kjardine@watmum.UUCP (Kevin Jardine) (05/13/85)
Warning: this article is long because there is a lot of news to tell. I was also at the Toronto Computer Fair and would like to add to Jan Gray's article on the ST. There is indeed an operating system underneath GEM. GEM (Graphics Environment Manager) is NOT an operating system at all. It is a graphical interface that can be adapted to virtually any operating system. GEM is also available for MSDOS systems including the IBM PC, and is a good step towards a universal interface that would allow casual users to treat an IBM like a Mac like an ST, etc., and that will make it easier to port applications to several machines. The ST operating system is called TOS (originally The Operating System but now generally referred to as Tramiel's Operating System). Presumably users who are impatient with GEM's flashy graphics could opt to bypass GEM altogether to access TOS more directly, using a (horrors!) IBM-like line oriented command interpreter. In this way the ST can appeal both to the Mac-types and the more conservative IBM-types. In the following, all amounts are in Canadian funds ($1 CAN ~~ $.7 US). According to the salesmen I talked to, the ST will be available in Canada on June 1 (not May 21 as originally announced). The $1400 package (with 520ST, 500K floppy, and 640 X 400 monochrome monitor) will be the only one available. The colour monitor will be available in July for $600. The salesmen speculated that an $1800 package including the colour monitor might be available, but implied that it would be left up to the dealers to decide. The colour monitor is beautiful! There is a selection of 512 colours to choose from (eight levels each of red, green, and blue). In 'low' resolution mode (320 X 200), 16 of these colours can be used simultaneously on the screen. In 'medium' resolution (640 X 200), 4 colours can be used. The large selection of colours makes subtle shading possible, and the three dimensional pictures demoed seemed to leap off the screen. Granted, this is not exactly state of the art computer graphics, but for $600, it's an amazing monitor. The monitor also has a black and white mode that may be easier on the eyes for ordinary operating system operations. I doubt the extra vertical resolution on the monochrome monitor will make a whole lot of difference, so I'd advise waiting until the colour monitor is available. 500K floppy drives will be $260. Up to four can be added. The hard disk was said to be 15 M for $700-$800. (Jan Gray said $600 - the price seems to be rising ...) One salemen said that it could be ready as soon as July, but don't count on it. The ST comes with a built-in 1.3 M/s hard disk controller. It also has an RS232C serial port and a Centronics parallel port, as well as a MIDI interface. Jan Gray remarked that he didn't "understand why Atari put the Midi ports in". MIDI is the new standard interface for music synthesis, and should be a boon for anyone who wants to mix flashy music with their flashy graphics. Three printers will be available (possibly by July). These are all described in the April/May Atari Explorer. The SDM124 Daisy Wheel printer will be $399. The SMM804 Dot Matrix printer will have the same resolution as the Apple Imagewriter (1280 dots across) and will be less than half the price, according to the Explorer, making it roughly the same price as the daisy wheel. Any image on an ST monitor can be dumped to the printer. The STC504 Color Thermal Transfer printer will print in 16 colours and any colour monitor image can be dumped to it (presumably, it won't be able to capture the image accurately, since the monitor can display 512 possible colours). One salesman told me that Atari wanted the ST to be a completely open system and that Atari itself would be publishing complete development documentation including pin-out diagrams. Since the total preliminary development documents are rumored to have been about 4000 pages, it may take Atari some time to edit all this into a more concise publishable form. Despite stories to the contrary, the ST is expandable. It has been designed so that the current RAM chips will be replaceable by 1 megabyte chips when they become available, enabling the ST to have up to 4 megabytes of RAM, enough to run even a large Smalltalk application. Even more exciting is the fact that Atari is going to make a CD ROM interface available. When compact disks are used to store data instead of music, they can store 550 M (that's right, 550 megabytes !). The first ROM available is expected to be the entire World Book Encyclopedia ! Despite all this exciting news, there is no doubt that software is (at least for a while) going to be a problem. The first salesman I talked to claimed that no software was being demonstrated because Atari didn't want people stealing its ideas before the product release. As the product release is less than three weeks away, that was obviously nonsense. Another salesman later drew a small crowd by clearly and fairly answering questions about the machine. He admitted that NO software except possibly Basic and Logo will be available by June 1. He said, however, that 300 developers including Microsoft, Lotus, and Ashton-Tate had paid about $4500 for hand-built ST's and development software and documentation, and some seemed to be planning to release software in July to coincide with the US ST release. The Digital Research C Compiler is expected "real soon" for under $100. At least one company has announced products: Haba Systems, who developed the Quartet integrated system for the Mac, have announced HabaWorks (Word, File, Calc, Graph, and Com) for $59.95 US (each?) and the Hippo C Compiler, also for $59.95 US. These are supposed to be available in July. The $90 Infinity integrated package expected with the machine's release has been delayed. The 'spreadsheet' that Jan Gray saw was likely the nonworking mockup that I saw demonstrated. Finally, a small flame about the word 'clone'. Jan Gray called Infinity a "1-2-3 Clone". Infinity will include word processing and communication capabilities not available with 1-2-3. It is an integrated package, yes, but if we call it a "1-2-3 Clone", we will have to call Framework, Symphony, Jazz, and all the other integrated packages, 1-2-3 clones as well, and that is not really fair. Moreover, it is even unfair to accuse Atari of producing a "Mac clone". The hardware Atari has developed is far different. The monitors are larger (12 inches rather than 9 inches), provide greater resolution, one provides colour, and they are separated from the computer. The ST circuitry is amazingly simple (one small board hidden in the keyboard). The mouse has two buttons rather than one. The keyboard itself has a different layout. A hard disk controller and MIDI interface are provided. There are many more hardware differences. About the only significant hardware similarity is that both machines use the 68000. Would anyone accuse Apple of producing a Sage clone? Atari is not guilty of the kind of coat-tail hanging common in the IBM-compatible market. Mac programs will not run on the ST. The machine must be judged on its own merits. There is no doubt that Digital Research has designed GEM to imitate the Macintosh Finder, but even here there are differences. GEM was not designed to "replace an operating system", but to serve as an interface for several operating systems. Apple fans who accuse Digital Research of theft are being a mite self righteous. The user interface of the Lisa and the Mac is NOT innovative, but is borrowed from that Computer Science paradise, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The Lisa was a Xerox Star imitation, with some improvements. Apple's innovations in the Mac were to drastically reduce the price one had to pay to use Star-like software (the Lisa was originally $15,000, and the Star was even more). Atari is simply continuing that process. Alan Kay's dream of the Dynabook, a sophisticated information processor as easy to use as a book, and accessible to everyone, is close to being realized. Even Atari's drastic price reductions have not yet made the Xerox ideas affordable to "the rest of us", but any year now ... So now, Commodore, what aces are YOU holding? Kevin "If the automobile industry was as obsessed with compatibility as the computer industry, we'd all still be driving Model T Fords."
mcb8391@acf4.UUCP (mike b) (05/15/85)
you say the ST will be expandable beyond 512k. We have heard no such thing anywhere. But if it were true, the expanded total would not be 4 megabutes, as you figure. If the ST is using 64k chips, they have 8 banks of chips. If it uses 256k chips, it has 2 banks. SO if and when 1 mb chips show, and they are compatible, they would expand the ST to 8 mb (in the 64k case) or 2 mb (in the 256k case). Mike
vr0z05@unido.UUCP (05/16/85)
As there are 16 chips with 256 Kbyte each, you can in case 1Mbyte chips will be availible, expand the 520 ST to 2 Mbyte. This is also what we heard here in Germany during and after the Hannover Trade Show. Uwe Hoch Computer Science Department University of Dortmund 4600 Dortmund 50 P.O. Box 500500 West Germany E-mail address UUCP: ...!mcvax!unido!vr0z05