So, we could make the same mistake BeOS did by going to PPC, and when we
>I guess by that reasoning Apple should dump their entire Macintosh line and
>port everything over to 80x86 since that would make them more competitive and
>increase their chances of survival, right?
Actually it would. There are people (me, for instance) who would give MacOS a try, who wouldn't in a zillion years buy an expensive, slow, proprietary PPC system from Apple. In their current business model, Apple will never be anything but a niche player. If they're happy at that, fine. But really, Linux beat out MacOS a year ago as the #2 personal computer OS. They're just going to shrink, as more people leave Macs behind. Apple's 10% technology (ok, sure, they do actually make their own, rather than copy other people) and 90% ego. The Macfaithful out there make the nuttiest Amiga zealots appear well balanced and well informed, living in that "reality distortion field" that eminates from Cupertino.
>-threatened by it. It is there mostly for nostalgia sake, the real Amiga will
>-emerge as the AmigaOne. Hopefully it will be succesful. I have my doubts, but
>-that's my opinion and I'm allowed that (I hope).
>The AmigaOne will never make it to market.
I don't have a real info on this, one way or another. I also don't see anything particularly "Amiga" about the specs on this system, either. The idea of cabling to an A1200 is just plain stupid, though. That's a 3rd party kludge, not a flagship system.
>-By pissing off other Amiga users like myself. Going around calling people
>-idiots because they see things a little differently isn't exactly helping your
>
>Umm, news flash, you are an idiot. You want to marginalize the Amiga into >nonexistance.
News flash: new Amigas have been non-existant since the early 90s. Plain old everyday PCs have as much in common with the post-A3000/post-68K architectures we had in mind for that next Amiga generation that never came, as anything else you're going to find. Plain and simple, all anyone's really arguing about these days is the CPU. Everything else in the system, PPC or x86 or something else, is PCI based, CPU-indepenedent, etc.
As for the CPU, why does it matter so much to anyone, ancient religions aside? If you want to run legacy Amiga programs, you're running a 68K emulator. If not, you're running new code. The goal is to put that on a fast, low-cost platform. Sadly, Apple's moves in the PPC market have forced it to be a niche processor, not competitive with the x86 for desktop machines. Does anyone really think hitching any possible Amiga future to a slower, more expensive CPU is the right way forward?
> I guess by that reasoning noone would ever touch Linux or the Macintosh
> either,
In the Macintosh case, that's increasingly true.
-Dave |
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