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View Full Version : BBC get the history of the Amiga completely wrong!



Harrison
23rd April 2007, 15:17
I was just looking through the BBC site after the Spectrum feature on the homepage today and came across the page dedicated to the Commodore Amiga. Sadly it seems that the BBC are not quite as good as I thought when it comes to research for their articles. Read this extract for proof:


The Amiga project was originally overseen by Atari, a company most famous for its computer games consoles. At the same time as the Amiga neared completion, Atari were working on their own machine, the ST. The two computers were very similar in specification, although the Amiga's speciality was in its graphics capabilities while the ST was designed for music. Atari thought that their own machine would fare better than the Amiga, so they looked for someone to carry on the project.So according to the BBC, the Amiga was originally "overseen" by Atari and was disgarded when they considered the ST superior. I think everyone else would slightly disagree with that! I also like the Amiga designed for graphics and ST for music, especially considering that unless you count the Midi posts on the ST (which you could add to an Amiga for £30) the Amiga's 4 channel stereo 8-bit audio was far in advance of the 3 channel Yamaha mono the ST could produce (until this was upgraded with the ST-E).

You can read the rest of the article to find out more inaccurate statements here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A622540

Demon Cleaner
23rd April 2007, 15:24
They got something wrong there.

AlexJ
23rd April 2007, 15:35
That's on their h2g2 site, it's similar to Wikipedia in that anyone can edit it, and as such there's quite a few poorly researched articles on there.

Harrison
23rd April 2007, 16:50
Yeah, I noticed that the site can be edited by anyone. Still, it is quite bad that it is so inaccurate. You would think that being a part of the BBC they would occasionally check the accuracy of articles as regardless of source it reflects badly on the organisation. You don't tend to see similar inaccuracies on Wikipedia.