The IBM CGA card has a header to connect an RF modulator. It was definitely designed to be connected to a TV. The composite signal is also NTSC-standard.

It's an rca jack on back of the card. There's a connector for an rd modulator on the card itself? News to me.

The RF header was later used to connect the internal monitor on the IBM 5155, as they could tap the composite signal from its pins, which means they didn't have to modify the CGA card or route a cable from the RCA connector at the back (the 5155 has a 200-line CGA composite screen, not an MDA/Hercules one. Theory is that the 'new CGA' design was made to offer more distinct luminance values on a monochrome screen, which benefited the 5155 output).

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2023-12-24, 02:08:

This thread feels so nostalgic for me. Reminds me of the early days of the internet where we'd argue nonstop about the little details of our hobbies. It's actually refreshing compared to how most online arguments these days devolve into mudslinging over American politics. Lol.

I heard but cannot confirm that A Mr Donald Trump was at the helm of Commodore when it went bankrupt, this is possibly just speculation however.

*This is just a joke, I own a good number of working Amiga and C64 machines, but this thread could use some levity.

I don't know what in blazes you're yammering about. It had composite out. It didn't have separate chroma and luma like a c64.

I thought it was Fabio. Or did he just play on an Amiga.

A 'composite' signal is 'composed' of various signals: the luminance, the chrominance and the sync pulses.
Luminance is basically just the 'brightness' on a monochrome screen. Chrominance ('colour information') is not decoded by a monochrome screen.
The thing is that if you take the old design CGA card, and connect it to a monochrome screen, the 16 possible colours are very close together in luminance, so you only see a few distinct shades of monochrome.
On the new design, the 16 different colours translate to 16 different luminance/brightness values, so you see 16 distinct shades of monochrome.

Ah ok. Thank you for that. Still don't know wtf it has to do with tvs 🤣 🤣 🤣.

F this anyway I'm going to bed.

A classic analog TV signal is a collection of composite signals that have been modulated into a number of frequency bands or 'channels'.
An RF ('radio frequency') modulator is a device that converts a composite signal to a frequency band or 'channel', so that you can feed it into a TV, and the TV can use its tuner to tune into that frequency band and decode the composite video data from that channel.
That's how things were done in the late 70s and early 80s, when direct composite input was not a common feature on standard TV sets.
Many computers have an RF modulator built in. The CGA card has a header to connect one. Theory has it they didn't install it in the PC because it would require extensive shielding, which would have to be tested and approved by the FCC before it could be released to market, causing a delay.
IBM never did sell its own RF modulator for the PC, but they did offer one for the PCjr. It's highly likely that the PCjr modulator can also be used on the CGA card, if you replace the connector.
Regardless, the CGA card was obviously designed to output an NTSC-compatible composite signal, which can be fed through an RF modulator to connect it to a TV.
And given that the CGA card doesn't have its own crystal, but instead takes the NTSC base clock from the ISA bus, this means that the entire PC was designed around NTSC frequencies.

Yep, know what amplitude modulation is. In the absence of a modulator you have ntsc/composite video. Your point that it was included to keep costs down is valid (the rs-170 banana jack). Even if it never went anywhere near a tv (a horrifying thought). The 14.318??? Mhz crystal was probably used because of it's ubiquity. Another cost cutting move. I doubt the IBM PC was designed to be used with TV sets.

These IBM ads from 1981 literally say "hooks up to your home TV":

The Byte article from January 1982 reviewing the then-new IBM PC also specifically mentions connecting to a television:
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-198 … up?view=theater

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-12-24, 01:21:

Wolfus wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:55:

AppleSauce wrote on 2023-12-24, 00:39:

The main reason this annoys me is because you see amiga forums with threads literally going on for like 1000 pages of just people screaming at each other about how the amiga should have been handled,
honestly it almost resembles a madhouse.

There was similar figbt here not a long ago between Intel and AMD fans 🤷

Yeah I'm not suprised and I wish they didn't.

I avoid inserting these sorts of non-sequiturs when a conflict occurs because they are themselves off-topic, but decide to offer a reminder in this case since this was brought up explicitly.

VOGONS has a set of community standards that everyone agrees to follow when posting here. If you notice other community members derailing threads or engaging in personal attacks and it’s impossible to engage with them constructively to stay on topic, please flag those posts. It is expected that strong disagreements will occur among groups of people who are very passionate about a subject, and also that everyone has bad days and makes mistakes from time to time, but we do keep track and ban users who are consistently unable to follow the rules. It is important to me to try to have VOGONS be an place where people are able to have open discussions about sensitive subjects without devolving into the sorts of flame wars that are prevalent in most other online spaces today.

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-23, 20:36:

The C64, nor the Amiga 1000/2000, were suitable for business computing. That was my basic argument from the getgo many pages ago. A person who states a PCjr is every bit as suitable for a business environment as a real PC on account of some aftermarket hacks is going to have an awful hard time convincing a prospective buyer to give it a go. It seems you argue every point regardless. Units have specific features out of the box. You claim it doesn't matter as an add-on can make it all seem kosher. Apples don't become oranges just because you skap orange paint on them.

Was I conflating scan doubling and flicker fixing? Yes I was. My mistake. That doesn't change the fact that Commodore decided.the saddle the Amiga.1000/2000 (3000/4000 is a later model and no one gives a fuck) with substandard graphics with regard to data processing and such. It was a huge mistake imho. But it is wha it is. Some people could stare at that grainy shit. When I was EIGHTEEN I said no way. I never wore glasses or contacts either. And that was nearly 40 years ago.

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 02:03:

The Amiga had blase graphics (at hi-res) and it's monitors were lower class. Not professional grade. Which is fine you get what youbpay for. But the PC world just had so many options. With the Amiga you were stuck. That's just tje facts.

you might want to read up about the Video Toaster

Together, the hardware and software provided, for a few thousand U.S. dollars, a video editing suite that rivaled the output of contemporary (i.e. early 1990s) professional systems costing ten times as much. It allowed small studios to produce high-quality material and resulted in a cottage industry for video production not unlike the success of the Macintosh in the desktop publishing (DTP) market only a few years earlier. The Video Toaster won the Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in 1993.[2] Other parts of the original software package were spun off as stand-alone products, notably LightWave 3D, and achieved success on their own.

LightWave 3D

LightWave was used to create special effects for the television series Babylon 5,[2] Star Trek: Voyager, Space: Above and Beyond, seaQuest DSV,

lets also not forget Traces the predecessor to Blender

the various IBM compatible and motorolla accelerators aside 1990 the Amiga 3000 had the first ECS "enhanced chipset" super denise chip allowing graphics modes called 'productivity modes' up to 1280×512 and yes including 640x480 non interlaced, a revised Amiga500+ also had this chip upgrade, it could also be retro fitted to earlier revision Amiga500s, whereas most IBM machines around that time stock would not do above 640x480 so from a pure business perspective you would have better screen realestate for text based applications over IBM from a stock Amiga.

either way these wild emotionally charged arugements are strange. IBM like most companys of the era used utterly brutal tactics to bully smaller competition, then quickly lost market share in the clone era. Amiga went the way it did via a tale as old as time that is incompetent upper management. the term "paying the IBM tax" didn't pop up without a reason

reguardless both companies sold specific products, Commodore clearly wanted to cut into the business market and by their own admission they had no idea how to market the original Amiga as it was a multimedia powerhouse and the numerous musicians, film, tv and game companies that utilized it demonstrated how it was a buisness machine.

I'm fairly new to vintage hardware i grew up with pentiums 2 and up, arguing over which company/product is better is kinda pointless, they released different products at varied prices, each with their own advantages and disadvantages be it from stock or otherwise. but claiming amigas where useless for business is factually wrong.

OriginalDan wrote on 2023-12-24, 10:51:

reguardless both companies sold specific products, Commodore clearly wanted to cut into the business market and by their own admission they had no idea how to market the original Amiga as it was a multimedia powerhouse and the numerous musicians, film, tv and game companies that utilized it demonstrated how it was a buisness machine.

One thing I distinctly recall is that the Amiga was wildly misunderstood by most business users, because it was just too far ahead of its time.
People were used to business machines using text-only displays and working from a command prompt, running one program at a time.
Yes, there was the Apple MacIntosh, but this was generally considered mainly a DTP machine, not for other kinds of tasks, because people weren't used to a GUI.
And the Mac didn't have multitasking either.
People just didn't understand why you would want a GUI, they would think it looks too flashy, not business-like.
And they also didn't understand why you would want to be able to run more than one program at a time.
It wasn't until the early 90s when Windows NT became commonplace, that people would finally get used to GUIs for any type of application, and they would see why multitasking matters.
Now it's the other way around I suppose. People who grew up with a GUI and multitasking will probably have a hard time working on a machine with text-only and capable of running only one application at a time.

The same goes for the graphics and sound capabilities. For some reason people would think that because it was capable of colourful animation and high-quality digital audio, that it somehow was NOT capable of business stuff.
It's a really weird case of flawed logic... People thought business machines HAD to look boring, and HAD to not be very capable in the multimedia department in order to be good at business tasks (in which case the horribly poor graphics and sound capabilities of the IBM PC are exactly what you want).
These days people use their 'business machines' for playing video and music all the time, so they finally figured it out.

Scali wrote on 2023-12-24, 11:00:

One thing I distinctly recall is that the Amiga was wildly misunderstood by most business users, because it was just too far ahead of its time.
People were used to business machines using text-only displays and working from a command prompt, running one program at a time.

In 1985 there wasn't Internet in common use; there wasn't any need for a browser — and I mean present Firefox/Chrome, capable to handle Javascript and other such nonsense, without which one can forget to access most WWW sites. That's why business people were considering text-only displays as good enough.
„Running one program at a time”? Not having any Internet at your disposal — therefore not having a need to glance at, say, stock rates reported in real-time on some WWW page — and not having any need for running your mailer in background (there were no mailers) — most of the time you wouldn't have to run more than just one program at a time even today.

The Internet means distraction!

Universities had internet.

Did Linus Torvalds ever give his opinion of the Amiga?

OriginalDan wrote on 2023-12-24, 10:51:

you might want to read up about the Video Toaster […]
Show full quote

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-23, 20:36:

The C64, nor the Amiga 1000/2000, were suitable for business computing. That was my basic argument from the getgo many pages ago. A person who states a PCjr is every bit as suitable for a business environment as a real PC on account of some aftermarket hacks is going to have an awful hard time convincing a prospective buyer to give it a go. It seems you argue every point regardless. Units have specific features out of the box. You claim it doesn't matter as an add-on can make it all seem kosher. Apples don't become oranges just because you skap orange paint on them.

Was I conflating scan doubling and flicker fixing? Yes I was. My mistake. That doesn't change the fact that Commodore decided.the saddle the Amiga.1000/2000 (3000/4000 is a later model and no one gives a fuck) with substandard graphics with regard to data processing and such. It was a huge mistake imho. But it is wha it is. Some people could stare at that grainy shit. When I was EIGHTEEN I said no way. I never wore glasses or contacts either. And that was nearly 40 years ago.

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 02:03:

The Amiga had blase graphics (at hi-res) and it's monitors were lower class. Not professional grade. Which is fine you get what youbpay for. But the PC world just had so many options. With the Amiga you were stuck. That's just tje facts.

you might want to read up about the Video Toaster

Together, the hardware and software provided, for a few thousand U.S. dollars, a video editing suite that rivaled the output of contemporary (i.e. early 1990s) professional systems costing ten times as much. It allowed small studios to produce high-quality material and resulted in a cottage industry for video production not unlike the success of the Macintosh in the desktop publishing (DTP) market only a few years earlier. The Video Toaster won the Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in 1993.[2] Other parts of the original software package were spun off as stand-alone products, notably LightWave 3D, and achieved success on their own.

LightWave 3D

LightWave was used to create special effects for the television series Babylon 5,[2] Star Trek: Voyager, Space: Above and Beyond, seaQuest DSV,

lets also not forget Traces the predecessor to Blender

the various IBM compatible and motorolla accelerators aside 1990 the Amiga 3000 had the first ECS "enhanced chipset" super denise chip allowing graphics modes called 'productivity modes' up to 1280×512 and yes including 640x480 non interlaced, a revised Amiga500+ also had this chip upgrade, it could also be retro fitted to earlier revision Amiga500s, whereas most IBM machines around that time stock would not do above 640x480 so from a pure business perspective you would have better screen realestate for text based applications over IBM from a stock Amiga.

either way these wild emotionally charged arugements are strange. IBM like most companys of the era used utterly brutal tactics to bully smaller competition, then quickly lost market share in the clone era. Amiga went the way it did via a tale as old as time that is incompetent upper management. the term "paying the IBM tax" didn't pop up without a reason

reguardless both companies sold specific products, Commodore clearly wanted to cut into the business market and by their own admission they had no idea how to market the original Amiga as it was a multimedia powerhouse and the numerous musicians, film, tv and game companies that utilized it demonstrated how it was a buisness machine.

I'm fairly new to vintage hardware i grew up with pentiums 2 and up, arguing over which company/product is better is kinda pointless, they released different products at varied prices, each with their own advantages and disadvantages be it from stock or otherwise. but claiming amigas where useless for business is factually wrong.

I know all about the VT. Who doesn't know what the fing VT is. It's irrelevant to the conversation. It wasn't a vehicle for displaying hard core data, but rather glitzy glammy cute graphical shit. A cool device nevertheless. But still no high res text to be had.

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 14:13:

Universities had internet.

…the businesspeople hadn't. And even if they had, they would have hardly any need to use it — there were no business-related WWW sites.

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 02:50:

Yep, know what amplitude modulation is. In the absence of a modulator you have ntsc/composite video. Your point that it was included to keep costs down is valid (the rs-170 banana jack). Even if it never went anywhere near a tv (a horrifying thought). The 14.318??? Mhz crystal was probably used because of it's ubiquity. Another cost cutting move. I doubt the IBM PC was designed to be used with TV sets.

They should have put a tv in one them ads. Ya think.

Max Headroom wrote on 2023-12-24, 14:42:

kant explain wrote on 2023-12-24, 14:13:

Universities had internet.

…the businesspeople hadn't. And even if they had, they would have hardly any need to use it — there were no business-related WWW sites.

But business people never bought Amigas. So ... ???

To make the argument that if the internet/www was in common use the Amiga would have been a viable business tool makes no sense. Not when you'd go blind using it.