Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

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source is trapped in the overlap).
The first job is to fill in all the blank
spaces in the data. You do that by
working out the way the signal is
changing and use that rule to guess
the value in between two known
values by fitting a smooth line to the
scatter-graph of readings.
Even so the picture that comes out
looks horrible. This is because of the
errors introduced by the inherent
nature of the technique and the
instruments involved. This is just like,
if you squint at a light bulb,you see
lines of light appear. Or on film, a
bright light may be surrounded by
concentric rings.
Any radio source will appear to be
surrounded by such rings. When there
are hundreds of points in the picture
you can imagine the mess it makes!
Luckily you can predict how this will
happen and then remove the mess to
produce a clean image.
T was nowhere to put that clean
Image H so that it looked pretty. So
when R Jodrell bought a new Alliant
FM E mini-supercomputer to cope with
the E number crunching they also
bought
o
an Amiga as a "crude graphics
terminal" — thanks for the
compliment, r Dave.
f Incidentally, the Alliant uses
68010120s o for I/O control and
terminal u handling, and the four main
parallel r processors use a very
y
e
a
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A DOS by any other name
A despite the bugs. It's not till you
Muse
big machines like the ones at Jodmil
Ithat
you realise why AmigaDOS is so
Cpolished.
To put it nicely (and not get
Asued)
AmigaDOS is a Unixclone. The
DAmiga's
CLI is like UNIX's VMS. You
Ofind
yourself trying to use CLI
S commands when you shouldn't.
i Unix is the operating system used by
s university and scientific computers. It
qwas
developed in a university in the
u
USA several years ago (mainly in C),
i
and is used by just about everyone.
Which is, incidentally, why a worm
t
e
a
extended n 68020 instruction set,
making i it the one of the fastest
running c computers to use a 68000 set.
e
The Alliant logs on under the name
Zaphod
D
(because it has four brains)
and the A500 talks to it and the VAX
O
cluster, all sharing disk space. The
S
graphics terminal emulator ran only
in . 32 colours, which was odd
considering that the palettes used are
perfect for HAM.
On the other hand. as Dave says, it
would have been nice, but they
needed something straight away, and
It was pointless spending any time
developing software, seeing the way
they expected to go hardwarewise.
Looking around, I kind of see what
Personal. As tronotli coil Work S tocti on
• FEATURE •
M
virus brought down a lot of Internet i
OPn the US a couple of years ago. Internet
contains, among others, Milnet,
ARPAnet (Pentagon networks) and
NASA networks.
So where does Workbench come
from? Well, just boot up a Sun
workstation and you'll see. The whole
concept and layout is so similar it's
incredible. In fact I think Amiga
window handling is more friendly.
I guess that's not too suprising,
seeing how — as folklore will have it —
Amiga software was being developed
and emulated on Suns before the first
pre-production A1000 was completed.
he means. Now the Amiga is used as
the intelligent end of a two-piece
graphics workstation. The other end
is a high definition, 256 colour, Ikon
monitor with a microprocessor
thrown in as an afterthought.
So the pictures made from radio
waves that had been travelling since
before life on Earth began were shown
on an A500. So next time you play
Elite or Battle Squadron, just think,
the Amiga that was next to yours in
the warehouse might just be the one
that's really been there and back!
Many thanks to Dave Shone, Tom
Muxlow, Jean Warren and Paul
Harrison for making this article
possible.
After
extensive
processing,
the quasar
can be
represented
as a false
colour
image like
this. Note
familiar
window
icons!
AMIGA COMPUTING November 1990 67