csc@watmath.UUCP (Jan Gray) (05/11/85)
I saw the Atari 520 ST again, this time at the Toronto Computer Fair.
Atari was demonstrating two monochrome and two colour STs.
The ST will be available in Canada May 21. A system with 520ST,
monochrome monitor, 500K floppy and mouse will sell for $1400CDN;
with RGB colour monitor instead of monochrome, $1800CDN. ($1CDN ~~ $.7US)
Earlier specs indicated that the ST would come with GEM, etc, in 192K
of ROM. Now Atari says GEM, etc, will be loaded off disk. It looks like
they were afraid of doing ROM upgrades to hundreds of thousands of
machines. Unfortunately that means that a good chunk of RAM will be
consumed with GEM. It took 20 or 30 seconds to load the OS off disk when
powered on, but response seemed crisp after that (it should be if everying
is resident in RAM!). The salesman said that would be reduced to
almost no time when the hard disk becomes available (1.3 MByte/sec transfer
rate (DMA)). The hard disk is expected late in '85, 15 MBytes for $600.
The ST has floppy disk, DMA hard disk, parallel printer, serial, Midi in
and out, and video ports, as well as a ROM cartridge port (which only addresses
128K bytes). I don't believe there are any internal slots. I don't understand
why Atari put the Midi ports in...
Atari did a very nice job with the monochrome monitor. It is a high speed
(35 MHz) white phosphor, to display 640 X 400 non-interlaced.
The GEM desktop really feels like a Mac clone. It has a menu bar
(although Atari menus are "drop down", not "pull down" -- you don't have
to press down on the mouse button to make the menu drop down, a feature
I don't like!), desk accessories (a control panel and a Breakout game),
dialog boxes, a trash can, windows with go-away-box, title, scroll bars,
resize box, etc, etc.
I should say a "cheap" Mac clone. The environment didn't feel as
polished as the Mac's. And there is some other operating system
underneath, which I think is CPM-68K. I was able to break some program,
and found myself with an "{A}" prompt. After some fiddling I got the
world famous "Error on drive A. Abort, Retry, or Ignore" error, which
you get from IBM PCs (probably all CPM or MS-DOS systems).
The software was sparse. There was some spreadsheet software which I think
was their $90 1-2-3 Clone. I DIDN'T SEE Logo, Basic, GEM Draw, GEM Write, etc,
which I was expecting. After all, this machine is going to be released in
two weeks...
Looks like a good machine to hack on!
Jan Gray (jsgray@watmath.UUCP) University of Waterloo (519) 885-1211 x3870
(ignore that address at the top of the message)planting@uwvax.UUCP (W. Harry Plantinga) (05/13/85)
In <14398@watmath.UUCP>, Jan Gray (jsgray@watmath.UUCP) writes: > I saw the Atari 520 ST again, this time at the Toronto Computer Fair. > . . . It took 20 or 30 seconds to load the OS off disk when > powered on . . . The salesman said that would be reduced to > almost no time when the hard disk becomes available (1.3 MByte/sec transfer > rate (DMA)). The hard disk is expected late in '85, 15 MBytes for $600. Don't count on much improved performance with the hard disk. Some hard disks use voice coils for quick head positioning and some use stepper-moters to keep the cost low, but the Atari hard disk (when it becomes available) is supposed to use a third technology which is cheaper and slower still. Seek times are said to be roughly the same as for floppies. Harry Plantinga planting@wisc-rsch.arpa {seismo,ihnp4,allegra,heurikon}!uwvax!planting