The following article is a portion of "Chaos Manor" by Dr. Jerry
Pournelle, published in BYTE Magazine, March 1989. --
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THE AMIGA 2000 IS THE CLEAR WINNER AS THE MOST-IMPROVED COMPUTER
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The Amiga 2000 is the clear winner here [Most Improved Computer].
It's not just the hardware upgrade to the 68020 chip and a new
chip set with more video RAM (although these certainly helped).
Commodore has also greatly improved the operating system. The
Amiga 2000 will now boot from its hard disk; there's no more
Kickstart with a floppy and then calling in the workbench. The
disk access times have been improved dramatically: it used to be
that you could go get a sandwich while the Amiga read in a medium
length file.
   The Amiga 2000 is now good enough for most things you'd like a
computer for. For example, WordPerfect users will find their
favorite editor works fine on the new Amiga. Indeed, the whole
software base is expanding rapidly.
   I was just up to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(SLAC), where they use Amiga 2000s as workstations for both
secretarial and scientific staff. A great deal of work is done
locally, while the Amiga's multiprocessing capability keeps it
connected to their big mainframe. SLAC has developed software to
let a mainframe initiate an Amiga task while the Amiga is doing
something else. They use Donald Knuth's TEX scientific text
formatter; there's an excellent implementation for the Amiga.
Incidentally, the X in TEX is a Greek chi, so it's pronounced
"tek."
   SLAC has developed a whole slew of software for the Amiga. I
was quite frankly impressed with what the SLAC people can make
the Amiga do. If Commodore could manage to get the SLAC software
- most of it is public domain - and distribute it with the Amiga,
it would go a long way toward making the Amiga a machine for the