Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: 'Best' Poser PC System? Conflicting stories. Help!

Philywebrider opened this issue on Dec 18, 2004 ยท 69 posts


duanemoody posted Sun, 26 December 2004 at 2:33 PM

I don't know when it was conceived but the ST IMO was Atari's chance to shine. Tramiel AFAIK was the one who was associated with it, hence the nickname Jackintosh. I don't know much (anything) about the game systems or the 8 bits. The difference between an 800XL and a 7200 game unit is almost identical to a PC and an XBox. The 8-bit unit OS/architecture is from 1980 and never intended to run DTP or Internet. Apps have been written by hobbyists to prove the concepts but they're painful to watch. The company may well have been better run but tech-wise, I don't see how the 800 type machines were much of a future in the PC world. The ST on the other hand with a laser printer and a quality DTP program in Calmus, etc. at a fration the price of a Mac when the PC was still emerging from 80 column character mode had great promise. In reality, it may have never had a real chance against Apple/Wintel but they never really got enough market awareness to give it a shot.

When the ST came out I was an 8-bit Atari loyalist with great skepticism about the difference between the ST and the Mac. After all, they had GUIs, mice, and the same microprocessor. It took actually using a Mac in our lab for a few weeks to get the difference, and an OS-level graphics library was a large part of it.

Hard to remember, but MacOS had three important things ST/Amiga didn't:

Graphics library which meant styled text or any graphic (even vector) could be pasted into any office suite application, not just between two applications written by the same vendor.

An OS designed with computer-nonrastered output in mind.

System level printer drivers.

ST and Amiga in their equivalent incarnations were not nearly as carefully structured OSes, and software support suffered for it. Message edited on: 12/26/2004 14:37