TOS platform (Re: Opera)

[Konrad Kokoszkiewicz <draco@mi.com.pl>]

> > It costs us nothing to try mailing them.
> 
> No, ofcourse not. I'm going to do so myself :-)

As well as costs us nothing to make some noise around about the (former)
Atari platform (now called TOS platform rather) as Amiga users do about
Amigas and they succeed. We should do the same as much as possible intead
of sitting in our own club. We have even better chances to promote the 
platform and the operating system: I know from my personal experience
that people, who are using Amiga and Falcon for the first time, usually
are considering GEM based computer as more friendly and "less weird" than
Amiga (yes, I have a Falcon and Amiga 3000 in my home, though the Amiga
is not mine). Also, the GEM is much faster than Amiga GUI drawing windows!
This makes very good impression on people from the outside of TOS club
(including Amiga users).

Look, how Atari world looks like these days. We have several groups of
computer owners, that is:

1) old ST users, who are cultivating so called "nostalgia". They might be
   active, do new developments, disk magazines, WWW pages and generate
   high mail traffic on USENET, but their only concern is "1 MB STFM with 
   TV and floppy". In fact, they're lost in my opinion, because their
   addiction to the ST is like most 8-bit addicts are feeling to 8-bit
   computers these days. Id est, it's nice to play old hits (from time
   to time), but nothing more.

2) active ST users who would like to get a better Atari, but have no
   money. They mostly end-up with a PC, but some of them get second
   hand Falcons or TTs instead. Our rule would be to convince them to
   stay in the Atari world. Of course, we can do nothing about prices
   :) but we can make the Falcon/TT platform more attractive.

3) Falcon/TT users. Their machines are good enough to compete with
   other computers, but they may want to upgrade their computers or
   change them to TT clones. To do that, they must believe it is worth
   doing.

4) Few clone users. We have to support them as much as possible by
   developing software for them and patching programs (when necessary)
   to run on 040/060.

5) Musicians & DTP teams, who are rarely interested in Atari itself,
   but rather in music software.

The common thing for all these groups (and probably few others I missed)
is that they're constantly and subsequently loosing users instead of
getting new people from the outside of the Atari world. Our rule would
be to make the platform more attractive and to make enough noise in the
media and on the Internet to get noticed and to convince people that
a TOS based computer is worth considering buying for the money it costs
and its an option besides PCs, Apples, Amiga or something.

In fact, there are some people in the outside, whose are potentially ours.
First of all, they're PC-GEM addicts (yes, they exist :)). We can get them
just coming with a TT running MiNT & N.AES vel GEM 4 and saying: "hey, you
think the GEM is the best GUI ever made? Look, here you have fast,
multitasking GEM with lots of software on a platform that can have 256 MB
of RAM, gigabytes of hard drive, good graphics, digital sound and friendly
people across the world". Or something like that :)

Next group are PC (or something) owners who are disappointed with their
computers. Again, we come up with a TT or Falcon, and say: "Look, this
computer is perhaps not so fast, than a Pentium, but its processing power
is used the good way. No constant swapping, fast & compact software, no
bad crashes, no need to reinstall the system once a week or more often.
What do you need? A multitasking? Here, its MiNT. A mouse driven, simple,
easy to understand GUI? Here, its N.AES & Thing desktop. Networking? Here,
you have MiNT Net. A text editor? Here, its 1st Word Plus. What? 1st Word
is not good enough? So, perhaps Papyrus Gold is better! :) DTP software?
Yeah, here, Calamus SL, DA'S Vector, Arabesque Pro, Convector 2, Photo
Studio Pro, DA'S Picture (& perhaps lotsa others I forgot). Music? What
music, professional or protracker, or perhaps you just want to play with
sound processing?...." etc.etc.etc.

Generally, we should drop the usual Atarian philosophy, that says "Yes, I
know that Atari is the best, but nobody will admit the same, so I'd better
shut up sitting home and try to convert a Papyrus document into MS Word
format". Wrong!!! It is the MS Word what has to know how to import Papyrus
documents!!!! :))))))) If we are sitting in our club, silent and
completely isolated, we WON'T get noticed by the external world. 

Of course, we shouldn't follow Microshrot, concerning only commercials and
advertisments and doing nothing except that. As we are software & hardware
people, we should first of all be concerning with supporting the platform
with that. Sad to say, for now, and for the near future, its has to be
done for free or almost for free. And its being done this way, but we
should change our mind. For now all developments are done in order to
"keep the platform and help it to survive". It won't survive, because
there's no other side of the street we're crossing. We just are'nt
crossing anything, the PC domination is not a temporal pestilence what
could stop by itself and we aren't waiting for it to happen. We're going
straight on a street (not cross), so to survive as Atarians, we HAVE to
look to the future and in this future we have to see the TOS platform
existing, alive & kicking ;)

The only way to do that is to convince new people to join us.

There is a lot of things we're lacking to make the platform attractive, 
but if we only want, we can fill this hole out. As I am thinking about it,
these things first of all are:

1) A good, fast, MiNT-only WWW browser, what you Jo were talking about. As
far as I know, Odd Skancke is developing something like this. Perhaps it
should be a larger project, but its up to him to make sources available
for more developers experienced in 68030 assembler and networking.

2) An ethernet card for Falcon & TT, for a reasonable price. It may
be just a connector for a PC ethernet. These days its a need.

3) A PC and Mac emulator for TT, Hades and Afterburner machines (perhaps
for Falcon too). I was considering starting such a program, because I
think I got enough experience with emulation while developing the EmuXL
for Falcon. But I am lacking PC & mac knowledge.

4) New MiNT distribution, based on the KGMD, but remade and upgraded with
all new Unix software we got last two years. This distribution should be
   a) English
   b) fully modular (scripts should allow to add/remove modules to/from
      working system)
   c) upgradable (provided with some standard modules made from new
      software by a distribution team and made public; such modules
      could be automatically added to the existing system without a 
      pain).

5) New memory management for the MiNT kernel (mainly to avoid the annoying
   memory fragmentation effect).

7) platform specific developments, like critical portions of the kernel.
   device drivers, and generally as much stuff as possible should be
   written directly in pure assembler. Assembler programs is the only
   hope for the 68030/40/60 to kick Wintel & PowerPC ass.

8) we should also slowly being to prepare to move to another processor
   such as Motorola PowerPC or DEC Alpha. This will need a Motorola
   68k-line emulation software for them and a solution for a system
   capable to run 68k software as well as PowerPC software!
 
9) drivers for modern printers and scanners!!

10) ... and few other details.

> I agree 100%, but this is the problem: How big is the
> TT/Falcon/clone-market? Are there 3000 potential Opera-buyers out
> there? I'd say mail them, but I wouldn't expect Opera to invest a lot
> of time and money in a product they most likely won't make any money
> on.

The point is to make the market bigger, not just sit and complain that it
is small. 

> > should try to convince them to do Atari version, as MiNT users - to select
> > MiNT as the OS and MiNT Net as the networking stack. Otherwise we'll just
> 
> I don't think there are enough MiNT/MiNTnet-users with powerful
> computers out there to make a Opera-port commercially viable.
> Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm afraid I'm right. But as I said, I'm
> going to mail them anyway.

That's why we should convince existing Atarians to move to MiNT/MiNT-Net.
A browser implementation, like Opera, coming from the "professional"
world (even if the CAB is a bit better), would help people to make a
decision on moving to the MiNT-Net.

By the way, since Kay Roemer (it seems) has dropped the MiNT Net
development, perhaps we need some guy with enough BSD & TCP/IP experience
to continue that. MiNT Net 1.01 seems to contain some bugs (land.c) also
new IP-style is coming!

That's all for now. :)

Konrad M.Kokoszkiewicz
mail: draco@mi.com.pl
http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~conradus/
http://www.obta.uw.edu.pl/~draco/

** Ea natura multitudinis est,
** aut servit humiliter, aut superbe dominatur (Liv. XXIV,25)
*************************************************************
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