Dickson@HIS-PHOENIX-MULTICS.ARPA.UUCP (02/11/87)
I downloaded the following article from a local BBS here in Phoenix (Az).
As you can probably tell from reading, the article is pretty dated. But it
still contains some interesting info. The latest rumor is that the baby
Amiga will be the 500 and the one mentioned in this article will be the
2000. But only time will tell....
-Paul Dickson
Dickson%pco at BCO-Multics.ARPA
--------------------
Article from Personal Computer World, a British Magazine.
Taking the Wraps off Amiga 2500
Four IBM PC slots, connected to each other and to nothing else,
have been included in the latest computer from Commodore - the
Amiga 2500, due out in March. It will include the ordinary Motorola
68000, no (as everybody thought) the much more powerful 68020. It will
have a new standard, 100-pin Amiga bus. there will be room in the box
for a lot more than today's single 3.5in floppy drive - in fact, there
will be room for three disks, one of which can be a 5.25in drive. The
machine is officially still secret. It was known as the 'Ranger' until
it unveiled in Monterey, California, to a collection of slightly
dubious software developers, and it is meant to be the top of the range
of three models, with the original Amiga being renamed the Amiga 1000,
in the middle of the range. This 2500 machine has been expected ever
since the original Amiga was launched last year. Almost nothing about
it is exactly what people expected. Even so, it's pretty impressive,
and if Commodore lives long enough to launch it, it could make a big
difference to the Amiga family.
Almost no information whatsoever was available on the baby Amiga,
however, which surely must be the most important of the three.
Commodore's sales bosses, in Monterey, spoke earnestly about the
need for a new strategy. This includes, for the first time in
America, apparently, the original notion of spending money advertising
it. It also includes the idea of 'migrating' people from their current
seven million Commodore 64s (there will be eight million be the time
Commodore stops making that machine) to the Amiga. Logically, that
means that the new Amiga must cost something close to 300 pounds. I
bet you anything it doesn't, but we'll have to wait and see what
Commodore does, before pouring scorn on it.
In the meantime, the big 2500 model has enough suprises.
The idea of four expansion slots - suitable for plugging hard disks
cards, local networks, and so on - is to make the Amiga happy about
sharing a world with the IBM PC.
To make the slots 'come alive' however, you need to make the
machine compatible. To do this involves buying a plug-in IBM PC
card, including 512k of memory.
Both the 2500 and this card were designed in Commodore's offices in
Germany, and neither has a price yet. Theoretically, the plug-in card
could be sold for a price of around $200 - theoretically. Also
theoretically, the whole system including a hard disk could be sold for
under $2000.
At that price, with built-in IBM compatibility (just add a 5.25
diskette, at $100 and the IBM card for $200), the machine would be
pretty irresistible.
Not all the people at the conference were totally convinced that
the future will unroll in that irresistible way, however.
For a start, Commodore's history on pricing policy (especially in
the UK) suggests that the new machine will probably be offered for
around 4000 pounds. Next, there is the question of how stable the
company is. Commodore says it is doing very well, thank you, with
losses down, turnover up, and all signs strong, fewer managers, and an
advertising budget, and Gail Wellington, strong honcho in charge of the
Amiga's software program, moved from Maidenhead to Westchester in
America.
Exactly what Commodore's bankers think is not a question to which I
can get an 'on the record' quote as an answer. Commodore's
approach: "They must think we're OK, or they wouldn't continue to back
us.' Well, that's true, but the logic doesn't tell us yet whether
Commodore's bankers will, after all, continue to back the company.
This time next year, we'll all know what the answer would have been,
but for now, you believe whosoever you want.
Fans of the Amiga say they don't care. 'Jack Tramiel at Atari
badly wants to buy Commodore, the company he originally started
up. He urgently needs to give Irving Gould (the man who fired him from
Commodore) the sack. And so the Amiga is safe, one way or the other.'
It sounds water-tight, doesn't it?
The trouble is that Tramiel has been indulging in an expensive
lawsuit, attempting to prove that the Amiga's special-purpose chips
actually belong to Atari, who commissioned the early developments. It
is thought by most of those who speak to him, however, that he doesn't
really want the Amiga, or its chips.
What he really wants, they say, are the next chips in the Amiga
series, which he can plug into his ST range.
The question which this theory answers is: 'Why on earth would Jack
Tramiel want two, incompatible, ranges of 68000-based computers - Amiga
and Atari? The answer is: he doesn't. He'll kill off the Amiga, and
plug the next-generation chips (they say) into the next Atari ST.
So, there are no certainties; which is where we came in, isn't it?
*Note
In the same magazine, they do a review of the "McEmulator", a
Macintosh emulator for the Atari ST. In its present state, the
emulator does not operate very well with the ST. However, they did
mention that the company, Data Pacific, is developing an Amiga version
that will not have the same limitations as does the ST version. Some
of the problems stem from the ST-specific disk drive. The Mac and the
Amiga both use generic drives so this won't be a problem. To use Mac
programs on the ST you need to serially connect a MAC to a ST and
download the programs into a special disk format that the ST can read.
On the Amiga, it is just a matter of writing some system software
calls. Also the display architecture of the Amiga and MAC is much more
similar than the ST and MAC. Be on the look out for this cheap $150
hardware cartridge. You do need to buy your own Apple Macintosh Roms
to plug into the cartridge however. Data Pacific did make their own
but Apple threatened to sue.
Oh, by the way, unlike the Transformer, that ran IBM software at
70% speed, the McEmulator runs Mac software 20% faster than a MAC
does. Howa bout those Apples!