chas@ssc-bee.UUCP (Chas Boyd) (08/27/86)
[Waka - Waka - Waka - Waka] On Monday Aug 18th Leonard Tramiel spoke at a meeting of the Boeing Employees Computer Society. I am not an Atari owner, but I attended just to see what was there. He said many things that seemed too good to be true about coming Atari hardware. The following is my impression gathered from him and talk with other hackers at the meeting: The next major product to be released is the TT. It is a 68020 based UN*X box with 68881 floating point support and memory managed multiprocessing. It will have no graphics capability. It will have eight DMA ports which can be connected to peripherals such as disk drives or STs. It was not clear whether the memory management will use the 68000 series chip or not, but will probably support virtual operations. I have no idea of the eventual cost of such a box, but cheap UNIX boxes are currently all over $8k. For about $2k from Atari, a crunch unit would be a major coup. The actual announcement at COMDEX should settle that. I wonder how much RAM it has 2M? 4M? The implications are that a multi-user, multi-terminal UNIX system with hard disks and bit mapped graphics terminals capable of running a window for each of several processes will be possible. Another product mentioned was the successor to the 1040ST. I will call it the 2080ST for convenience. It is reasonable to expect that it will have 2Meg of RAM. The relevant quote on graphics was: "With the same resolution as the current hi res mode (640x400) it will have as many colors as the current lo res mode". The current low res mode has 16 colors, which requires four bits per pixel. This implies that if the 2080 has a hi res mode with one color per pixel (monochrome) it would have twice the resolution i.e. 1280 by 800. This is in the class of engineering workstations like Sun, Apollo, and MicroVAX. Tramiel confirmed that the 2080, due for release probably near Xmas will have a custom blitter chip. This should greatly increase the speed of graphics operations. It would still have a 68000 for cpu. He denied that Atari would ever produce a 1024 by 1024 display. This is probably because it is tough to make those numbers come out even. He also implied that the 2080 would not have a separate keyboard but I am not sure about this. I am particularly impressed with the Atari approach to expansion because it permits owners of STs to keep them and still upgrade to the power of a 32bit cpu with a real operating system. The STs become intelligent terminals. If much of this is true, the Atari system will be a definite competitor for the Apple Unix machine (Jonathan?) rumored to be announced in April. I hope I haven't stepped on anybody's toes, Chas.