
XOR patent ended CD32, and Commodore-Amiga  - robin_reala
http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html
======
rbanffy
Erm... I see XOR for blinking cursors is obvious and should never be patented,
but to blame only that for Amiga's demise is... a bit of an exaggeration.
Management deserves most - in fact, almost all - of the credit for driving
Commodore into the ground.

It's such a shame. Commodore made great computers.

The Amiga had sort of an identity problem. It was born a videogame console and
NTSC timing was pervasive throughout the system and that made the design more
complex as the machines evolved. They should have gotten rid of that as soon
as they launched their second-generation machines.

~~~
Maci
Technically the Amiga Platform has always been rather agnostic about it's
timing & video output. It spits out PAL / NTSC / RGBS in various funky
resolutions, all you have to do is ask or set a jumper depending on the model.
Secondly if it wasn't for this spot on NTSC carrier frequency that the Amiga
could output we would never have seen products such as the Video Toaster.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster>

Or this oddity, the A2024 with a 10hz-15hz refresh rate: <http://www.amiga-
hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=863>

~~~
zandorg
Vaguely related, is that I once hooked up a monochrome VGA monitor to my Amiga
1200 by soldering the monitor's cable to a suitable Amiga video connector, and
setting it up to be 640x480 VGA in the OS settings.

Worked a treat!

------
Sodaware
Here's the patent in question:
<http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT4197590>

------
brlewis
It's easy for HN to see that the XOR patent is obvious, and not just in
hindsight. Convincing a court is not so easy. The solution is not to get rid
of quote-unquote bad software patents, but to adhere to the Supreme Court
precedents that make software per se non-statutory. Any patent whose novelty
and non-obviousness is claimed only in software should rightly be invalid.

~~~
monochromatic
> Supreme Court precedents that make software per se non-statutory

Got a citation for that? I didn't think so.

~~~
brlewis
I agree with the citations from the 1970s here:
<http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html>

I disagree with their description of the 1981 Diehr opinion as saying "the
only new feature of this invention was the timing process controlled by the
computer". The dissent said this, not the majority. The dissent was based on
the facts of the case, not law. Diehr was not a departure from earlier
precedent.

EDIT: Not only did the Court majority not say what bitlaw says in the Diehr
opnion, they contradict it: "According to the respondents, the continuous
measuring of the temperature inside the mold cavity, the feeding of this
information to a digital computer which constantly recalculates the cure time,
and the signaling by the computer to open the press, are all new in the art."

<http://brlewis.com/y/2004/diehr.htm>

~~~
monochromatic
To the extent those old cases are in conflict with Bilski, they are not
binding precedent.

~~~
brlewis
What does Bilski say that conflicts with them?

~~~
monochromatic
I would argue that it doesn't say anything that conflicts with them. But you
were citing old cases as authority for software being per se nonstatutory
subject matter, and that's pretty clearly not true in the post-Bilski world.

~~~
brlewis
Theoretically, if the only opinions that conflict with those old cases are
from lower courts, then they're still valid precedent. However, you're quite
right that in today's world you're unlikely to get a patent overturned because
of Benson or Flook. This difference between theory and practice irks me.

~~~
monochromatic
I meant Supreme Court's Bilski, not Fed Circuit's Bilski.

~~~
brlewis
Bitlaw opines that the Supreme Court's Bilski didn't clear things up. I'd be
interested in seeing a concise analysis stating otherwise.

[http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/bilski-and-software-
pa...](http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/bilski-and-software-patents.html)

~~~
monochromatic
Don't get me wrong, I don't think SCt Bilski does anything but muddy the
water. But it's simply not the case that there is binding precedent that
software is nonstatutory. That's all I was talking about.

~~~
brlewis
From a practical standpoint, you're absolutely right, and I certainly hope
nobody takes what I'm saying as legal advice.

From what's actually written in the Supreme Court opinions I've read, every
software patent I've seen discussed on HN should be invalid. Benson and Flook
were super clear. Diehr was long and hard to read, but when you boil it down,
it didn't change anything; it merely clarified that software as part of an
invention doesn't automatically make the whole invention nonstatutory. I
haven't read Bilski, but it sounds like SCOTUS punted on clarifying things
because they think it should be Congress's job.

Until Congress steps up and clarifies, I think the previous Supreme Court
decisions should be law. But they aren't. I find that extremely annoying.

------
jefffoster
Previous discussion here (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545178>)

------
nekoZonbi
Somehow, when I was a kid, and I got my first computer, it was an Amiga 3000.
The amiga was already dying, but as a kid I was not able to at first realize
that.

What personally killed the Amiga for me, was the graphics power. The Amiga
3000 "enhanced chipset", best graphic mode was 320x200 with 64 colors (extra
half brigth). Meanwhile, PC VGA displays 800x600 and 1024x768 256 colors were
starting to become popular on the PC side. The Amiga was clearly behind.

The Amiga was also capable of 640x400, but only with 16 colors. And the "HAM"
mode, 4096 simultaneos colors on low res 320x200, suffered from "color
fringing" and was mostly unusable.

What would have made me happy back then, was a 736 x 482 overscan mode with
4096 real simultaneous colors.

I wish I could restore all the game demos that I made back then with Amos
Basic. lots of simple games, a basic doom clone, musical apps, etc. I would
love to give a look at that code again.

------
EdwardMSmith
Hmm, I wonder about the accuracy of this, specifically about CD32s not being
imported.

I worked, at that time, for the largest Amiga dealer in the US, and we built a
couple hundred multimedia display kiosks using CD32s and Paravision SX-1s. We
had no trouble getting them (well, other then the usual Commodore supply
issues of the time).

Oh, wow, found an old email about this:

<http://www.howtomakeanimations.info/cd32sx1mm300-problems>

freaky.

~~~
epmos
I remember reading about it at the time. As I recall, some units had gotten in
before the majority were seized. I have a CD32 ( complete with an SX-1 ) in my
garage that likely was one of your display kiosks at one time.

I have never been quite as excited over a machine as when I got my Amiga 500.
I had owned a Commodore Plus/4 and a 128 since middle school and high school,
and bought the 500 to start college. It was quite an amazing little machine
for it's day.

Then again, I haven't ever been 17 again either, so that might explain it.

~~~
StudyAnimal
I remember when I had a C64, and my friend wanted a computer for xmas, and we
were pestering his had to get the 128, which was the best computer we knew of
at the time. Then on xmas day, he got an Amiga 500! We didn't even know about
those. He was pretty happy. I was pretty bummed I only had a C64.

~~~
iqster
I first had a C64 and then an Amiga 500 ... those were some of my best
memories as a child/teenager. My experiences with these machines undoubtedly
led me to being a Computer Scientist as an adult. There will always be a place
in my heart for Commodore.

------
al_james
Although I used to be a huge Amiga fan, I think that Amigas of the time lagged
behind other systems for gaming. PC's having chunky display formats (as
opposed to plainer (planer?) on the Amiga) meant that PC's could do far more
3D graphics than a equivalently powered Amiga, and Amigas were often
underpowered anyway. The Amiga kicked ass at 2D games, but could not hack it
in 3D.

At the end of the day, had the Amiga been a viable business, $10M in patent
fines would not have killed them off.

~~~
eftpotrm
The planar mode graphics had been a benefit in the more memory restricted days
before; it was starting to become a problem but still, at that point Amigas
tended to play the games of the day better than PCs costing 3x as much until
Doom pushed 3D to the forefront. There were enough 3D games on Amigas, but
Doom was a level beyond them for a while. Still, I did enjoy Acid Software's
Gloom which wasn't that far behind.

As a hardware platform, it was more closely tied to the individual chips but
that was rapidly fading, with OS abstraction APIs for sound and graphics
coming in around then.

As a software platform, while it lacked MMU-dependent features, in other ways
it had major benefits. Small, fast, pretty tidy, modular, customisable. Quite
frankly I'd still like something to replace the Amiga's Datatypes concept, 20
years later.

A sad loss to computing. To this day I'm baffled how Commodore managed to lose
the not-PC slot to Apple in spite of having cheaper harder with more features
and a vastly more capable operating system. I've said before here; if
Commodore had done their job properly, we'd be saying Steve Who?

~~~
jerf
I don't know much about the Amiga, but it sounds to me like the way in which
it was a "nice computer" was that it was pushing a quirky design well past
where it should actually have been, and that it was rapidly hitting the end of
the road technically regardless of what the management was doing. That is to
say, listening to descriptions of the Amiga reminds of listening to OS 9; yes,
it's full of nice things and there's all sorts of ways to argue about how it's
"better than PCs" but in the end you can't handwave around the fact that the
foundation is at or beyond its capacity and there's no way to incrementally
advance.

Apple managed to make the leap to OS X, as Microsoft managed to move to the NT
base before it. I don't see how Commodore was going to do it without being
something fundamentally different. Their machines were nice but it seems to me
they were always building machines for today, never thinking much about
tomorrow. But tomorrow comes... it always does.

I'm posting this because I'm curious about reactions; if this is flamingly
wrong I'd love to hear. I don't have direct experience, except with the
Commodore 64, which looking back was already experiencing the "make a computer
for today" problem in many ways.

~~~
kenjackson
The problem is that the management of the Amiga did little to evolve it. It
didn't need a revolution, ala OS X. It just needed refinement over time, of
which there was none. The Amiga that Commodore purchased was the Amiga that
died.

The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1984. Had VideoScape 3D in 1987.

It's hard to say that they were building computers for today, when they're
machines were doing things the mainstream OSes (Mac and Windows) wouldn't do
for a decade.

It would be like introducing the iPhone in 2000. And then doing nothing for 10
years.

I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so
far ahead of the field when released. And yet virtually all of it squandered.

~~~
kragen
> I honestly can't think of another piece of computing technology that was so
> far ahead of the field when released.

Maybe the PDP-1? Or the Tera MTA? Or the Transputer? Or the CDC 6600? Or
VisiCalc? Or the 6502? Or Intel's first X25-M SSD? Or Gmail?

Preemptive multitasking by itself isn't very interesting. It's useful if
you're running a real-time control task (in which case, on MS-DOS, you would
hook an interrupt, and fuck the lack of OS) or if you have memory protection,
which the Amiga didn't. That's why the mainstream OSes didn't have it for
another decade: because it didn't matter. (And concurrency control is _much_
simpler without it.)

The Amiga had lots of other awesome stuff in the late 1980s, stuff that (as
others pointed out) still isn't mainstream. But preemptive multitasking
without an MMU is mostly a waste of time.

