Re: TOS platform (Re: Opera)

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

> > 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.
> 
> Which IMO it isn't (worth upgrading to a TT-clone). Without quality,
> modern software, these people will move over to PCs or maybe macs.
> We must support the existing Falcon/TT users as our primary base, IMO,
> with ST users as secondary "support if possible" (ie dont exclude them,
> but dont fudge it to make it compatible if it needs high-rez, new AES
> and a fair bit of memory).

No, because this would be an attempt to conserve the existing state. Which
is impossible to be conserved. To avoid loosing Atari users in the future
we should concentrate on clones like Hades and (hopefully) Milan.
Some sort of conservatism in the Atari world always meant in practice that
the newest machine was remaining unsupported because everybody was
concentrated on older computers which had larger base of users. But when
these users wanted to change the machine, they noticed that a newer Atari
exists, but is unsupported. So they moved to PC/Mac.

> > 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
> 
> I'm sorry, but I really cannot see the Atari market growing rather than
> shrinking... Maybe I'm being to pesistic, but 

That's what I wrote above.

> > you have MiNT Net. A text editor? Here, its 1st Word Plus. What? 1st Word
> 
> Everest or QED, but not FWP... it was good in 1987 when I bought it, but
> now it really doesn't cut it...

Well, I am a journalist and I don't find the 1st Word as unusable. This is
perhaps not good, but a decent wordprocessing program. Of course it has
some bugs worth fixing, f.e. stupid Malloc(Malloc(-1)-10240), but it is
usable for creating texts. Even Calamus 95 imports its documents!

> > The point is to make the market bigger, not just sit and complain that it
> > is small. 
> 
> Do you really expect more people to join the Atari community than leave it?
> I dont.

Don't sit complaining. More positivity please :)

> > That's why we should convince existing Atarians to move to MiNT/MiNT-Net.
> 
> Yes, at the moment MiNTnet is seen as "use it for PPP if you cannot get StiNG
> to work". It should be the standard system, for both SLIP and PPP.

Yes. So perhaps we should fix the PPP-kit and make it easy to install and
configure with a decent docs (perhaps containing some preconfigurations).
People will consider MiNT-Net more easy then, and they finally install the
full distribution anyways ;)

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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