> For more than a dozen years, Amiga computers have been
> hard at work at Cape Canaveral's Hanger AE supporting the
> launches of every American spacecraft including the space
> shuttle.
12 years from 1999 would mean that they adopted the Amiga back in 1986 or 87. That time frame makes a little more sense. The Macintosh wouldn't have been a good choice if you need to interface with custom hardware (the Mac II arrived in 1987 with NuBus expansion slots, but that was brand new).
It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.
I guess it depends a lot on personal preference. That would be a very fun job, especially when you get to choose which platform to work with.
> It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.
The hardware might work OK but back then that AT would be running PC-DOS or MS-DOS, i.e. it would effectively not be running an operating system. The Amiga did have a functional operating system which was flexible enough to get out of the way when needed. Given that the Amiga seemed to do the job and they were comfortable using it there was no valid [1] reason to look elsewhere.
[1] bureaucratic reasons are not valid reasons, at least not to engineers. The right tool for the job, not the right tool for the acquisition department.
The IBM AT didn't come with an operating system with a lightweight premptive multitasking kernel capable of being used for real time applications.
I learned quite a bit about operating systems by disassembling the Amiga exec and other libraries with a debugger. The code was elegant and efficient, modular and well thought out. Putting the core of the operating system in ROM was a good idea for the time as it freed up most of the RAM in the system for application use - an important design choice when machines were only shipping with 512KB to 1MB of RAM.
Amiga had great graphics, with chips that made it feasible to animate at 50/60fps, and a genlock expansion that gave it ability to overlay graphics on top of a TV signal.
It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.
I guess it depends a lot on personal preference. That would be a very fun job, especially when you get to choose which platform to work with.