RE: filmscanners: OT: Co-processors & Amiga

["Austin Franklin" <austin@darkroom.com>]

> Most people who never used one are confused completely about what
> Amiga was.
> No, it wasn't a grown-up Atari,

Hardware/architecture wise it sure was.  The Atari was the first such
machine to have custom processors (four) designed specifically to handle
video and audio processing, as well as I/O.  It was truly revolutionary at
the time.  I agree the intended use was entirely different, but that does
not change the architecture.

> but it *was* the first desk-top machine
> to use co-processors.

Depends on your definition of 'desk-top', the Atari did have four
co-processors.

> The co-processors, in this case, were 2 proprietary ICs dedicated to sound
> and graphics (math chips were added later),

Sounds just like the Atari...

> The beauty of the idea was that the CPU dould do its "control" thing while
> the sound and graphics chips did the "heavy lifting."

Yeah, and the Atari did the same thing...before the Amiga!

> The math chip could
> help out if there were arithmetic problems. ;-) (actually, all computer
> graphics are math-heavy, but the math chip was more specialized, and not
> programmed-for early on). It could, therefore, do "multi-tasking" almost
> effortlessly.

A 'math' chip has nothing to do with multi-tasking.  It is mostly interrupt
and memory structure that aids in multi-tasking.  The Amiga was 68k based
and it was the MMU (Memory Management Unit, which was done by Hitachi 68410
if I remember correctly) that aided in multi-tasking, not a math
co-processor.

No disagreement that the Amiga was a great machine, but it really wasn't the
first to use the architecture/concepts it used.  It capitalized on the use
of available technology at a much later time than the Atari was able to use.