aer@alice.UucP (D. Rosenberg) (01/18/86)
I thought it might be a good idea to inject here what the outside world
thinks about the Amiga and 520 ST. Following is an excerpt from the January
1986 IEEE Spectrum:
"COMPUTERS FOR ART, MUSIC, BUSINESS
The only players with new entries in the home computer market in 1985
were Commodore Business Machines Inc. of West Chester, Pa., and Atari Corp.
of Sunnyvale, Calif., and both entries came late in the year. Atari first
demonstrated its ST series of computers last January but did not ship any to
dealers until the end of the summer. Commodore introduced its Amiga computer
in July and began shipping about two months later.
"Both computers use a Motorola 68000 as a central processing unit,
come with a mouse, and feature a windowed display. Atari's 520ST, which has
512K RAM and a 400K external 3.5 inch disk drive, retails for $799 with a
monochrome monitor and $999 with a color monitor. It has a palette of 512
colors and can support 16 colors in its low-resolution mode (320 by 200),
four colors in its medium-resolution mode (640 by 200), and is monochrome
in its high-resolution mode (640 by 400). Thanks to Digital Research Inc.'s
GEM operating environment, the display looks like a color Macintosh and is
thus nicknamed Jackintosh, for Atari head Jack Tramiel.
"Commodore's Amiga gets its power from three custom chips in addition
to the 68000 CPU. It comes with 256K RAM, internally expandable to 512K
and externally expandable to 8 megabytes, and an 880K internal 3.5 inch
disk drive. It retails for $1295 without a monitor and $1795 with a color
monitor. The Amiga has a palette of 4096 colors and supports 32 colors in
its low-resolution modes (320 by 200 or 320 by 400) and 16 colors in its
high-resolution modes (640 by 200 or 640 by 400) [Fig. 4 [The "Mandril,"
an image traditionally used to show off computer graphics systems and monitors
(the fine hairs beings particularly difficult to render) is shown here as
created by the Amiga computer.]]
"Like the ST and Macintosh, the Amiga can display numerous functions
in windows on the screen. But on the Amiga, up to 50 windows can be active at
once, running various programs, while the ST and Macintosh can have only
one active window.
"With graphics and animation capabilities unsurpassed by any other
microcomputer, and the ability to synthesize both music and voice, the Amiga
is being promoted as a machine with the "creative edge." It can also double
as a serious business machine because it is IBM-compatible. The compatibility
is not achieved by strapping another processor onto the machine, as other
computer manufacturers do, but rather by loading software that emulated the
IBM PC, down to its monochrome monitor. And the Amiga has earned the
interest of the CAD/CAM market, with employees at Los Alamos National
Laboratory alone purchasing over $60000 worth of the machines for that
application.
"By late last year, Atari had reportedly shipped some 50,000 STs.
No sales figures for the Amiga were available, but Commodore said its 700
dealers have been selling the machines so fast that retailers are maintaining
waiting lists, and "every machine that comes off the line has someone's name
on it." If there is a market for a "home" computer after the slump, one
of these machines will find it."
Well, this article definitely influenced my decision on which machine to get.
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#D. Rosenberg "Disclaimer: I'd never want to hurt anyone with My Opinions"
#(..{ihnp4,research,allegra}!alice!aer)